CHRIST OUR EUCHARIST

“. . .Consequently, in this Sacrament there is no other way in which Christ can be present except through the conversion of the entire substance of bread into His Body and through the conversion of the entire substance of wine into His Blood, leaving unchanged only those properties of bread and wine which are open to our senses. This hidden conversion is appropriately and justly called by the Church transubstantiation. Any theological explanation intent on arriving at some understanding of this mystery, if it is to be in accordance with Catholic faith, must maintain, without ambiguity, that in the order of reality which exists independently of the human mind, the bread and wine cease to exist after the consecration. From then on, therefore, the Body and Blood of the Lord Jesus under the sacramental species of bread and wine are truly presented before us for our adoration . . .

". . . And this same existence remains after the Sacrifice in the Most Blessed Sacrament which is reserved in the tabernacle, the living heart of our churches. It is then, our bounden and loving duty to honour and adore in the Blessed Host, which we see with our eyes, the Word Incarnate Himself, whom we cannot see, but who nonetheless, without leaving heaven, is made present before us . . ."

- Paul VI, Credo o f the People o f God, 1968

Nihil obstat: John M. T. Barton STD., LSS, Censor. Imprimatur: David Norris V.G. Westminster, 26-VI-1973

The Nihil obstat and Imprimatur are a declaration that a book or pamphlet is considered to be free from doctrinal or moral error. It is not implied that those who have granted the Nihil obstat and Imprimatur agree with the contents, opinions or statements expressed.

CHRIST OUR EUCHARIST

Edward Holloway S.T.L

"In the beginning was the Word: the Word was with God and the Word was God.

He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things came to be, not one thing had its being but through him. All that came to be had life in him and that life was the light of men, a light that shines in the dark, a light that darkness could not overpower . . ." (John 1:1-5).

There is no passage of the gospels which sums up more magnificently than this prologue to St. John's gospel, the Divinity of Christ and His creative Godhead, and the work for us of God made Man. All the pathos is there as well, the struggle, the victory, and the giving of thanks, "from His fullness we have all received, and grace upon grace". It was never part of the very liturgy of the Mass as such, but we may regret that it has dropped out of it, said by priests and people together, after Holy Communion it makes the most rich of thanksgivings for the Holy Communion of the body and blood of Christ. It is lawful for us already to use it as a hymn or canticle of praise and thanksgiving after Holy Communion, and we may perhaps hope and pray that one day it will be again printed in the liturgical texts as the foremost, and the most to be recommended of the themes of praise and thanksgiving with which the liturgy of the Eucharist may end.

In Christ the Word, or Living Wisdom of God in Person, the entire Creation proceeded, from the energies which produced the forms of elemental matter, to the angelic nature, made in the simple image of God. Nothing came forth from the Word in chaos, but all energies poised and measured through a law of being which is a law of ascent. All things were poised in one law of control and direction, so that the laws of the sciences of matter run the one into another, in an ascending harmony of creation, the universe God made builds up like a pyramid, the broad bases upon the vast universe of matter, the apex a point in the making of Man, man a being of spirit and of matter, Man made to the image and likeness of God, to the image and likeness specifically of the Word of God who exists from eternity, and who therefore upon his incarnation for us, chose and preferred the title of "the Son of Man".

Christ the Head of Creation

Similar in certainty and identical in witness is the teaching of St. Paul to the Colossians concerning the Son of God, that:

"He is the image of the unseen God and the first-born of all creation, for in him were created all things in heaven and on earth: everything visible and everything invisible, Thrones, Dominations, Sovereignties, Powers - all things were created through him and for him

Before anything was created, he existed, and he holds all things in unity.

Now the Church is his body, he is its head.

As he is the Beginning, he was first to be born from the dead, so that he should be first in every way; because God willed that in him all fullness should dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross" (Col. 1:15-20).

Of the life which is less than man, the Psalmist writes: "All these look to thee, to give them their food in due season. Thou dost open thy hand, and they are filled with good things, When thou takest away their breath, they die and return to their dust . . ." (Ps. 104:28-29).

