Back in May of this year, as most Americans prepared for Memorial Day weekend cookouts, Bishop Erik T. Pohlmeier of the Diocese of St. Augustine celebrated an outdoor Mass in sunny Florida at the National Shrine of Our Lady of La Leche. The shrine is recognized as the site of North America’s first Catholic Mass in 1565. This summer, it was the starting point for the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage 2026, which coincided with the 250th anniversary of the United States and included stops in the original 13 colonies.
“The roots of Catholic faith had grown a lot in the years leading up to 1776,” Bishop Pohlmeier said earlier this year. “This celebration is a call to embrace our legacy and carry the mission of the Gospel into the future.”
The pilgrimage concluded on the weekend of July 4 in Philadelphia, where the first American-born pope—Chicago native Robert Prevost—also received the National Constitution Center’s annual Liberty Medal.
The pilgrimage also took place a century after another gathering that was in some ways similar and in others radically different: the 1926 International Eucharistic Congress in Chicago. A million people attended that Eucharistic celebration, yet it is largely forgotten today. What can a divided country learn from such a momentous gathering—in Pope Leo XIV’s hometown—which took place amid dizzying social change and the rise of the “new” Ku Klux Klan?
Patriotism and faith are all too often exploited or manipulated by the powerful. But Cardinal George William Mundelein, the archbishop of Chicago, had something far more nuanced in mind 100 years ago when he, too, coordinated an ambitious event with the sacrament of Communion at its center. The 28th International Eucharistic Congress—a four-day gathering held June 20-24 in 1926—was the first such gathering of the Catholic Church on U.S. soil.
“Such an impressive outcome was far from guaranteed,” University of Rome Tor Vergata historian Lucia Ceci writes, “considering the predominantly Protestant population in the US [and] the lack of diplomatic relations between the US and the Holy See.” Also overlooked these days are the fierce culture wars of the 1920s—over religion, yes, but also race, immigration, alcohol and organized crime.
By 1923—when Cardinal Mundelein officially received Vatican approval to host the 28th International Eucharistic Congress—decades of Catholic and Jewish immigration had transformed Chicago. “Many US-born Protestant whites wondered if cities like Chicago…could even be called American,” Dominic A. Pacyga notes in his 2019 book American Warsaw: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of Polish Chicago, while poet Carl Sandburg famously called Chicago “Hog Butcher for the World” as well as “City of the Big Shoulders.”
Among those who called Chicago home at this time were the future parents of Pope Leo XIV, whose mother, Mildred “Millie” Agnes Martinez Prevost, is believed to have attended the 1926 International Eucharistic Congress as a student at Immaculata High School on the North Side.
Ultimately, the 1926 International Eucharistic Congress took place amid extraordinary social tensions reflected in the shocking rise of the Ku Klux Klan, which wanted “to keep all foreigners, Jews, Catholics, and negroes in their place, which was no place at all, and let the country be led by native Protestants,” as Sinclair Lewis put it in his scathing 1927 satirical novel Elmer Gantry. The Klan and other Christian nationalists exploited these cultural tensions and, “transform(ed) premillennial apocalypticism into a moral crusade on contemporary culture,” historian Matthew Avery Sutton wrote. Some even planned hostile responses to the International Eucharistic Congress, including an Illinois-based group that organized an “answer of Illinois Protestants to (the) Invasion of Alien Romanist Forces.”
So, how did the 1926 Eucharistic Congress come to be? And why? And what can 21st-century Americans learn from it amid our own profound divisions?
Keeping the faith
The first international gathering dedicated to Eucharistic adoration took place in France nearly 50 years earlier. It was inspired in part by a group of French and Belgian laywomen, including Marie-Marthe-Baptistine Tamisier, who helped organize the first Eucharistic Congress in Lille, France. The theme was “The Eucharist saves the world,” according to the Vatican website, which adds that the “first congresses were inspired by a lively faith in the real presence of the person of Jesus Christ in the sacrament of the Eucharist…(to be) expressed particularly in solemn adoration and in grand processions.”
