Perhaps the most challenging words Our Blessed Lord uttered on the
earth were those by which he proclaimed the reality of the Eucharist:
Then Jesus said to them: Amen, amen I say unto you;
Except you eat the Flesh of the Son of Man, and drink His Blood, you
shall not have life in you. He that eateth My Flesh, and drinketh My
Blood, hath everlasting life: and I will raise him up on the last day.
For My Flesh is meat indeed: and My Blood is drink indeed. He that
eateth My Flesh and drinketh My Blood, abideth in Me and I in him. As
the living Father hath sent Me, and I live by the Father; so he that
eateth Me shall live by Me. This is the bread that came down from
Heaven. (John 6:54-59)
It was then that many of his disciples “walked no more with Him”
(John 6:67), murmuring as they walked away: “This saying is hard, and
who can hear it?” (John 6:61)
Notice, these were not His enemies, not
the Scribes and Pharisees, not the Herodians or the pagans, but His
disciples! Now the same challenge of the Eucharist has remained
throughout the centuries, and remains indeed, today the main reason why
so many of those who call themselves Christians, and so many who are in
fact Christian by virtue of their baptism, remain separated from the
Church of the Eucharist, preferring a Christianity without the
priesthood, without the Mass, and consequently, without the Eucharist.
Father Feeney believed, and taught forcefully, that the challenge of
the Eucharist must remain in our day just as hard as when Our Savior
uttered those immortal words. The Church has the duty to do that, and
people can accept the challenge or reject it. For those who accept it,
it shall be well with them and infinite blessings will fall upon them,
and upon the world, because of them. But for those who reject it, well,
it is too bad for them, but the Church will have discharged its duty.
This is the issue of salvation as Father Feeney saw it. It is not
merely a legal issue nor even a moral one. It does not rest on canon
law, nor merely on pronouncements of popes and councils. Important as
such measures are, they remain means to protect a truth of a much higher
order. The challenge of the Eucharist belongs to the ontological order;
namely, it is a matter of being and reality. “Unless you eat Me you
shall not have life in you.” Life is life-eternal and means nothing less
than salvation.
I am introducing here Father Feeney’s study entitled “The Eucharist
in Four Simple Mysteries.” This classical article abounds in ontological
terms not very popular with modern philosophers or with Modernists in
general. The reader is advised to watch carefully for such terms as
substance as they occur in statements made by Father, e.g., “The last
bequethal which Jesus made to us was of the substance His Mother gave
Him — His Body and His Blood. Or this statement: “No other sacrament
unites us with the human nature of Jesus in substance — with His Body
and Blood.”
Another truth Father Feeney brings out is the connection, rather the
identity, between the Eucharist and the Church considered as the
Mystical Body of Christ. Emphasis on this truth Father shares with many
of the early Fathers (St. John Chrysostom, St. Cyril of Alexandria, St.
Augustine, St. Ephrem, etc.), but not with many theologians of modern
times.
The Eucharist, in Communion, comes to us under the aspect of food.
Now, ordinary food is assimilated by the eater; but in Holy Communion
the Food assimilates the eater! We, the Church, by Holy Communion,
become an extension of His Reality! Listen to Father Feeney affirm this
great fact: “In Holy Communion Jesus takes in me.” Again, “so much is
this so, that Saint Paul was inspired to call us Catholics, ‘the
fullness of Christ.’ We are the Mystical Body of Christ. ‘Mystical’
means the same Christ in endurance, even when He has gone away. He is
the Vine, and we are the branches. He is the Head, and we are the
members. We become in echo almost as divine as He was in utterance.” By
this mystical but real unity with His Person, He makes us become sons of
His eternal Father and true children of His Immaculate Mother. Holy
Communion is the fulfillment of what is inchoatively contained in the
Sacrament of Baptism.
And those who die lacking this fulfillment,
whether they be the baptized children in the New Testament who die
before receiving Holy Communion, or the Just in the Old Testament who
died before the coming of the Savior, they are promised to drink of the
Chalice of Salvation in the Kingdom of His Father. (Mark 14:25) The
Eucharist cannot be a sacrament after the resurrection of the body, but
it will be Holy Communion.
We invite the reader, therefore, to follow with careful attention the
clear and undeniable distinction Father Feeney makes between the aspect
of sacrament and the aspect of communion, in the Eucharist.