But for the angel and mankind it is otherwise. The inferior creation witnesses to God and its very being is its eucharist of thanksgiving to him. This creation however is not made to his very image and likeness, it cannot know him, nor lay hold upon him. The angelic spirit, and man who shares in both orders of reality, spirit and matter, do not live by bread alone. They are created by God in the living likeness of the Divine Word, and God alone is the principle of their being, of their quickening to life more abundant, and their final perfection in perfect union with him of knowledge and love. This relationship to God St. Paul expressed well two thousand years ago, when he told the Athenians concerning God that, "in him we live, and are, and have our being . . . and we are also his offspring" (Acts 17:28).

In the case of mankind we may wonder how this can be, for matter seems to be a drag upon the created spirit, quite apart from actual or original sin. With the angel, yes we can understand, God can pour upon them his energising Being in the immediate contact of pure Spirit upon the pure spirit of the angelic nature. With man, we who come to know, and come to love through the medium also of matter, through the word spoken and enacted, and through the interplay of all our senses with the spirit, how can we fully and adequately know God, love God, and be in communion with God? The answer is foreshadowed with majesty in the Epistle to the Hebrews, where we read in the vision of the inspired seer, that "Here I am, with the children whom God has given me. Since his children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same nature, that he might destroy him who has the power of death, that is, the Devil . . . for it was not the angels that he took to himself, but descent from Abraham" (Heb. 2:14-16).

God is always the Way, the Truth, and the Life for men. He was in the beginning, in the prompting of that first knowledge of Himself which is the primitive revelation of God to men, the mustard, seed out of which there grew the scriptures, and the vocation of Israel to mankind. God was always the food and life of the spiritual creation, God was the reason for hope in the resurrection of the dead, which the orthodox Jew also professed. To minister this `life' more abundantly, God raised up the priest and the prophet among His people, and commissioned the many sacrifices of the Old Law, themselves wonderfully prophetic of the meaning in Christ which was to come.

In the fullness of time, by a climax of that spiritual evolution in His economy for mankind, which matches the majestic ascent of the creation itself and which crowns the creation, God gave to man the plenitude of salvation and redemption in Himself. To the angels earlier God had given this same fullness, and called them, if they would respond, to the communion of the beatific possession of God, as God is in Himself. To us men He gave no less, He gave it again in His very self, in the Incarnation of the Eternal Word, who is the principle of the created being, and of its fulfilment. The eternal Word is the principle through whom we are taught by God, and lay hold on Him: the principle also, since the disaster of original sin, of our reconciliation with God. This same Word, now to be made Incarnate, is also the principle of our inward nourishing, our growing up into the adult measure of the sonship of God through Christ. Jesus Christ is everything for us, true God and true Man, the sacrifice of our perfect redemption, the "Lamb of God" who by His reconciling and revivifying sacrifice, has been made also the "Sacrament of the World". As "Sacrament of the World" He is also the unique Bread of Heaven, whose human nature gives life to the world, for God, and only God is the proper food of soul and body in the order of life everlasting.

Sacrifice and Sacrament

"I am come that they may have Life," said Christ, and that they may have it more abundantly" (John 10:10). We bear in mind that all the work of Christ for us, when He was on earth, and now at the right hand of the Father, is a `giving of life' to us. The Redemption itself is a giving of life, for He has "withdrawn us from the kingdom of darkness, and brought us into his own kingdom of light" (I Peter 2:9). We would be a spoiled creation, dead to life in God, but for our insertion into Him, and but for that victorious work of bitter labour, pain and contradiction to death, by which He has torn us back again from Satan, so that the Gates of Hell have not prevailed against Him, nor against our race.

So much goes into the idea and the understanding of that word `life'. In nature around us, in the life which is below man, the life of the seed cast into the ground consists in the good earth in which it roots, and in the sunshine and shower, and the air around, with which the seed interchanges in a sort of union and communion.

Jesus Christ is that `union and communion' of life for us, with whom we `interchange' and because as He said, we are worth "more than hundreds of sparrows" (Lk. 12:7). He gave us the fullness of the Godhead in bodily form. The way in which Christ ministers Life to us, has many facets, many an aspect. There is the word of the Word Incarnate in teaching, preaching, forming and witnessing, the words which came out of His mouth once in Palestine, and are now recorded in the gospels of the Church, and interpreted and developed in the teaching and apostolic tradition of the Church. But, even when our Lord spoke, as even now, when the Church speaks on His behalf, the outward word needs an inner, divine enlightenment, that a man understand it, and join himself to God through it. In this inner citadel of a man's soul Christ also unites Himself and communes with us.

