At this most important moment in the history of our archdiocese, we bishops bring you an essential message of our shared faith: We Catholics are a Eucharistic Church. We believe in the Mass as an encounter with Jesus Christ, one that forms and shapes us personally and as a community. Because Jesus Christ is truly and really present in the celebration of the Eucharist, he can form us into a community that is one, that is united in his Holy Spirit. We also believe that such a community wants to go beyond itself to bring Christ’s presence to others.

We are Eucharist in the way we love, challenge, and support one another in living our faith in God. We are Eucharist when we become Christ’s presence daily to our family members, our neighbors, our co-workers--to all whom we encounter in every realm of our lives.

We have recently undertaken a difficult and vital planning process to ensure the continuation of a vibrant Catholic presence throughout the ten counties of this archdiocese. We are proud of the rich faith tradition we share, and together we will build upon that foundation in tackling the challenges of being Catholic in a new millennium. To do so we must join our efforts and our prayers in being Church with fewer priests, amidst populations shifting to new locations, and with the unprecedented growth of lay ministers.

It is indeed a complex and exciting era in which to be Catholic!

As your bishops, we are proud of the dedicated efforts and serious participation of Catholics in all parts of the archdiocese during the parish planning process and especially in the listening sessions, an essential phase of the total process. As our Catholic community soon begins to move forward in bringing those planning efforts to life, we issue four primary challenges to you:

Participate actively in Sunday Mass and encourage others to do so. Make that your first form of evangelization. Help your parish to live fully the Eucharist outside of Mass by your outreach to others. Become the living symbol of Eucharist without walls. Make that your second form of evangelization. Do not be afraid to share the enthusiasm you have for your own faith with others. Make that your third form of evangelization. Prepare for the celebration of the Jubilee Year 2000 by a personal spiritual renewal.

We are excited about the pages that follow here. We ask you to jump in and read! Discuss the issues of our Catholicism in your family, your parish, your classroom. Be proud of your faith and talk about it every chance you get!

In just over two years, we will enter the next millennium. Let us begin now our preparation to seize this graced moment and venture forth together in the fulness of our Catholic faith.

When we bishops finished the parish visits as a way of bringing the 150 anniversary of the Archdiocese to every corner of the diocese, we were full of optimism. We saw true vitality and a solid faith among you our people. We are grateful to you for making those visits so rewarding. We feel that the Church is now poised to meet the future with a strong faith and trust in God. We realize there will be difficulties ahead, but the evidence we see of good-will and strong attachment to the Church makes us hopeful. Thank you for that steadfastness in faith.

The future will be exciting. Somehow God is bringing us to a new dimension of what it means to be disciples of Christ. We cannot analyze it all very clearly, but we know the sacrifices we are being asked to make now and in the near future because of the shortage of priests will bring us many graces. How it will all work out remains a mystery, but of one thing we are sure -- God’s love will never be lacking.

To live in these times is a special grace. Not everyone is privileged to experience the exciting and memorable opening of a new millennium.

We Catholics have a tradition of making holy all divisions of time. Time is important to us because God, in the person of Jesus Christ, became one of us in time and now shares our story. We celebrate all the events of Christ’s life--especially his birth, death, and resurrection--as important to our own lives. In the sacraments, his events become ours; ours become his.

The cycle of the Church’s life revolves around Easter, the memorial of Christ’s resurrection. Every Sunday is for us an Easter celebration, a dying and rising again. Throughout the year all the other events of Christ’s life are also remembered. For example, every year we celebrate Christmas, the birth of Jesus Christ, when God came among us and shared our human condition. How should we celebrate the 2000 anniversary of the birth of Jesus Christ? We cannot let such an event pass by without considering it a gift to our generation.

As we approach the Jubilee year 2000, we must prepare ourselves. The depth of our preparation will determine the quality of our celebration. We will prepare well if we use the present moment to enkindle within us a firmer trust in God, rediscover the foundational truths of our faith, and ask ourselves how we can live by them.

We bishops would now like to outline the story of our faith, what we feel is the essential framework of our Catholic tradition. These convictions we must seek to strengthen and live by as we prepare for the year 2000.

We might call such love a "sustaining presence." But God wants to develop a deeper and more personal relationship with each of us and not provide just a lifeless buttress to keep us in existence. God’s presence wants to penetrate us, embrace us in love, and share with us new life, His eternal, divine life. That is the kind of God we believe in.

