Story of big monstrance used during the National Eucharistic Congress starts in LA

LOS ANGELES (OSV News) -- Jesus Christ may have been the main protagonist at the National Eucharistic Congress July 17-21, but the golden, unusually large monstrance used to carry him each night before thousands at Indianapolis' Lucas Oil Stadium caught people's attention, too.

Where did they get such a big, beautiful monstrance from? And as one reporter jokingly asked, had Bishop Andrew H. Cozzens of Crookston, Minnesota, board chairman of the National Eucharistic Congress Inc., been lifting weights to be able to carry it through the stadium?

The monstrance, Bishop Cozzens told journalists at the congress, was actually the same model that organizers had seen images of Los Angeles Archbishop José H. Gomez use in a Eucharistic procession through the streets of San Gabriel in March 2023.

Almost immediately after the event, congress organizers at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops asked Archbishop Gomez's office, "Where can we get one of those?"

The inquiry led them to Father Miguel Angel Ruiz, a 31-year-old Los Angeles priest ordained in 2019 with roots in Guadalajara, Mexico. Father Ruiz was known for having the same monstrance, and often lending it to other priests in the Los Angeles Archdiocese for special events. It was his monstrance, in fact, that the late LA Auxiliary Bishop David G. O'Connell borrowed when he famously blessed Los Angeles in the early days of the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020.

Father Ruiz told the officials that the monstrance was made by a liturgical store in Guadalajara, Articulos Religiosos San Jose. They ordered an exact replica of the monstrance -- one of the store's most popular ones -- in a hurry, since Pope Francis had agreed to bless it in a private audience in Rome a few weeks later.

Four feet tall and weighing more than 20 pounds, the new monstrance -- together with hosts specially sized for it -- was shipped from Guadalajara to Tijuana, where Father Ruiz drove to pick it up. From across the border in San Diego, he had it shipped to USCCB headquarters in Washington, just in time for the congress delegation led by Bishop Cozzens to bring it to Rome for the pope's blessing. 

"It's big. It's beautiful," the pope said with a smile to members of the congress planning team at the June 19, 2023, meeting.

Father Ruiz, now administrator at Our Lady of the Rosary of Talpa Church in East LA, told Angelus, the archdiocesan news outlet, that his personal connection with the monstrance actually began at a convent in Guadalajara he used to visit as a seminarian.

While praying before the Blessed Sacrament in the convent's adoration room, "I would think to myself, 'When I become a priest, I want one like that one,'" he recalled.

A few years later, the sisters at the convent purchased the monstrance as a gift for Father Ruiz's ordination to the priesthood. The rest, as he says, "is history."