The many titles we use of Christ Our Lord beautifully summarize one complete work of giving life, of restoring life, and of fulfilling life. The final fulfilment will be the resurrection of the body in the likeness of the risen Christ, and transformation

of our nature, like to the Divinity of which we have been made co-sharers. There is only one word which says all totally, the word `fullness' or `pleroma' as the Greek Fathers have named it. I think we do express such a `pleroma' of meaning concerning Our Lord, if we say that Jesus Christ, Son of God, and Son of Man, is our Paschal Sacrifice and Sacrament.

Many Titles, One Work

To describe fully what is meant in the preceding paragraph could encompass the entire theology of the Church, in the Old Testament and the New. If we call Christ "Our Passover" we implicitly name him Saviour, King, Priest, Prophet, Good Shepherd, and Lamb of God. He is also called The Way, the Truth, and the Life. Yet, we have not said all that stresses the work of Christ, or the gifts He ministers to us men, until we have also recognised in Him the "Bread of Heaven" typified in the manna, who has come down from heaven to feed a hungry people, starving in the desert of their own despoliation. "For my Flesh is food indeed, and my Blood is drink indeed: he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in Me, and I abide in him. Just as the Living Father has sent Me, and. I live through the Father, so he that eats Me, the same man shall live through Me" (John 6:58).

When a man understands and accepts the literal Divinity of Jesus Christ, when he gives to that Divinity the real, not merely the notional assent, (to quote a profound distinction of Cardinal Newman's) then the real giving to us of the actual Body and Blood of Christ in the Holy Eucharist becomes inevitable, and the reason for it apparent. Because the incarnation is a work performed within God's own Being, in the bosom of the Blessed Trinity. The Eternal Word, term of the Father's contemplation of Himself in the divine Being, is sent by the Father, in the Love common to both of them, who is the Holy Spirit. Christ is God in very person, and He is making it clear in this sixth chapter of St. John, that just as He lives through the Life which is in the Father, so we also, who feed on Him, will live through and by the Life which is within Christ. Christ is claiming divine prerogative here, and a divine vocation for us. To give us "His flesh to eat, and His blood to drink" is an integral part of the economy of the Incarnation.

We tend today to speak too much of Christ's "kenosis", of the emptying out of this divine glory for us. It has reached a point at which many theologians have emptied out the Divinity of Christ Himself. Christ, in becoming man, was not any the less God for us: He was rather much more, and so much more fully the plenitude of God communicated to us.

He was first in the crib, and then later at the Last Supper, our Holy Communion with God. He was "Emmanuel", God with us. We cannot for a moment refuse to the human nature of Christ, that participation with His Divinity, which we grant and assert to His broken body in the redemption and salvation of the Cross. Jesus Christ is only one Person, the Person of God the Eternal Word, and His human nature participates in all the aspects of His divine work for us. Just as Jesus could not delegate to any creature whatever His function of sacrifice and reconciliation so also Jesus cannot delegate to any creature His role as the sacrament of the world. He is the reconciling High Priest, and also the victim of atonement, but just as much, the Bread given from Heaven for the life of the world. This is all one function and one economy in Our Lord, one perfect work of the Divine and the human in Jesus Christ. The role, the necessity, and also the majesty of the Holy Eucharist, now perhaps begins to become apparent.

I put it to you that this is the very reason why Jesus Christ left the institution of the Holy Eucharist to the eve of His Passion and Crucifixion. It had to be so. The Eucharist as Sacrament is more than a supreme witness to His love. It is part and parcel of the very economy of the Incarnation in its unity. In Christ's Passiontide, all the many types and figures of the Old Law were blended and fulfilled in the supreme climax of the Cross. We see fulfilled the Day of Atonement, the Passover, the New and Eternal Covenant in the blood of the Lamb of God. Yet we have not seen all fulfilled, unless we see also the fulfilment of the loaves of proposition, the bread called "of the face of God", the Manna which fed the people of God in the desert, as they passed through redemption to salvation in the promised land, and that aspect of the Paschal Lamb, in which the lamb was journey food, as well as sacrifice. We find this fulfilment only if we link the Last Supper to the Cross, and then all things become plain in the wisdom and gift of God.