U.S. Catholic leaders followed suit, organizing the United States’ first National Eucharistic Congress in 1895 in Washington, D.C., with four more held between 1901 and 1911. An International Eucharistic Congress was held about every other year from 1897 to 1914, then ceased for nearly a decade because of World War I.
By the time Chicago Archbishop James Edward Quigley died—and Mundelein, at the time still an auxiliary bishop in Brooklyn, was selected as his replacement in February 1916—the city’s population had grown to 2.5 million people, up from one million just two decades earlier.
Was it possible for all these Catholic immigrants to the United States to maintain their faith while integrating within a new culture?
“Leaders of big-city Catholicism set the tone for the American church,” the Mundelein biographer Edward R. Kantowicz writes, by “visibly [throwing] their weight around in an attempt to instill self-confidence in their flocks.” To “gain prestige and raise Catholic self-esteem,” Kantowicz adds, Mundelein and others embarked upon projects characterized by “gigantism” and “Americanism.”
The 28th International Eucharistic Congress—to be held in and around the cavernous Soldier Field stadium, with its distinctive Roman columns—was one such project.
There would be many challenges, including (in Kantowicz’s words) the “Protestant ministers in the Bible Belt [who might be] scandalized by this Romish display.”
It was no coincidence that by the spring of 1924—just weeks after Pope Pius XI elevated Mundelein to a cardinal—Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act, banning immigration from Asia while limiting immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe. Then came the disastrous 1924 Democratic National Convention, which dragged on for over two weeks in endless debates about whether or not New York’s Catholic governor Al Smith should be nominated for president (he wasn’t) and whether the nativist Ku Klux Klan should be condemned (it wasn’t).
In public, Cardinal Mundelein tried to stay focused on logistics, like transporting and housing crowds for the Congress. “(A)ll of the resources at our command will be utilized to that end,” he said. There were also meetings in Rome and Chicago to schedule, starting with Belgium’s Bishop Thomas Louis Heylen, the Vatican director for all International Eucharistic gatherings. Official invitations eventually went out in nine languages, with Spain’s King Alfonso XIII and Albert I of Belgium among the first monarchs to confirm. More than 20 committees were eventually established, working under the assumption that as many as two million visitors might show up.
Music committee chairman Father James Hoberg was charged with overseeing choir rehearsals that would ultimately incorporate 62,000 children from Chicago’s parochial schools (among them, perhaps, Pope Leo XIV’s musically inclined mother).
All of this planning was interrupted, however, when Mundelein was forced to intervene in a public scandal that reinforced negative stereotypes about American Catholics.
Crime and punishment
On the morning of Nov. 10, 1924, three men strolled into a flower shop on Chicago’s State Street and gunned down reputed gangster Dean O’Banion. It was mere days after the spectacular funeral of his underworld ally Michele “Mike” Merlo. Cardinal Mundelein had to decide whether or not the Irish Catholic O’Banion should receive a Catholic funeral.
Chicago underworld funerals had become garish, closely watched spectacles, even if the deceased were widely known (in church parlance) as “public sinners.” Four years earlier, Cardinal Mundelein had denied “the rites of the Catholic church and permission to be buried in a Catholic cemetery” to “Big” Jim Colosimo, as a May 1920 UPI report put it.
Headlines eventually read “Church Services Denied O’Banion,” adding that “Cardinal Mundelein Will Allow Burial in Consecrated Ground.”
The same questions arose yet again when two bootleggers were slain: Walter O’Donnell in June 1925 and Angelo Genna in May 1925. Cardinal Mundelein may have had such headlines in mind a month later when he spoke at Archbishop Quigley Preparatory Seminary about ongoing plans for the International Eucharistic Congress. “It will be a magnificent sight to all in Chicago…and may make an impression upon a city where there are more crimes and less punishment than any other city in the world.”
