Recovering faith in the Eucharist at the JEMJ

The JEMJ was born as an echo in Spain of the National Eucharistic Revival, a project launched by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). The US bishops discovered, after a survey, that 70 % of Catholics do not believe in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. We said to ourselves that in Spain the percentage must be similar...

Faced with news like this, the great temptation is to despair or defeatism, but we decided to continue fighting for the faith of our young people. Jesús Sanz Montes took us to Covadonga, the cradle of the Reconquest. Covadonga is much more than a sanctuary. John Paul II said in the Holy Cave, which he visited at the end of WYD 1989 in Santiago de Compostela: "Covadonga is a motherly womb and cradle of faith and Christian life". It was the ideal place to wage a new battle for the faith of Spanish youth.

Needs and fruits

We proposed the JEMJ as a great annual meeting for young people between 14 and 30 years of age to have an encounter with the living Christ in the Eucharist, hand in hand with Our Heavenly Mother, through adoration, formation, Eucharistic evangelization workshops, testimonies and music. First we gave the name -Jornada Eucarística Mariana Juvenil- and then we realized that the acronym JEMJ could be confused with WYD. That is why we started calling this meeting "jemjota".

The first JEMJ took place from July 5 to 7, 2024, at the Shrine of Covadonga. It brought together more than 1600 young people from all over Spain, but also from outside Spain. At its service were 175 volunteers and a large group of priests. At the closing Mass, D. Jesús Sanz exclaimed: "The JEMJ has been an immense grace of God, which the Archdiocese of Oviedo has been blessed to welcome and accompany".. 

The news of the fruits of the WYD is precious: many young people have begun a new life at the feet of the Blessed Mother. Several priests have told us that many young people, on their return from Covadonga, asked for help in discerning a vocation to the priestly or consecrated life. Some have already taken steps. In the official website we have been publishing their testimonies.

For the priests themselves it was a renewal of their priesthood. Many did not expect that Saturday night would be spent confessing until well into the early hours of the morning, at the request of the young people. At the end of WYD 2024, Fr. Félix López Lozano, responsible for the Liturgy Department and for welcoming the priests at WYD 2024, pointed out not only the number of confessions that had taken place that weekend, but also the quality of these encounters with Jesus Christ and declared: "Confessions show the quality of the encounter with the Lord". 

D. David Cueto was, at last year's JEMJ, canon of the Shrine of Covadonga. This year he will welcome us as abbot and will preside the Saturday night adoration vigil. At the end of last year's meeting he confessed that not only to him, but to the whole chapter of Covadonga, the JEMJ has given them a lot of light to know where to walk in response to what the Lord was putting in their hearts regarding their pastoral responsibility in Covadonga.

The truth is that, at the end of the first WYD, the sensation was that of having "set in motion something transcendental for the recovery of the faith of young people in the Eucharist and in the love of Mary Most Holy".

The second JEMJ

Seeing that the objective had been largely achieved and that the WYDW had proven to be a tool with enormous potential at the service of the evangelization of young people, we began to organize the second WYDW, which will take place from July 4 to 6, 2025, again at the Shrine of Covadonga (Asturias, Spain).

This year, to be able to count on the relic of the heart of the Carlo Acutis It has been an immense joy. Carlo is going to WYD to tell young people that it is possible to be a young person of the 21st century and live in love with the Eucharist. The WYDW participants will be able to "measure" the heart of a young man madly in love with Jesus Christ and learn from him that "those who approach the Eucharist every day go straight to Paradise". And to approach the Eucharist we must live in the world, but remembering that "we are not of the world".