The Meaning of St. John's Words

This is the deep meaning of St. John's expression, when he says that "He had always loved those who were His own in the world. When the time came for Him to be glorified by you, His heavenly Father, He loved to the very uttermost". . . (John 13:1) words which have now passed most beautifully into the prologue of the consecration, in the 4th Eucharistic Prayer of the New Roman Missal. John is telling us that the Holy Eucharist is in all its aspects, the climax for mankind of the work of the Incarnation. I entitled this pamphlet "Christ Our Eucharist" because it is possible to name Christ as the "Eucharist" in a sense which embraces everything from the Last Supper, through to the Agony in the Garden  and  the  Crucifixion,  to  the  glorious  Resurrection  on  the  third  day.  Christ as Sacrifice of Salvation, and Sacrament of the World, cannot be divided against Himself. This work of His is one economy. As Pope Paul said to the pilgrims in his general audience for the feast of Corpus Christi --"the Holy Eucharist is a Sacrament only in as much as it is a Sacrifice"1. Christ Our Lord alone mediates between the Divine and the human created nature of mankind, and as much as we are willed and accepted in Him, so also do we participate in the Divine Life, living through Him, as He lives through the Father. Because He is the Living Sacrifice, therefore also He becomes to us the Bread of that Life and Immortality He has gained for us.

Therefore Christ linked the Blessed Sacrament with the Cross: when we name him the "Sacramentum Mundi", the Sacrament of the World, we include His role of sacrificial mediator and principle of life and nourishment, all in one title. The Salvation and Redemption of Christ spans the whole work Christ enacted in Himself, from the Last Supper, to the Resurrection. At the Last Supper Christ consummated the New Passover, and gave Himself in His Divinity and in His human body, as the Bread of the spiritual personality of man. In the enactment of that solemn Eucharist, He made Himself solemnly and publicly the Oblation of the Lamb, the immolation of which was to be consummated on the morrow. This was all the one sacrifice, because He could not have said of the totality of His work for us, as Sacrifice and Sacrament, "consummatum est" upon the Cross, unless He had first said "ratum est" of the New Covenant and Passover in His Body and Blood, which He enacted on the eve of the Passion.

The Mass a True and Full Sacrifice

The Supper, the Cross, and the Eucharist we celebrate today, which is the "clean oblation, offered among the nations from the rising of the sun to its setting" (Malachi 1:11) is all the one same Sacrifice and Sacrament. The physical reality of Christ's Body extends as much and as necessarily to His sacramental relation to us as the Bread of Life, as it does to His role of Redeemer. The Holy Eucharist of the Christian Altar continues one lasting work of Him "who ever lives to make intercession for us" (Heb. 7:25) a text which demonstrates that while the Sacrifice was offered but once in the broken body and blood of Christ, yet that Sacrifice lives on in the Person of the Intercessor. He cannot intercede except as our Priest and Our Sacrifice, and if He lives to intercede for ever, then the Sacrifice is offered for ever, rising before God as a sweet savour in Our Lord Jesus Christ2. Christ is always Priest and Atonement for us, just as He is always Prophet and King. Likewise He is for ever the Manna, through whose life and being, communicating Godhead to us through the veil of matter, we live more fully unto God.

The Holy Mass therefore is a true, proper, and full sacrifice. It is more than a commemoration of the Cross alone, for that would not be a rite in Christ, but only a ritual concerning Christ. When we speak of the "Holy Eucharist" we mean the risen Christ, offering Himself eternally, and now really and in His physical reality through the hands of the priest, and the vows of the people: offering Himself as our Thanksgiving in person, as our "Eucharist" in very person. Upon that glorious Body He still wears the wounds of the nails as trophies, and to His victory, we ourselves add, "in Him, through Him, and with Him" the wounds of our own self-crucifixion, or that which men have imposed on us for His name's sake. In so doing, we dare to "fill up anything that may be wanting to the Passion of Christ", as St. Paul dares to say, for in Him our personal Passion becomes a part of His own efficacious gift to God, through that "Mystical Body" which we compose in Him.

