Frances Webber is preparing for the adventure of a lifetime: to join the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage this month on its 10-state journey. The 21-year-old is among eight “perpetual pilgrims,” a group of young adults chosen to make the entire trip — and the only one from Minnesota. Their pilgrimage begins in Indianapolis on May 18 and concludes in Los Angeles on June 22.
“It’s exciting,” said Webber, a member of Nativity of Our Lord in St. Paul. “It’s radical and new and a huge gift.” Webber is completing her degree online through St. Joseph’s College of Maine. She serves as outreach coordinator for Assumption in St. Paul and lives with a group of women from St. Paul’s Outreach, the college-oriented Catholic ministry.
Q) When did you learn you’d been chosen as a perpetual pilgrim?
A) I found out with an email in December. I didn’t tell anybody for the first 48 hours because I wasn’t sure it was real. I hadn’t done the best interviews. I was frazzled.
Our director of pilgrimages, Maria, tells us: “You guys all have this funny itch to go do things. You’ll just go on wild trips or adventures.” I think there’s a particular compulsion to just go and not get caught up in the details. That was probably what they saw in me: a radical openness to what the Lord is doing.
Q) How will you travel?
A) We’ll have a 15-passenger van. They removed the first row of seats and put a tabernacle in it, with a place for perpetual Eucharistic adoration on top of it, so it’s a consecrated chapel. It’s with the Handmaids (of the Heart of Jesus) in New Ulm now, so my friend and I are driving it down to the starting point in Indiana. Bishop (Andrew) Cozzens is friends with their foundress (Mother Mary Clare), and he’s the guy who started this Eucharistic revival, so it just worked out for the Handmaids to watch the van for the year.
Q) A chapel on wheels!
A) That’s what we’re called to do. If your life has been transformed by the Gospel, then your response should always be to go — whatever that looks like in your life.
Q) I love that Masses for the Eucharistic pilgrimage will be celebrated in various languages, rites and liturgical musical styles. And your path is called the St. Katharine Drexel Route for its outreach to the marginalized, including stops at nursing homes, food banks and a federal prison.
A) Yeah, we’re doing a procession inside a federal prison. We’re intentionally making space and time to bring Christ to people who would not normally get to encounter Eucharistic adoration. Jesus is truly present in the sacrament, and people deserve to encounter that. Jesus is worth being taken everywhere.
Q) Do you plan to document the trip?
A) I would love to make a little scrapbook. My hope for this pilgrimage is that the Lord would seal on my heart the things I need — his hopes and graces for me — going forward, beyond the pilgrimage.
Q) As a Virginia native, what do you appreciate about Minnesota?
A) The pace of life here is slower. In Minnesota in general, and in this archdiocese, the Catholic faith is incredibly accessible in a way that it’s not in most other places. Opportunities for Eucharistic adoration and Mass are abundant. There are five perpetual adoration chapels within a 15-minute drive of my house.
Q) One Minnesotan pastime you’ve picked up is cribbage.
A) Everybody here plays it. It’s not big out East. I love the slow-moving games where I can have a conversation while playing it.
Q) You’re also getting into sourdough making.
A) I’m really crunchy. I’m getting into sourdough. I make yogurt. I like to make as much as I can from scratch. Part of Catholic social teaching is an understanding of process and where things come from and how we get from point A to point B — in our food, our clothing. There’s a natural enjoyment of hard work. It takes three weeks to make kombucha, but at the end, it’s better than going to a store to buy it.
I’ve worked really hard over the last couple of years to adjust my mindset from instant gratification. I’ve become so aware that we weren’t created for instant gratification. So, I push back against that in my life to build virtue. We don’t get to experience God in the same way if we are constantly living for instant gratification because God doesn’t really do instant gratification.
Q) What are a few ways you push back?
A) If I notice I’m craving something, I tend to cut it out. I’ll fast from sugar for a week, or I skip caffeine. It’s based on what I find myself becoming too dependent on. With my phone, I run our SPO chapter’s Instagram, but I do that on my iPad, which only has Wi-Fi and doesn’t really go anywhere. I don’t have any social media on my phone. I gravitate toward how I can distract myself in the moment when I’m bored or uncomfortable or I don’t like sitting (and) waiting. Can I take that away?
Q) That’s so relatable: Trying to stay off Instagram while running it for your SPO chapter! I bet playing guitar is another good way to unplug and center yourself.
A) I just learned how to play “Jersey Giant” by Tyler Childers. I play music by The National Parks and Penny and Sparrow. But I play mostly for praise and worship now. It’s how I enter into prayer. There’s often an ease that I experience that I don’t in other forms of prayer.
Q) How do you stay humble?
A) The Lord has given me so many good things. To experience both the grace of the Lord’s goodness alongside suffering is a really beautiful way to nurture humility in one’s life. And I am often very bad at it. I’m not the most humble person. I think about myself a lot — far more than I should.
But I also think regular confession is huge and learning to enter into confession with a reality of: “I immensely need the Lord’s grace for everything in my life.” Without the Lord, without grace, without the sacraments, I can do nothing. I can try as hard as I want — and for so much of my life I have — and it’s just impossible. There is no way to do it alone.
I have grown the most in humility by learning to be loved and to be accepted where I’m at. That removes the need to create somebody or something out of yourself or a false narrative or lean into pride the way we do when we are not loved well or when we’re afraid of being loved.
Q) You are wise beyond your years! I see there is some fundraising needed for this pilgrimage. Readers can go to the website eucharisticpilgrimage.org and then click the “perpetual pilgrims” tab on the top right. Once they click on your bio, they’ll see a “give now” button at the bottom.
A) We have to fundraise to do what we’re doing. That is the financial reality. The pilgrims fundraise to support dioceses that can’t afford to host us, which is many of the dioceses we’re going to this year — and that is an incredibly beautiful thing to step into.
Pray for me. Pray for us. Pray for the people we’re going to encounter. And we would love to pray for the archdiocese, for you all. You can submit intentions at the website. They will all be printed out and carried to the Eucharist.
Q) What do you know for sure?
A) I know that the Lord is good and that he’s working for the good at all times — which I feel like, in this day and age, is sometimes hard to believe. That’s probably the only thing I know for sure.
