CAMDEN – When Millet LoCasale was a teenager, she would go to Mass each week with her family. She didn’t enjoy going, and often found Mass to be boring.
“But in God’s amazing creativity, he used music to [bring] me in,” she said, adding that she was motivated to join the parish choir and learn how to play the guitar. “I didn’t understand what was going on, but I was there.”
LoCasale, who now serves as the youth and young adult minister at Saint Katharine Drexel Parish, Egg Harbor Township, shared her story as one of two parishioner witnesses during the daylong Diocesan Eucharistic Congress held March 25 at Freedom Mortgage Pavilion. LoCasale, who addressed the audience in English, was followed in the afternoon by Darvin Diaz, a parishioner of Divine Mercy Parish, Vineland, who serves as a lector and with the local IMEC, the Instituto de Ministerio Eclesial de Camden – the Diocese’s three-year certified program for Hispanic lay ministry formation.
“The center of the Mass is the center of my life,” Diaz, 27, said in Spanish of his relationship with the Eucharist. “When the priest celebrates Mass, I feel alive, and I feel that’s the presence of God.”
LoCasale recalled how God also revealed himself to her through others in her life. She lost her father in 2011, and her mother later passed away following a long battle with cancer. That left LoCasale feeling isolated, with no elders in her family to turn to for guidance.
“I felt so alone, [and] I felt responsible for my siblings,” she said. “At that point, Christ revealed himself … gently and patiently with me in the Eucharist, because that is what I needed. That is what I could handle.”
LoCasale recalls a moment when she was worshiping among fellow Catholics, and felt the sense of community that lifted the loneliness she had been experiencing.
“At that very moment, time stands still,” she said. “I did not feel alone anymore.”
During her witness, LoCasale asked how many in the audience had family members or friends who no longer went to Church – prompting many to raise their hands. She then shared how her daughter didn’t used to enjoy going to Mass, for much the same reason she didn’t enjoy going as a child.
When praying about it, LoCasale was reminded of her own experience – and was encouraged to be as gentle and patient with her daughter as Jesus was with her. Today, her daughter is a cantor in her parish.
While faithful can spread the Gospel in their lives and among those they meet, she said, it is important to remember how Jesus encounters each person through the Eucharist.
“Conversion doesn’t happen by us,” she said. “It happens through the Spirit.”
Diaz agreed, explaining that conversion happens through a relationship with God, which is difficult these days when statistics show a majority of Catholics don’t believe in the Real Presence in the Eucharist.
“He is always with us, but we are not always concentrating on him,” he said. “Sometimes we are faithful people, but we don’t feel him with us. It you want that relationship, be open to God. Go to him in the Eucharist and say, ‘I am here, Lord. I don’t know you. I don’t feel you. Help me.’”
Managing editor Jennifer Mauro contributed to this article.
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