We cannot make the Holy Eucharist which we celebrate upon the Christian Altar to be simply the presentation of Christ, offered to His People as the food of their souls and the principle of the resurrection of their bodies, as the Council of Trent reminds us, in its canonical definitions upon the Holy Eucharist3. Why cannot we limit the understanding of what the Eucharist is in this way?--Because if we limit our understanding of what the Eucharist means as sacrifice, in this way, we have failed to grasp what it means to claim that Jesus Christ is the Living God, in nature and in person, and that in Him Salvation and Redemption lives in His person. In Him, it is His person which sanctifies His acts, not vice versa. The acts of His person, fulfilled once in history in Palestine, have passed into Life and Victory gained for us in His very being as the Son of God, and the Son of Man, for whom all men were made.

We dare not view Christ's Redemption, as if the bloody acts alone, as something done, a redeeming execution made once in history, was what the Father sought, and found to be the all perfect reconciliation. For the good God is not some feudal, tribal chieftain. Did not Jesus Himself from the Cross cry out, "Father, forgive them, they know not what they do" ! (Lk. 23:34).

It is Christ Himself, who sanctifies His acts, so that they redeem us, not the acts which redeem us, because they are His. Christ as Son of Man is the more loved and rewarded, the more perfectly acceptable satisfaction for our sins, because of the holiness and perfection, the love and the obedience, the pain and the labour, with which He crowned His work and His witness, even to the obedience of the Cross

"Therefore we see Jesus, who for a little while was made lower than the angels,

Crowned with glory and honour because of the suffering of death,

so that, by the grace of God He might taste death for all men . . ." (Heb. 2:9)

Thus Jesus cannot fail to be, upon the Christian altar, the Sacrifice of adoration and love, of propitiation and of intercession. This is the Living Son of God whom we offer, and through whom we ourselves are gathered up in Himself, and offered in the Eucharistic liturgy. The Son of God is no passive thing. No priest offers, and consecrates as one having power, except in that living union with the Priesthood of Christ which he participates upon a title of holy order which is more than that of baptism alone. When we enact the Christian Passover, the Holy Eucharist, the Mass, we offer it in Him, with Him, and only through Him, to whom is the honour and the glory for ever and ever.4

The meaning of Transubstantiation

There are many definitions of a sacrifice, and among the most significant is St. Augustine's in The City of God5 in which he defines a sacrifice as "every work by which we cleave to God in holy fellowship". The sacrifice by which we cleave to God in holy fellowship is Christ Himself, a sacrifice which was an immolation indeed, but an immolation of love. The Last Supper, the Crucifixion, and the Eucharist of the New Covenant in Christ's blood, is the one and supreme work in which, in the holy fellowship of the Church, we all of us who are baptized in Him, cleave to God, through the person of Our Lord Jesus Christ. The offering of the Holy Eucharist is then necessarily the offering of sacrifice, and indeed of the one and unique sacrifice which has any meaning with God, the risen Lord Himself, in whose human body the sacrifice of the Cross remains, except only that death has now passed over into eternal victory and an eternal efficacious intercession. This is why we preach, and the Church solemnly teaches, that the Mass applies to each and every soul the merits of the Cross, through the victory of the Resurrection.

I think it is enough to say that if a man truly understands, and believes in transubstantiation, in that basic, all important sense in which the term is not a theory of the schools, but the defined doctrine of the Council of Trent6 that then he must believe sufficiently in the Eucharist as sacrifice as well as sacrament. But it is not enough today, and it never was enough, to profess belief in the `real presence' of Christ in the Holy Eucharist. Christ has many presences with His people, and all of them are real, but not any but His sacramental presence in the Eucharist is His presence by bodily identity, in His physical reality.

The test of the Catholic and Roman Faith must be whether, after the words of consecration have been spoken, we recognise that this thing, a piece of bread, is no longer any such thing, but only, and personally, Jesus Christ Himself, to whom bowing our heads we offer the worship of latria, the worship given to the One Living God, saying in our hearts, if not with our lips, "My Lord and My God". If a man admits that it is the Living God in the Person of Jesus Christ, who is offered by the hands of a priest upon the altar, then there is no difficulty at all about the Mass being a true sacrifice. For the Living Jesus is no "thing", but the principle of life and power from whom all the life of the Church, and all the gifts of Christian men derive. If He lives, then He intercedes. If what is consecrated becomes Himself in very Person, then He is Sacrifice, by virtue of what He is, and our relationship to the Father, in the Holy Spirit, through Him.