We are conscious of sin and alienation from God. We experience, at close range, evil, violence, exploitation of others, and selfishness. Our world is not a perfect one.

Our Scriptures tell us that even though God’s love for us, His own creatures, was at the beginning not reciprocated but rejected, God continued to love us. He willed to make all things right again, to restore the possibility of His love dwelling within us. When we say that Jesus Christ is our savior, we acknowledge that he is both God as well as one of us, sent to bridge the gap between our sinful selves and his loving Father. He was sent to reconcile us, make us one people again, bring us back—like prodigal children—to the bosom of his Father. In Jesus Christ, God recreates us in love and smothers us with forgiveness. We are born again in baptism as we put on Christ, His first-born beloved Son. Then we can call God our Father too, as Jesus taught us.

At Pentecost, Christ sent his Spirit on the early gathered community making his Church a privileged instrument through which the energizing love of Christ’s Spirit, through baptism, continues to recreate all its members into new life. Through the action of that same Holy Spirit, Christ’s saving and life-giving presence lives on in our midst.

We, baptized into the Church, are the instruments of Christ’s mission to the world. He sent us to evangelize, to carry the good news to all, to travel lightly, not getting bogged down in earthly cares on our journey of faith.

In his wisdom, Pope John Paul II added the theme of reconciliation as essential in our preparation for the Jubilee year 2000. A Jubilee year is one of forgiveness and thus of starting over. The Holy Father knows that only God can bring about a full union of all the Christian churches, but he calls us to two aspects of reconciliation—among ourselves as Catholics and with all others who believe in Christ our savior. Reconciliation among ourselves means being actively engaged in seeking and giving forgiveness--within our families, in our communities, in our nation, between races and between nations. Forgiveness will not be easy, but the unity that Eucharist brings with it forces us to move onward with the courage to seek and to grant pardon.

We are called to look deeply into our hearts and be as generous in our forgiving as Christ was. We must try to imitate God in His mercy and forgiveness. He reached out first to us, as unworthy as we were of His love.

We know that the presence of Christ in the Eucharist is mysterious and inexplicable, yet nourishing and uplifting, humanizing and divinizing, building up the Church and challenging it to move forward toward fulfillment in the Kingdom. It is Christ’s unique and special gift of himself to us—Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity. We believe that Christ is truly and really present in the Eucharist.

We yearn for the day when all will be one in the Eucharistic Lord. Until then, we are anointed through confirmation to bring the fruits of the Eucharist into the world around us, making Christ’s presence real to others. Those fruits are seen in our loving service of others, sharing Christ’s healing and nurturing presence through reaching out in love and generosity. Most of all, the Eucharist demands that we bring Christ into our families and our workplace. The challenge of our generation is to reflect more and more on how Christians, those who live in Christ’s Eucharistic presence, are to bring that presence into the work they do. Our lives must be integrated in Christ.

In hope we look forward to that fulfillment of the Kingdom known only to the Father. Eucharist, we believe, prefigures that heavenly banquet. We now have only an inkling of its beauty.

In outlining this vision of Church, we bishops are acutely aware of the dilemma we, as Catholics, face. On the one hand, we are struck by the shortage of priests, but, on the other, we are very convinced we are a Eucharist people, built into a community of baptized believers through the Mass, the Eucharistic sacrifice.

Moreover, we look forward to the healing presence of Christ when we seek from the Church forgiveness and reconciliation or when we beg the healing oils of the anointing of the sick. We also want the saving and encouraging presence of Christ in the sacrament of matrimony. We want hands laid on so that the sanctifying priestly ministry of Christ can continue on in the Church.

These are not empty words or wishes for us. They are the expressions of our faith in a loving Father, a saving Redeemer, a life-giving Spirit.

Yet we see the number of priests decreasing rapidly. We fear we will have fewer possibilities of participating in the fulness of the Mass each Sunday. We say fulness of the Eucharist, because the Eucharist consists of three essential, integrated moments:

hearing God’s Word and having it come alive in our contemporary world; offering, through the ministry of the priest, the sacrifice of Calvary as Jesus told us to do until he comes again in glory; receiving Christ’s Body and Blood.

We fear that we could be deprived of the other sacraments as well. We pray on bended knee for vocations to priesthood, but we do not want to lower our standards for this challenging calling. As members of the Universal Church, we know we must accept the Pope’s decision against a married clergy and the ordination of women as possible immediate solutions. We know for some accepting this reality is difficult. Faith at times can be demanding and stretch us in ways we had not expected.

