A key to Cardinal Francis Leo’s second pastoral letter for the Archdiocese of Toronto comes, fittingly, in the fifth paragraph of the introduction to the document’s nine segments.

Indeed, there is a foreshadowing in the very title of the 30-page exploration of Catholic faith, meaning, and action: “The Blessed Upper Room.” 

Given that thematic distant early warning, ChatGPT hardly need be used to discern the Cardinal’s direction. Yet given the time pressure to rush our reading even of matter meant to be questioned, meditated, prayed over, it remains worth drawing attention to his words. 

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The table of contents uses language such as “The Institution of the Eucharist,” “The Arrival of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost,” and “The Gift of the Mother – With MARY, the Mother of Jesus.” They point to what might be called the animating spirit of our faith.

But turn or scroll the page and Cardinal Leo offers us a crucial complement with these words: “The Upper Room was a real physical dwelling/meeting place in Jerusalem at the time of Christ — but much, much more. It constituted an array of grace-filled events, an anointed sign of God’s redeeming love…a series of turning moments in the life of the worshiping Christian community, and the unfolding of God’s saving and loving dream for us.”

Real. Physical. Dwelling. Jerusalem. 

The Catholic Church has been cultivated, grown, and flourished for more than 2,000 years thanks to God’s gift of some of the greatest human minds in history. They have articulated its creed, its dogma, its theology, its role in philosophical inquiry. 

But it began and endures above all, Cardinal Leo reminds us (because we all need constant reminding), in real physicality. It does not float tethered to the ineffable Tao of Taoism or the inscrutable void of Buddhism or the abstractions of other belief systems that appeal to the religious sense in every human heart. 

Christ did not crash to earth because His wings of wax melted from flying too close to the sun, á la Icarus in Greek mythology. He was laid in an actual stone tomb after physical death on a heavy wooden Cross destined from the moment he was humanly born in a geographically identifiable place. 

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The Eucharist unfolding from that destiny was not, as is often pejoratively said, empty ritual. It was a physical, placeable, time-based, grace-filled event. Actual wine was poured. Munchable bread was broken. Both were shared not as mere symbolic signifiers but as constituted, bodily, eternal aspects of Christ’s Real Presence within, to repeat for emphasis Cardinal Leo’s  expression, “the unfolding of God’s saving and loving dream for us.”

Elsewhere, he uses the language of “key and foundational building blocks” to undergird the purpose of his second pastoral letter, and makes clear that he does not mean the words as pure metaphor but rather in the sense that we build identifiable foundations of health, of habits, of moral conduct, of faith. 

Throughout the text, he emphasizes observable activity as the cornerstone of Catholic spiritual life, which doesn’t mean running ourselves ragged as though we’re competitors in a race to holiness. It means, rather, applied energy that might take the form of focused quietude.

“Some might consider meditating on these reflections as a sort of Novena, one per day. Others might choose to dedicate a day a week or a day a month to focus on these points,” he writes.

Alternatively, we can: “(L)ook into our hearts and ascertain how we are incarnating them in our daily walk of faith, followed by bringing them up in spiritual direction or in the sacrament of penance and reconciliation.”

Or: “(T)ake one question per day and let it accompany you or set some quiet time per week, a short 15 minutes, to read a paragraph and ask yourself a question that is proposed.”

Repeatedly, though, Cardinal Leo calls us back to the meeting place reality of Holy Mother Church. He uses the example of the washing of feet during Holy Week to show us the “very concrete and even crude physicality” of Christ’s love.

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“It is not a fuzzy feeling…it is not a philosophical ideal. For the Son of God, it is a tangible even earthy expression of the gift of self — this self-giving is real, graphic and costly.”

The reward for us, of course, is immeasurable, as it is in reading the Cardinal’s letter either online or in the pages of The Catholic Register over the course of this summer.