Consequences of this Faith and the Witness of the Church

"My Father works until now, and I work," said Our Lord Jesus Christ. It is because the Eucharist is Jesus Christ in Person that He continues to work through the Christian Altar. He offers to the Father, consecrates, and brings to perfection,  new  sons  and  daughters  of  God  all  through  the  ages.  In doing this work, Christ is always offering, interceding, and communicating life to mankind. That is why even 'Baptism is subordinated to the Holy Eucharist, and looks to the Eucharist as the fulfilment of the sonship it gives, and the hope it confers. Baptism gives us spiritual infancy in the likeness of Christ, and the Holy Eucharist nourishes us, in the Divinity and humanity of Christ, with the life which we have been given.

It is no accident, therefore, that the Holy Eucharist is the centre and focus of the Church's life and power. It is no accident that the very structure of her divine life hinges upon the Holy Eucharist. The divine, not human charism by which Peter and the Apostles gathered into one college by Christ, and confirmed by Peter, are able through the ages to define with divine certainty the truth of Christ against subtle error, is itself centred upon the Eucharist (Lk. 22:31-32). It is no accident that this fullness of the Magisterium of Christ belongs only to those men who have been membered into the fullness of Christ's own magisterial priesthood.

The Holy Eucharist must be the manifest sign not of any sort of unity among men, not of any sort of unity among even Christian men. It must be the sign of perfect unity in faith, in hope, and in love. Why so? Because just as Jesus, in the giving of this Holy Sacrament, loved His own who were in the world in the fullest way that even He could love, so also in offering our whole being with Him, in the perpetual re-offering of the Cross, and in feeding our whole being upon Him, as the Bread of Life and the hope of the resurrection, we live and express the fullest possible union and communion with Himself. In offering and in receiving Him in the Eucharist, we do not live merely the fullness of charity and hope, but also the fullness of faith, of teaching, and of that structuring of the Church around Our Lord, which we call the "Mystical Body of Christ".

Perhaps it was possible for Western man, at the beginning of the age of his superiority complex, and colonial expansion, some four hundred years ago, to think that the words of Christ in the sixth chapter of St. John, could be interpreted as some sort of beautiful parable, by which we were only "to feed on him by faith in our hearts", but we must remember that any such interpretation was utterly impossible for the Eastern Jew. The Jew was forbidden to eat flesh with the blood in it, or to drink of blood alone. This was unclean, the penalty for it was death, under the levitical law (Levit. 17:11-14). In everything else, Our Lord had fulfilled the types concerning Him in the Old Law with harmony and elegance, and it would have been most shocking, if He had meant in metaphor, something which as a type, and picture, could only be horrible for the Jew, and against the Old Law, which Christ came not to destroy, but to fulfil. If Christ had meant the command to eat His flesh and drink His blood in any way less than the literal, then most unwisely did He choose a likeness, expressly forbidden, and made horrific under the Old Law. Besides, we know that His hearers did not understand it as any picture, and they were scandalised in Him. The whole atmosphere and tenor then, of His sermon must have been strictly realist.

We can show why it had to be so. It was forbidden to the Jew to eat flesh with the blood, because the "life is in the blood, and I have given you the life of the sacrifice in exchange for your own" (Levit. 17:11) and it was forbidden again, because the life was in the blood, and the Lord your God alone, is master of life and of death. This also Christ took up, the Law was not broken, but fulfilled in an utterly unique way in Himself. For the Life of Man was in His Blood, and on the Cross He gave it in exchange for our own. Again, the "life is in the blood", and as He said to the Jews, in that electrifying chapter of St. John, "do you not understand, it is the spirit that gives life, the flesh profits nothing, the words that I have spoken to you, they are spirit and life". Because the Life of Christ, is in His Divinity, and whole and entire, God made man, He must be the Bread of our souls, and His body share in the work of the Divinity, to which it is conjoined in the union of His one Divine Person. We could not have thought of the way, Jesus who is "the Way" he could find a way, and the Eucharist is the way He found.

This teaching has been the living witness of the Church, East and West, from the earliest times, and to it Greek and Latin Fathers of the Church have given beautiful testimony, and added development, especially in the relationship of the Eucharist to the Church, as the Body of Christ. This faith in the Eucharist as the Living Sacrifice of the Cross, continued in the Paschal Christ, and in the true human body of the Lord, ministered as Sacrament for the nourishment of the Christian soul, was never challenged by a major heresy in the Christian Church, until the great schism in the Christian Faith of some four hundred years ago.