It all goes back to the two great truths proclaimed by Our Lord with unmistakable clarity:
- “Unless an man be born again of water and the Holy Ghost, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.” (John 3:5)
- “Except you eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his Blood, you shall not have life in you.” (John 6:54)
The life spoken of here, in the universal judgment of the Church, is
the life-eternal whose attainment is salvation. All men already possess
that mortal life bequeathed to us by mother Eve.
The Church calls Mary the second Eve as Christ is called the Second
Adam. And Mary by means of the Eucharist as communion will be the Mother
of all the saved, that is of all those from the Old as well as from the
New Testament, who will live forever that true life earned for us by
Jesus.
Eve received her name because “she was the mother of all the
living” (Gen. 3:20); and the Second Eve will be as universally the
Mother of all who will be eternally in the land of the living.
This is how Father Feeney understood the mind of the Church and the
Eucharistic Theology of the Fathers. We hope that these introductory
notes will help the reader to appreciate more fully Father’s article. It
is a commentary on Scripture. It is an echo from the ancient Fathers.
It is a theology of salvation. Here, then, is Father Feeney explaining
the Holy Eucharist:
The simplest name for the hiddenness of God in the seemingness of
wheat and wine is the Blessed Eucharist. The Blessed Eucharist, or The
Holy Eucharist, is the term we use in an over-all reference to the great
reality of God upon our altars.
The word Eucharist means alternately “good favor” or “good thanks.”
It preserves its shades of meaning, one for God and one for man. The
Blessed Eucharist is God’s “good favor” to man, and man’s “good thanks”
to God. the Blessed Eucharist goes both ways, — to God, and from Him, in
one little wafer of white, in one small cup of red. The Blessed
Eucharist brings God down to man; and it lifts man up to God. It is a
communion between God and man.
In our liturgies and our devotions, in our catechisms, in our books
of theology, there are four auxiliary titles the Blessed Eucharist
requires so as to make its abundant proposes clear to us. These
additional titles are: a) The Real Presence, b) The Sacrifice of the
Mass, c) Holy Communion and d) The Blessed Sacrament. There must be some
sublime reason why these not altogether identical expressions are used
by the Church in regard to the Blessed Eucharist. I would like to make
these reasons clear to you.
The four distinctions in the Blessed Eucharist which I have just
named, are not divisions. It is one and the same Blessed Eucharist in
all four holy purposes. But these purposes, rightly entitled, give us a
marvelous sense of realization of the Gift of God to us in the Blessed
Eucharist. They help us to see what a favor it is from God, and what
thanks we owe God in return. The various reverential ways in which Our
Holy Mother the Church refers to the Blessed Eucharist deepen our love
for its reality.
The Sacrifice of the Mass
You may ask: Of the four assignments given the Body and Blood of
Jesus when He descends to our altars, which is the highest? I answer at
once: The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is God giving God glory. It is more
necessary, more essential, more adorable that God love God, than that I
love God, or that God love me.
The Sacrifice of the Mass is the Blessed Eucharist offered to God
immolatively. It is God loving God. It is God given to God by way of
propitiation. Nothing is, or could be, more exalted than that. We love
God most when we want God to have perfect adoration and perfect love.
That is why we are always saying in our Catholic prayers: Glory be to
the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost! As it was in the
beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.
Have you ever stopped to think what the world would be like without
the Mass? Have you realized how much we must thank God for making the
Holy Sacrifice possible to us all these years, and for giving us such
dignity when we adore?
In the Sacrifice of the Mass occurs the great mystery of
transubstantiation, when the substances of bread and wine are changed
into the substance of the Body and of the Blood of Jesus. Let us speak
of this wheat and this wine.
The earth does God a great favor by supplying Him with the materials
of transubstantiation, with the vestiges He uses in the Eucharist. Have
you ever stopped to realize that if the fields yielded no more wheat, or
the vineyards stopped distilling the liquids that become wine, there
would be no more Holy Sacrifice of the Mass? And without the Mass there
would be no Church!
When you realize the elemental innocences out of which God gives us
the Bread of Life in the Blessed Eucharist, rains have a new meaning,
vines acquire fresh value as their grapes ripen in the sun, wheat fields
assume a sudden significance, and clouds and foliage and silt and soil
are all supersubstantially associated when we see them as necessities
for the accouterments, the wrappings, of this great Gift which makes our
Holy Sacrifice, and which is the Flesh and Blood of Jesus under the
eye-likenesses of bread and wine.