We know there are many more needs both within the Catholic community and in the society around us to which we Catholics are expected to respond generously. We want to do so as people of faith, individually and with others. We realize that for our parishes to assume these tasks, we need to pool our material and spiritual resources, be they gifts of personnel or treasure. It is the only way to be more effective in our ministry.

In facing such a dilemma, we must use wisely and effectively all our resources, but especially our priestly gifts. We cannot afford to have priests celebrating Masses each Sunday for only a small handful of faithful when others might be deprived of Mass.

Mass, we believe, is not a private devotion but the gift Christ gives to the whole faith community to build up the Church. But just to provide a Mass in a parish on a Sunday is not sufficient in order to be Church. We must also provide the fulness of Christian life that includes education and outreach. Experience has taught us that when larger numbers are present to celebrate the Eucharist together, not only is it possible to have a more vital liturgy, but the sense of community grows.

The first resolution for all at this moment as we prepare for the year 2000 and beyond should be to work for an increased participation at Sunday Mass.

In recent years attendance at Sunday Mass has fallen off. We must be convinced that the Eucharist is necessary to be the Church that Jesus intended.

First, the faithful in each parish must gather to hear God’s Word proclaimed in their midst. That Word must be digested, interpreted, and made actual for them, so they can apply it to their everyday lives, challenging them, encouraging them, and nourishing them spiritually. This Word and its application to our day also reminds us of the many saints who preceded us and who are present with us at Mass. We hear of their heroic lives; we imitate their virtue. We place ourselves on the altar with the gifts, seeking to do God’s Will in our lives.

Then, we must gather around the altar and become one with Christ and with one another. We are also aware of all the living and the deceased who have gone before us. Each Sunday we all join the other baptized members of the community in thanking God for the gift of faith, for His love, for Christ’s redeeming power, for the force of the Holy Spirit in our lives, for the mission of the Church to the world.

Sunday Mass is a privilege not to be taken for granted. It must be a priority in our personal lives, one that ranks above all others. We must put all excuses for absence aside. As the priest shortage is upon us, we cannot permit our attendance to slacken; we must increase it.

In maintaining this vision of a Eucharistic Church, we also know that God is calling us now to make more sacrifices than ever before so that everyone in the archdiocese can have the opportunity of participating every Sunday at Mass. Each baptized needs the nourishment of the Eucharist to bring Christ to the world.

If only we could let the presence of Christ, like a living electric force, stretch out to cover the land with goodness. Christ did not mission his Church to be a body of perfect people but to help all in need--to bring forgiveness to sinners, love to the lonely, strength and courage to the weak, food and shelter to the needy, hope to the discouraged. The Eucharist nourishes a pilgrim people, not an enclosed and complacent colony of the self-contented.

Eucharist without walls means we struggle to bring Christ to every act of our day, every doubt, every wish, every effort of unselfishness. We also realize we have no monopoly on the action of the Spirit and often are encouraged, not only by the nourishment we bring, but by the Spirit out ahead of us. We rejoice in God’s presence in the world and in others and say that it is good.

We bishops hope that every parish on the night between December 31, 1999, and January 1, 2000, will hold an All-Night Vigil of Preparation and then a Mass at dawn, to start the new millennium as a Eucharistic people. In the spring of 2000, an Archdiocesan Eucharistic congress is planned. Through it we Catholics can affirm the Eucharistic nature of the Church. We are also considering an Archdiocesan assembly, similar to the one that ended our Synod in 1987, to help us face the future with hope. Each parish is asked to do something special for the poor and the underprivileged to show that we are serious about being Eucharist without walls.

Don’t be afraid to talk about being Catholic, about how faith brought you through tough times. Let us see that you look to the future with joy and confidence. What the Church of Milwaukee asks of you is to give a witness of trust and confidence in God’s mercy and goodness. Do not grumble. Be a strong pillar of hope in God’s goodness to all. Show us how to pray.

To Those in the Middle Years:

What is the Church asking of you? Resist all temptation to cynicism and skepticism. Do not become hardened and bitter. Use the millennium as a way of accepting the future with courage, asking for the graces of growing spiritually in the midst of and through all life’s problems. Learn forgiveness. If you have been away from the Church or not attending regularly, now is the moment of returning to full participation.

To Young Adults:

The future is yours. You believe in God, but remember God needs many hands. Stay close to the Church and its spiritual potential and you will see the difference in your life. Learn to enjoy being with Christ and others by attending Mass every Sunday. Then have a good service project to help others. Bring Christ to the world.

