How the Diocese of Peoria prepared a Mass for 50,000 in a former football stadium
When 50,000 people attend Mass in a former football stadium, the logistics get a little more complicated than your average Sunday liturgy.
But on the day before Archbishop Fulton Sheen will be beatified at The Dome at America’s Center in St. Louis, Peoria Diocese Director of the Office of Divine Worship Phillip Lee was unruffled.
“We’ve done plenty of liturgies for ordinations and chrism Masses where we fill the cathedral. We’ve also had some smaller scale events at our local civic center, so we’ve gotten used to that space, and then it just scales up from there,” said Lee, who has worked in the diocese’s divine worship office for 16 years.
About 50,000 people are expected to attend the beatification Mass, including (as of Wednesday morning) 99 bishops and around 300 deacons, 900 seminarians and 1,000 priests.
The planning team is prepared with enough ciboria and hosts for even more, just to be safe. The Diocese of Peoria collected about 650 ciboria — sacred vessels to hold hosts — on loan from dioceses around the country, estimating they’ll need 400 to distribute Communion during Mass. There are 80,000 hosts ready to go, though the plan is to consecrate about 60,000.
In a church, consecrated hosts left over after Communion — the Body of Christ — are placed in the tabernacle. In The Dome, a small locker room has been designated as the “tabernacle room,” a space where eucharistic ministers can consolidate remaining hosts into about 200 ciboria borrowed from the Archdiocese of St. Louis. The archdiocese will later distribute those ciboria with the hosts to priests for use in their parishes, Lee said.
Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, pictured in an undated photo, was a popular evangelist who was well-known as the host of “The Catholic Hour” radio show in the 1930s and ’40s and as the host of the “Life is Worth Living” television program in the 1950s.
The Diocese of Peoria consulted with planners involved in other recent large events including the National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis and the annual National Catholic Youth Conference, Lee said, to get advice on scaling up the manpower and resources needed for a stadium Mass.
Since Archbishop Sheen’s death was just 46 years ago, the liturgical music team was able to draw from Archbishop Sheen’s own preferences when planning the music.
“We found records of what he wanted for his funeral, other songs that he’d liked at Masses, so we’ve tried to incorporate those into our liturgy. Those are our main hymns,” Lee said. “Then we invited different musicians from around not just the diocese but around the country to help contribute to the Mass and asked them to prepare a couple songs to fill in the times for procession and Communion.”
The Dome was chosen as the beatification venue to allow tens of thousands of pilgrims to be able to attend the Mass, but the environmental and liturgical pieces are purely Peoria. A wide image of the deep blue ceiling adorned with gold stars at the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception stretches on a screen above the raised platform sanctuary. More images of the cathedral’s interior line the back of the platform, giving the feel of looking down the center aisle of the cathedral.
“I think the first thing pilgrims do when they walk in is to look up to see that blue starry sky in our cathedral in Peoria, and we try to introduce that a little bit here,” Lee said. “(The cathedral) would have been the space that Fulton Sheen would have been a server in, would have been ordained in, and would have prayed in and celebrated Mass in, so we wanted to bring that all together.”
A chalice that belonged to Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen will be used during Archbishop Sheen’s beatification Mass on Sept. 24 at The Dome at America’s Center in St. Louis.
One of Archbishop Sheen’s chalices, on loan from the Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen Museum in Peoria, will be used during the Mass, and Bishop Lou Tylka will wear one of his pectoral crosses. Liturgical items including the Roman Missal, book of Gospels, altar cross and more were brought from the Peoria cathedral for the Mass.
It’s been an emotional experience preparing for the Mass, Lee said. As he has prayed during the novena of Holy Hours at the Peoria cathedral in the days leading up, he’s been inspired by pilgrims’ excitement for the moment — a moment not just for the Diocese of Peoria but for the universal Church.
“In a time right now when we’re seeing an increase in those entering the Church — I think the U.S. has seen an uptick in the numbers for OCIA for the youth entering the Church, for the older generations coming back into the faith — I think this is the perfect time for Archbishop Sheen to be raised to the altar of the blessed, when he was such an evangelist to everybody,” Lee said.