Bread is a product of fields and hands. Wine is the product of hills
and feet. If Jesus did not have bread, there would be no Blessed
Eucharist. No other food could serve Christ’s sacrificial purpose with
the lightness and clarity and brilliance of wheat become bread. And it
was the sun-charged grape bunches on the sides of villages that lured
His generosity to pour Himself out in the guise of wine. This wheat and
wine came to God the Son from God the Father.
The Son thanks His Eternal
Father for them at the Offertory of the Mass. He thanks Him for all the
hosts and all the wheat fields until the end of time! What a harvest
Christ requires for His sacrificial Suppers of Love. And what a wheat
bill if God the Father were to charge the Son!
In the immediate prayer before the Consecration in the Mass, the
priest reports of Jesus: “Who the day before He suffered took bread into
His holy and venerable hands, and with eyes lifted up to Heaven, unto
Thee, God, His Almighty Father, giving thanks to Thee, He blessed it….”
What is Jesus giving thanks for in this prayer of report? Not for the
Blessed Eucharist in Real Presence as yet, because the words of
consecration have not yet occurred. It is for the bread of the Mass. It
is just for the bread! Oh, the tons, the cargoes, the ships, the fields,
the sun, the rains, the elements, the farmers, the sickles, the
scythes, and the little nuns in holy bakeries, that are required to give
us the bread for the Holy Eucharist, all down the centuries! Is not
that beautiful?
At the Sacrifice of the Mass, Jesus is not God to whom we go to
adore. That is His purpose as the Real Presence. In the Sacrifice of the
Mass Jesus is God to Whom we go to adore with. He is God Whom we give.
In the Real Presence, Jesus is the Magnum Donum, the Great Gift, given
to us. In the Sacrifice of the Mass, Jesus is the Magnum Donum, the
Great Gift, given to God the Father!
We can give God, God! We can give the Eternal Father His own Divine
Son! We can offer the Son to the Father! And this offering is the
payment for all God has given us — full price!
The Sacrifice of the Mass is not only a Gift to God. It is a
sacrifice in gift. We are sacrificing something that we give —
sacrificing something that is now ours.
The priest is asked to offer
that great gift of God to God, in terms of sacrifice and in terms of
immolation. Jesus can never die again, but He can be immolated again.
And the
immolation is complete, which is inflicted on the Body and Blood of
Jesus in the Sacrifice of the Mass.
When a priest takes bread in his hands, he has power only over the
Body of Jesus. (That the Soul and Blood and Divinity will also come
where the priest puts the Body of Jesus, is due to the inseparability of
the constituents of the God-Man forever in the place where He is.) And
when a priest takes wine in this hands, he has power only over the Blood
of Jesus.
It makes no difference whether a power is a power with words or a
power with hammer and nails. Power is judged by the effect, not by the
devices by which the effect has been achieved. The walls of Jericho were
overpowered just as much when they fell to the ground at the command of
Josue, as when they fell under the ramming of Oriental wall-bangers.
Jesus gave us in His life examples both of His power directly, and of
His power in command: directly, by driving the buyers and sellers out
to the Temple with a scourge, and by command, causing to fall on their
faces the men who came out with Judas to crucify Him. I might almost say
there is more power in the person who can bring about his purpose with a
word, than in the one who has to have a hammer and nails and violence
to help him out.
There is more execution-power in Catholic priests than there was in
the Roman soldiers who nailed Our Lord to the Cross, as far as power
goes. The soldiers could put the Body of Jesus there only once. Priests
can put the Body of Jesus there every morning; indeed, every time they
choose! That is terrific power!
In the Mass, we offer the Son back to His Eternal Father, and His
Eternal Father remembers the preciousness of this Body and Blood in
separate offering, once having seen, to Divine horror, its separateness
on Golgotha, when there was all corpse on the Cross and all blood on the
ground.
The Sacrifice of the Mass is God’s Son dying and offering Himself in
death to the Eternal Father, by way of adoration, propitiation,
thanksgiving, petition. It is God’s Son thanking His Father for the gift
of our existence, the graces given us, our Faith, the sacraments we
have received. The Sacrifice of the Mass is God’s Son pleading with the
everlasting majesty of God for the greatest and tiniest favor the priest
might have as his intention. The Mass is God’s Son mystically dying for
whatever the priest pleases.