Use these years of preparing for the millennium as a way of making an even greater preparation for life itself. Think seriously about how to serve God better with your talents. Do not forget that God might be calling you to a special vocation in the Church, such as priesthood or religious life or some other special service. If God is calling you to the married state, prepare yourselves well. For all these forms of following Christ, unselfish love for others is needed.

To Teenagers:

Do not be afraid. Relax. The world will change rapidly around you, but God’s loving presence will always be there. Stay close to Church and Eucharist. Have trust that God’s love for you will never be lacking. Let the Holy Spirit guide you and guard you. Be conscious of God’s presence in your life. Pray much.

Use the Jubilee Year as a preparation for the whole of life that lies ahead. The best preparation is trying to be good and to do good. Helping others must be a part of any plan for one’s future. Consider what talents you have and how you want to use them for the betterment of others. Do not forget to reflect on priesthood and religious life as a way of serving others.

To Children:

Jesus was a person like us, but he was also God. He came to be with us so that he could help us to be better people. He healed those who were sick or hurting. He wants us to help others, too. He also wants to stay with us. He found the way to do so through the Eucharist or the Mass. There he is truly and really present. Jesus Christ wants to be with you. Talk to him; be aware of his presence in you and in others.

To All Ministers in the Church - Priests, Deacons, All Lay Ministers:

Keep the Eucharistic dimension of our Church before the eyes of all the baptized. Help them realize the need to be with the community at the Sacrifice of the Mass every Sunday and then how to bring Eucharist to the world. Keep yourselves and others focused on what truly counts. Be positive people and people of hope. Only in that way will you be able to confirm others in faith.

To All of Us as We Face the World We Live in:

We all fit one way or another into this category as we try to be Christians in the world. The Jubilee Year must be a special challenge to us about how we reflect in our lives the faith we profess. Mass on Sunday should change how we act on Monday.

As we all prepare for the year 2000, we should ask God for the grace of being attentive to bringing Christ to all those around us. We must make sure that our actions are motivated by the Gospels and by a deep commitment to our faith in Jesus Christ. We have to do more than talk about our faith; we must live it.

To Families:

The preparations for the millennium should, first of all, strengthen existing relationships. In the family, this means living in God’s presence, making the home an extension of Eucharist. This atmosphere can be created in a special way in the sharing of meals. Take such occasions for a deeper understanding of bringing that presence of Christ to others, especially to those with whom we share the most in life.

To Religious:

Religious life always had a link with the end-times, a reminder that what counts in this world is not what counts before God. As you keep that transcendent dimension alive in your own lives, help all of us to seek God first. To those of you who are retired we send a special message: Continue to pray for all of the members of the archdiocese that we remain strong in faith and love.

The theme we have chosen as we enter the future and prepare for the new millennium is "Eucharist Without Walls." Because we are a sacramental people, we know the Eucharist is vital in our lives as individuals and as parishes. We also know the Eucharist is not just a single act that happens in church. We take the Eucharist with us into the marketplace, to where we live, work, and recreate.

In many ways the Eucharist sums up who we are as Catholics. We believe God speaks to us in a special way through the Scriptures. At Mass, we hear that Word proclaimed to us in an ever-new way. We are proud to be a biblical people, hoping we can grow into a fuller understanding of God’s Word. We recognize that the Eucharist should also animate us to reach out to those in need, to those who in our society are hurting in any way.

We know that sharing in the Eucharist should also impel us to want to share the fulness of our faith with others. We call this desire evangelization. Just as Jesus Christ sent out his disciples to announce that the Kingdom of God was at hand, so we know that, through baptism and confirmation, he sends us all out to proclaim the good news to our own generation. Responding positively to his command requires enthusiasm. We must be excited about the gift of faith we have received. Such enthusiasm is contagious. To be a Eucharistic people means to be a sharing and evangelizing people.

As we get ready for the year 2000 and beyond, we bishops could think of no better way to prepare ourselves as Catholics than to keep alive all these dimensions of Eucharist--Eucharist as worship, Eucharist as service, Eucharist as sharing, Eucharist as evangelizing. Upon these pillars of our Church, we can build the future. Rather, we should rightly say that, upon these pillars, God can use us to build His Church of the future, here in Southeastern Wisconsin.

M. Rev. Rembert G. Weakland, OSB Archbishop of Milwaukee

M. Rev. Richard J. Sklba Auxiliary Bishop of Milwaukee