From Ireland to India

It is true to say that from the mists of our Western isles, from the Church which was founded by Patrick in Ireland, and Augustine in England, across the vast land mass of the Romano-Hellenic world, deep into Africa, and right across into India, to that Christian Church which, on no frivolous title claims descent from St. Thomas the Apostle, one same phenomenon of unity meets the mind wherever you turn: the Christian Church is defined everywhere and uniformly  by  bishop,  priest,  deacon,  the  baptized  people  of  God,  and  the  altar  of  the  Eucharistic  Sacrifice  and Sacrament around which all are gathered. It would be quite impossible to explain such a phenomenon of unity and continuity, across such vast distances, lack of communication, and cultures so divergent, unless this phenomenon had been everywhere and emphatically, from the beginning, the central nucleus of the Christian and Catholic Faith.

It would be possible indeed, but we have not the time, to write out a symposium of beautiful and brilliant texts from the beginning of the Church's history, until the present time, which all witnessed to this one fact: that the Holy Eucharist  is  the  true  Sacrifice  of  the  Lamb  of  God,  the  Passover  of  the  New  Law,  and  as  such  the  eternal commemoration and making present again, of Christ's Sacrifice upon Calvary, in His living person, upon the altar. These texts would witness most clearly that it is not sacrament and sacrifice merely of His "real presence", but of His actual identity and personal being, under the appearance of bread and wine. He is our Eucharist, our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving in glory, because He rose from the dead, and we rise again in Him, receiving our birthright again in baptism, and from baptism being led to the sacrificial banquet of the altar. To redeem us in His human flesh because of His Divinity, and to feed us with His human flesh, because of His Divinity, this is one same order, one same work, and one fullness of the word of God made Man, in the economy of the Incarnation. In the Eucharist therefore, we recapitulate in Jesus Christ, every fullness of the entire economy of the Incarnation, and look forward in confident hope to its consummation in "the new heaven and the new earth", the transformation of the creation of God into the Kingdom of His final triumph and glory.

One cannot perhaps end this pamphlet more perfectly, than by quoting St. John Chrysostom in this respect, as one witness who speaks for the whole Church, and all the Fathers: "Since He, Christ, has said `this is my Body', let us make our submission, and believe in it, let us contemplate it with the eyes of spiritual insight. For he has never given us anything material only, but through matter He ministers a spiritual content. In Baptism, for example, a sensible and material element is ministered to us, but the regeneration, the being born again which accompanies the physical Baptism is a spiritual transformation. Now, if you had been incorporeal, had been angelic natures, these incorporeal gifts would have been communicated to you directly, and without intermediary. But because you are a soul joined with a material body, the spiritual gift is communicated to you through matter, through sensible things. How many people say today, `How I wish I could but once see Him, gaze upon His fact, remark His figure, His clothes, His very sandals'! Very well then! You do see Him, you do touch Him, you eat Him as food, and take Him within yourself in union and communion.''7

This is the heart of the matter, this the meaning of the Incarnation, this the faith of the Catholic Church. Christ fulfils the angel as Saviour, and nourishes the angel with the Divinity as the food of the created spirit, directly, and without intermediary, as pure Divine Spirit upon pure created spirit. For Man, that we might have God as the same fullness in our mixed order of being and have God made Man as our Redeemer too, after the disaster of original sin, God in Christ laid hold upon matter, upon the mixed nature of matter and of spirit, and the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us. He gave to us the same fullness of the Godhead in bodily form, being made for us the fullness of Salvation and Redemption in His Godhead and His Manhood, and the fullness of our Bread, in the same fullness of His Godhead and His Manhood. So He abides with us, until He comes again in glory, and all things be subjected under His feet --for the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory are His, for everlasting ages, Amen.

1 Osservatore Romano, June 8th, 1972.

2 Cf. The Roman Canon (Euch. Prayer I).

3 Trent. Session 22, canons, 1 to 3.

4 Eucharistic Prayers I-IV.

5  De Civitate Dei. Lib., 10.c.6.

6 Trent. Session XlI, can. 2.

7 In Joannem Hom. XLVII. n. 1.

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