The priest can put in the Mass, in the Commemoration of the Living,
anyone in the world he wishes to pray for. He can remember one or many
of the souls of the Faithful Departed in the Commemoration of the Dead.
The Eternal God will be immolated on the altar to thank Him for. He will
plead with His Father for whatever the priest or his people wish to
plead for.
That is great love for us on the part of Jesus, is it not?
I think you can see in the Mass the transcendence it has over the
other sacred values in the Blessed Eucharist. Constructively, that is
not necessarily so. But in the dignity of performance, there is nothing
to equal it.
The priest indicates at the foot of the altar, as the Mass begins his
own unworthiness. He confesses his sins, and he says he is unworthy to
go unto the altar of God. In the Canon of the Mass, however, the priest
prays confidently. He does not speak so much of his own lowliness, in
the Canon, because what he does now is “through Him, and with Him, and
in Him.”
At the end of the Canon, at the Little Elevation, the priest lifts the Host and the Chalice to God the Father, and he says:
Through Him, and with Him, and in Him, be unto Thee, O God the Father
Almighty, in the unity of the Holy Ghost, all honor and glory, world
without end. Amen.
Nothing more than this can God the Father ever ask from this world.
It is impossible for God to receive any more than to have His own Divine
Son given to Him in the Sacrifice of the Mass. When that happens, well,
little bell, might you ring; well, little altar boy, mighty you wear a
white surplice; well, priest, might you bear a cross on your vestments!
The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is a Divine Giver giving a Divine Gift to a Divine Recipient. It is God giving God to God!
The Real Presence
The Real Presence is the second great value of the Blessed Eucharist. It must not be confused with God’s immensity.
As you know, God is present to all things. God is omnipresent. But
that is not what we mean by the Real Presence. God’s omnipresence
concerns the necessity of His being present to every created thing for
its sake, so that it can continue to be and to act. Before the words of
consecration, which put God in the Host, God is in the host by
omnipresence. But you cannot, before the words of consecration, say of
the host, “This is God.” Omnipresence means “God is here,” Real Presence
means “God is this!”
Let me repeat. Were I to lift up a host, if I had one in my hand, I
could say, “God is here,” because God is everywhere. But I could not say
of that host, “This is God” After the Consecration, however, I can say
of the Host, “This is God!” And I could put that Host in the ciborium,
lock Him in the tabernacle, put Him in a pyx. We can adore that Host.
Anything you could say about a thing present, God is submitted to, by
the Real Presence in the Blessed Eucharist. If you open the door and
put Him in the tabernacle, into the tabernacle He goes. It does not make
the slightest difference that He was there by omnipresence. He is now
there in space relation.. The unlocated in now located. The supralocal
is not local.
“This is My Body:” “This is the Chalice of My Blood.” Both the
consecrating words of the host and the chalice begin with that real,
presence-inflicting word, “This”.
What is Our Lord’s value to us in Real Presence — apart from His
other beautiful benefits in graces in the Blessed Eucharist? Well, we
now have a place to which we can go, in the presence of which we can say
we are, in the direction of which we can bow our heads and fold our
hands, to which we can sing our songs, strew our flowers, light out
lights, shake our incense; for which we can build our cathedral, top it
with a cross, stain-glass it with our windows, give it a center aisle
that leads down to the Real Presence, before which we can genuflect. The
Real Presence makes our bodies entitled to the prerogatives of
adoration.
Were you just looking for God’s omnipresence and not Real Presence,
His omnipresence — His being everywhere — would impress you more in the
ocean if you lived on the shore, in the mountain if you lived inland, in
the field if you were a farmer, or in the forest if you were a timber
man. You would give Him an igloo if you were an Eskimo, a hut if you
were a native at the Equator, a white meetinghouse if you were a New
England Congregationalist, and none would ever house Him at all.
But once you get “This” — a placeable, liftable, carryable,
locateable Jesus — you have the Real Presence.
In the adorational life
of the Church, the Real Presence elicits from us those beautiful human
observances, Eucharistic observances, which are sheerly adorational:
Benediction, Exposition, processions, the little sanctuary lamp burning
when there is no Mass and no communicant at the altar rail. It is what
we raise our hats to, when we go by the Church. Its very “thereness” is
our comfort, if we sleep in a town where It is, on a street where It is,
or, favor beyond all favors, in a religious house where It is!
