Dr Mary Healy continues Australian tour, speaks on Eucharist28 theme in latest Scholarship at the Cathedral

In one of the largest installments of ‘Scholarship at the Cathedral’, hundreds of Sydneysiders came together on 16 June to witness Dr Mary Healy deliver the program’s latest lecture, as part of her tour of speaking events across the state. 

Two days after addressing thousands of Christians from across NSW at the OneSydney concert at the Sydney Opera House, Dr Healy gave one of the first public lectures on the theme for the 2028 International Eucharistic Congress (Eucharist28) ‘This is My Body, Given For You.’ 

The event was attended by Bishops Tony Percy and Richard Umbers of the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney, with Bishop Percy beginning the evening with a prayer.  

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Dr Healy, a prominent biblical scholar whose works on the Gospel of St Mark and the Book of Genesis have garnered widespread acclaim,  began by expressing her excitement to see how the city of Sydney, and Australia more broadly, will journey in the lead up to, and after, Eucharist28. 

“It’s a joy and a privilege to be here, and it’s wonderful to see all the things that are stirring in the Archdiocese of Sydney, especially as you have the next Eucharistic Congress here in two years,” she said.  

“We had ours in the US two years ago, and it was dynamic, and the impact of that event is still reverberating now across the country, so get ready for the immense spiritual power of that event.” 

A key point throughout the evening was the power of the Eucharist. 

“Most of us have been going to Mass for years, probably, and it’s so easy to get used to it without necessarily thinking about what’s actually happening right in front of us,” Dr Healy said. 

“What happens is Heaven comes down to us, a divine love which saw the Son of God take our human flesh, become one of us and die for us on the cross comes to us, packaged in a little, plain, unobtrusive, innocuous looking piece of bread, because he said, ‘This is my body, given up for you.’”  

Dr Healy also drew upon her personal experience of receiving the divine, Eucharistic love of Christ. 

“At one stage in my life, I was serving a ministry in the church, and it was a difficult time, I felt I was being pulled in all directions by so many people, and in frustration, I turned to the Lord one day and said, ‘Lord, I feel like I’m being chopped up into a million pieces,’” she said.  

“It suddenly hit me that if I tried to meet all those needs, complaints and incidents, I was heading for not just a physical burnout, but a spiritual one too, and in that moment, I knew that if I let Him be first in my life, and I kept handing over the little paltry strength I had to Him, I wouldn’t burn out.  

“Sometimes, living the Eucharistic life is being willing to pay the ultimate price, the way Jesus paid the ultimate sacrifice on the Cross.”  

There was a buzz throughout the evening as Dr Healy weaved together Scripture with reflections on the spiritual reality of the world today.  

This led to a Q&A session immediately after the lecture, which saw many attendees ask raw, vulnerable questions about their own faith.  

In response to one parishioner, who asked how she could reconcile serving the Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican denominations while not being able to receive holy Communion in either the Catholic or Orthodox Church, Dr Healy connected such a circumstance to the necessity of Eucharistic love in, “our broken reality.”  

“You have experienced the reality of our brokenness, and that is the tragic reality of the body of Christ, that we are broken,” she said.  

“There is a history of fragmentation in the church, but we have to remember that we are all in this together, to try and paper over these wounds, and from a Catholic perspective, we should look to the universe God has created as a symbol and instrument of our desired unity.”