THE
EUCHARIST
The Eucharist is the heart
and the summit of the Church's life, for in it Christ
associates his Church and all her members with his
sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving offered once
for all on the cross to his Father; by this sacrifice
he pours out the graces of salvation on his Body
which is the Church (Catechism
of the Catholic Church, 1407).
Baptism and Confirmation
are the first two sacraments of Christian initiation,
and they find their fulfillment and perfection in
the source and summit of the Christian life: the
Most Holy Eucharist. As the Second
Vatican Council teaches, at the Last Supper,
our Savior instituted the Eucharistic sacrifice of
His Body and Blood. This He did in order to perpetuate
the sacrifice of the Cross throughout the ages until
He should come again, and so to entrust to His beloved
Spouse, the Church, a memorial of His death and resurrection:
a sacrament of love, a sign of unity, a bond of charity,
a Paschal Banquet in which Christ is consumed, the
mind is filled with grace, and a pledge of future
glory is given to us (Sacred
Constitution on the Liturgy, 47).
At the heart of the Holy
Eucharist are the bread and wine that, by the words
of Christ and the invocation of the Holy Spirit,
truly and substantially become the Body and Blood
of the risen and glorified Lord Jesus. In the Old
Covenant bread and wine were offered in sacrifice
among the first fruits of the earth as a sign of
gratitude to God, but they also received a new meaning
by the Exodus of Israel from slavery in Egypt.
The unleavened bread of
Passover recalls the haste of departure on pilgrimage
to the promised land, and manna in the desert testifies
that God always fulfills His promise to sustain His
people. Moreover, blood is the sign of fidelity to
God's covenant with Israel and of sorrow for sins
which violate God's law.
And finally, the cup of
blessing at the end of the Jewish Passover meal transforms
the simple human joy in wine into a sign of God's
saving action in history: the messianic expectation
of the rebuilding of Jerusalem. All of these meanings
were taken up and transformed by the Lord Jesus,
the true Lamb of God, when He instituted the Holy
Eucharist and commanded the Church to celebrate this
sacrifice until He comes again in glory.
The Most Holy Eucharist
is described in sections 1322-1412 of the Catechism
of the Catholic Church, and we encourage every
family to study these pages of the Catechism carefully
in order to understand more deeply the inexhaustible
riches of the sacred Mystery of Christ''s Body and
Blood.
In the other six sacraments,
God gives us a gift of grace; in the Holy Mass He
gives us the gift of Himself. That is why the Holy
Eucharist is the Sacrament of sacraments, the Mystery
of mysteries. The Lord Jesus urgently invites us
to receive Him in this wondrous sacrament: 'Truly,
I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son
of man and drink His blood, you have no life in you'
(John 6:53). Even as we struggle to understand this
Mystery of Faith, we rejoice in this most sublime
and abiding sacrifice of praise.
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