By Michael E. DeSanctis, Ph.D.
With great delight and popular demand from SSS religious of the Congregation of the Blessed Sacrament and diocesan priests internationally and our associates across the United States, we are pleased to reboot our award-winning publication, Emmanuel Magazine. This will be on our website – an online-only edition. There will be a few articles, book reviews, other particular resources, and holy hours, like the original magazine, to assist our Eucharistic spirituality. One of our longtime contributors to Emmanuel has generously offered to oversee the office of editor. For regular readers of Emmanuel, his excellent articles have inspired and provided a wonderful perspective on the Church’s ecclesiology, theology of the Eucharist, and worship spaces. It is a joy to share that Dr. Michael DeSanctis has begun this work with enthusiasm and dedication. Here is his first contribution, which we share with you, and we are grateful to God for this help during our jubilee year.
It’s no small irony that I should be introducing myself, a relative stranger to readers of SSS Grapevine, by way of an announcement intended to reintroduce them to a publication long-associated with the Congregation with which most have likely been familiar for decades. I’m referring to Emmanuel Magazine, a wonderful, little journal by any standard that, for well over a century, did much to assist the Congregation in its efforts to “foster love for the Eucharist among the church’s ministers and members.”
My own connection to Emmanuel dates back to December 1990, when, under the editorship of Father Anthony Schueller SSS, an article of mine entitled “Catholic Sacramentality and the Reform of Sacred Architecture” appeared in the magazine’s Advent issue. It was Father Schueller who subsequently invited me in 1995 to write a series of essays addressing the physical environment of Catholic worship in honor of the magazine’s hundredth year of publication. I was only a junior professor at Gannon University in Erie, Pennsylvania, at the time, teaching courses in both the fine arts and theology, and I was grateful to Father Schueller for apparently finding something of value in my writing. Years later, he was kind enough to provide a cover endorsement for a book I’d authored, and I persisted in sending him material from time to time if I thought it might interest his readers.
My periodic submissions to Emmanuel on a range of topics continued until I departed university life with emeritus status in 2019. At that time, through one of those inexplicable coincidences of grace, then-editor John Christman tapped me to serve the publication as something of a “contributing writer.” I would email John an article every few months, or so, then marvel at how he and his staff succeeded in making it look entirely at home on the page. I never had the pleasure of meeting John in person, unfortunately, though our respective offices in Cleveland and Erie were barely more than an hour’s drive by car from each other. Not wanting our long-distance connection to dissolve into mere abstraction, however, I attached his photo to the desk lamp where I worked each day and pretended he stood over me with an editor’s head for deadlines and eye for proper grammar.
Once a sacramentalist, I suppose, always. . ..
This phase of my relationship with Emmanuel came to an end with the November December issue in 2021, when, given the current challenges of the publishing world, print production of the magazine itself was discontinued. I’d authored no fewer than eight essays for Emmanuel that year and, like so many affiliated with the Congregation who valued its arrival in their mailboxes at the outset of one liturgical season or another, was saddened by its demise.
Through correspondence earlier this year with provincial superior Father John Thomas Lane SSS and his administrative council, however, I became party to discussions involving the possibility of reviving Emmanuel as a strictly digital entity with me at its helm. We agreed that new and existing readers alike would welcome the magazine’s restoration as a source of sound information on the nature, history, and practice of eucharistic prayer.
I should explain that my own attachment to the Eucharist in thought and prayer comes largely by way of my paternal grandfather, an immigrant church painter-decorator born and trained in the vicinity of Salerno, Italy, and my late father, a lifelong member of the Nocturnal Adoration Society.
I’m humbled by Father Lane’s willingness to entrust editorship of Emmanuel to me, the first layperson to hold the position in the magazine’s history. I should explain that my own attachment to the Eucharist in thought and prayer comes largely by way of my paternal grandfather, an immigrant church painter-decorator born and trained in the vicinity of Salerno, Italy, and my late father, a lifelong member of the Nocturnal Adoration Society. I credit my mother and the other women of the family with shaping my religious imagination, as well. It was they who spearheaded the celebration of the so-called “house liturgies” for neighbors and others my family routinely hosted in our home in the wake of Vatican II. You could say I was predisposed from a yearly age to embracing the whole of earthly experience as aglow with Christ’s participation in it, a contributing factor, certainly, in my eventually becoming a university professor immersed in the related fields of artistic and liturgical expression who doubled as a design consultant to Catholic parish communities throughout the United States involved in the construction or renovation of a place of worship.
Nowadays, I take tremendous spiritual nourishment from being a daily communicant at Saint Jude the Apostle Church in Erie, where my physician-wife, Kelli, and I oversee the OCIA and adult formation initiatives. I try “giving back” to the community I’ve called home for the past forty years by serving as a scholar-inresidence for sacred sites and artifacts at a local think tank known as the Jefferson Educational Society, and maintain a monthly “Senior Spirituality” column in a local news tabloid distributed free of charge to our senior population.
Conscious that I’m coming to Emmanuel at a moment when so much of what’s written—even about Catholic piety—seems either shrill or shallow, I will intend to make it a clearinghouse of ideas and images never so provocative as to lose their pastoral value. Nowadays, more than ever, it seems to me, the world could use some smart, well-written commentary from a eucharistic perspective filled with the very “light and warmth” Saint Peter Julian Eymard himself believed might inspire many to become true “apostles of the divine Eucharist.”
In the coming months, then, I invite the SSS writers across the globe, members and associates of the Congregation, to monitor Emmanuel’s entrée into the realm of online communication. I hope you’ll feel completely free to contact me directly at editor@blessedsacrament.com should you have any questions or suggestions regarding its content—and though I can’t guarantee a place for likenesses of each of you on my desk lamp, please know I’ll intuit your oversight as true collaborators in the work ahead.