A moment of triumph
As the dates of the congress drew closer, church officials turned for the first time to the new medium of radio to update the faithful. Chicago’s Msgr. C.J. Quille spoke for 20 minutes from station KYW, accompanied by the St. Philip Neri men and boys choir. Cardinal Mundelein also struck a deal with the Fox Film Corporation to record a documentary about the event.
Also fast approaching was America’s 150th birthday, which would be marked by another grand event in another historic U.S. city. The Philadelphia Sesquicentennial Exposition opened in May 1926, followed swiftly by revelations that the K.K.K. “had reserved the stadium and the auditorium on the exposition grounds” for what The New York Times described as a “three-day celebration” to be called “Ku Klux Klan Days.”
Imperial Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans outlined the group’s priorities in a widely circulated March 1926 essay. “Most immigration of recent years [has been] so unassimilable and fundamentally un-American…[and] has been Catholic.… [A]liens and their interests dictate all policies of the Roman Church,” which “take[s] pains to prevent the assimilation of these people.”
And yet, once the International Eucharistic Congress finally arrived, the challenges of the previous three years seemed to vanish.
Over a headline reading: “Solemn Rites Open Catholic Congress,” The New York Times reported: “A million Catholics had advanced to the altars and received Holy Communion in the churches of Chicago today, when at noon in the Cathedral of the Holy Name…John Cardinal Bonzano was installed as Papal Legate to preside for Pope Pius XI.”
U.S. Secretary of Labor James J. Davis, representing President Calvin Coolidge, told another gathering: “I can promise you will always find in America…the freedom you require to teach your faith,” adding: “If there is any prejudice against Catholics in America, it comes from persons who make a specialty of prejudice, and like other countries we have a few that do.”
In other words, as one syndicated newspaper column headline put it: “Eucharistic Meet a Triumph for Mundelein.”
Massive crowds
The four-day gathering included a “Children’s Day,” “Women’s Day” and “Higher Education Day.” Film clips from the Fox documentary depict the journeys and arrivals of church leaders, as well as enormous, diverse crowds, not to mention furious winds at Soldier Field. Traffic was chaotic, so much so that the Illinois National Guard was brought in to assist. The final day was a particular challenge when a severe storm sent massive crowds rushing for shelter, and hundreds were treated for injuries.
Still, the Brooklyn Catholic paper The Tablet captured the gathering’s overall impact: “Congress Closes With Great Tribute to the Divinity of Christ.”
Final ceremonies were held at a nearby village once known simply as “Area.” The Archdiocese of Chicago had erected the University of Saint Mary of the Lake there, and local officials selected a new name for the institution—Mundelein—to reflect recent changes.
Months later, Fox released the International Eucharistic Congress documentary, and urban audiences were so big that a knock-off called “Faith of Millions” was released by a competitor. Both films showed clips of prominent attendees—among them New York governor Al Smith.
America’s culture wars remained fierce—especially during Smith’s ill-fated 1928 White House run amid nativist, anti-Catholic paranoia—though they took more of a back seat in the news after October 1929, when the stock market crash foreshadowed the Great Depression.
Cardinal Mundelein died in 1939 at the age of 67. He had presided over an era of immense controversy and change, particularly as Black Americans fleeing Jim Crow racism in the South settled in Chicago, only to face similar hostilities. At the same time, Cardinal Mundelein publicly condemned the likes of “Radio Priest” Charles Coughlin and new German chancellor Adolf Hitler. In many ways, though, the 1926 International Eucharistic Congress may have been his most impressive accomplishment.
It would be another 50 years before the United States hosted another such gathering. Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa were among those who joined U.S. President Gerald Ford and future pope John Paul II for eight days of events in Philadelphia in 1976, America’s bicentennial year.
Just two years ago, U.S. Catholic Church leaders held their first National Eucharistic Congress in over 80 years at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Ind. And Pope Leo XIV is expected to attend the 54th International Eucharistic Congress—the first of his papacy—in Sydney in 2028.
Which simply means he is continuing a family tradition.
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