Could the International Eucharistic Congress spark a Catholic revival like Denver's World Youth Day?

International Eucharistic Congress, taking place this week in Budapest, Hungary, have a similar, revolutionary effect on Catholics in Hungary and throughout Europe?It’s a question worth asking because of there are many parallels to WYD ’93.As in Denver, many critics fail to see how a traditional religious gathering like a Eucharistic Congress can have a meaningful impact in these times marked by fears of a global pandemic, deepening secularism, and widening divides within the Catholic Church around the world.Yet it’s important to remember that grave problems existed in the Church and the wider society in 1993, as well.“I was not here in Denver ‘til 1998, but I can tell you what it was like being a Catholic in the Western World,” recalled Curtis Martin, founder and CEO of the Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS), based in Genesee, Colorado, which is one of the fastest-growing university outreach apostolates in the Catholic Church. “It was devastating, it was confusing, we were in the midst of chaos, heresy, apostasy. Every doctrine that had been held consistently for centuries was up for grabs,” Martin said.“Denver was in radical transformation. Cardinal Stafford closed the seminary because it was empty, there were only a very few seminarians and it was filled with heresy and other moral problems, so he shut it down.”Annie Powell, co-founder with her husband Scott Powell of Camp Wojtyla, a Catholic outdoor adventure program based in Erie, Colorado, remembers the difficulty the Catholic Church in America had reaching young people prior to WYD ’93.“My growing up experience in the Catholic Church was, they don’t do anything for kids, not a thing for the youth,” she said. “I really had no sense that anyone was actively Catholic at my age.”That began to change after WYD ’93.“The prediction was that it would be a miserable failure, that no one would come,” recalled Chris Stefanick, author, speaker and TV host whose apostolate, Real Life Catholics, is based in Greenwood