I could stay on that for a long time. The Curé of Ars in one of his
simple sermons (which the proud French intellectuals never noticed were
so deeply theological), in his saintly, priestly appreciation of the
Real Presence, put it beautifully, challengingly, and theologically —
for all he put it bluntly in peasant utterance. He said, about the Real
Presence, “If I place Him on the right, He stays there; if I place Him
on the left, He stays there; and if I drop Him on the floor (God help
me), He stays on the floor.”
That is the first point about the Real Presence in the Blessed
Eucharist. You can meditate on that. You can realize how wonderful it is
to have God “This”; to have God contained! God in a tabernacle, in a
pyx, in a priest’s pocket, in a child’s mouth. God in a room, God before
lights!
I shall never forget one night in England when I brought the Holy
Eucharist to a lady who was dying. She was unconscious. She could not go
to Confession. She could not receive Our Lord. Her sister was with her,
and we stayed for many hours and prayed. I had placed the pyx
containing the Blessed Eucharist on the mantelpiece. The sister said,
“Would you put it on her heart?”
“That is a beautiful idea,” I said, and I put the pyx on her heart.
While she was unconscious, lying there and breathing up and down, Our
Lord had a little, tiny Lake-of-Galilee ride on a little stormy breast,
and He was not a bit afraid, not even of falling over to the side. All
He was there was the Real Presence! There was no consciousness in His
sick old child to know that He had come from the Holy Sacrifice of the
Mass, or that He could be the Blessed sacrament or Holy Communion, if
called upon.
In Real Presence, the Blessed Eucharist is God at a terminal, instead
of God beyond the stars, of God beyond the stratosphere, or God
light-years away. It is God beside a wax light, beside a tabernacle
lamp. One little match-lit star in a dark sanctuary will show you were
God is in Real Presence.
I say It is a terminal, a terminus ad quem. You have arrived! This is
God! You need go no further to find either Jesus, or, by virtue of the
presence of Jesus, God the Father, or God the Holy Spirit — or God’s
Mother, or His Angels, Archangels, Principalities, Powers, Virtues,
Dominions, Thrones, Cherubim and Seraphim! They are all here! However
they relate themselves to this space, I do not know, but around this
space, in which is contained the Real Presence, they are crowded —
everyone trying to enter the circle of that little Host’s dislocation of
the air.
The Real Presence is God waiting for attention — or inattention! Most
of the time, alas, He is getting no attention. If you want an example
of unselfishness, think — not of how many times He has companionship —
but of the hours, and hours, and hours that He has none, at least of our
kind of companionship, the kind of companionship which He was seeking
when He came.
I remember a man telling me one day in New York (and I know the same
thing is true here in Boston) of the number of occasions you can go into
church, even in the daytime, and for weary hour upon weary hour there
will be only one or two people in church. Sometimes there will be nobody
but yourself. It is very easy to find an empty church during the day,
in large cities. Outside the church, there will be automobiles,
newsboys, traffic, business crowds, parades, reviews, policemen, neon
lights — everything! And inside, is God: ignored.
You may say, “Is Jesus hurt at being ignored?” Let me tell you a secret.
Jesus is hurt in the Blessed Eucharist when we do not come to visit
Him and adore Him as our God and our King. He is not hurt in His hands
or His feet, or in His back once so scourged with ropes, or His head,
once so crowned with thorns. He is hurt in His heart. That was precisely
what He came to say to Saint Margaret Mary, the great apostle of the
Sacred Heart.
Jesus came to tell Saint Margaret Mary that His heart had been hurt,
not by neglect during the slow three hours on Calvary on Good Friday
afternoon, but by the long, long neglect of centuries in the tabernacles
of our churches: Friday, Saturday, Sunday and every day of the week,
week of the month, month of the year.
If you sometimes wonder why the Sacred Heart was so daring as to
unbare His breast at Paray-le-Monial to Margaret Mary, a little nun who
came to visit Him in prayer, and to let her see, through the bones and
the flesh, the beat of His heart; — and if you sometimes wonder why He
asked that a picture of Himself with heart exposed be placed in every
Catholic home — know that Jesus wished to show the one part of Him that
the rope had not reached in the scourging, or the crown of thorns had
not pierced when He was exposed to ridicule and mocked as a King.
The
one part of Him the nails did not penetrate. The one part of Him they
forgot to wound when He was alive, and which the soldier’s spear pierced
when the mind and soul of Jesus had gone, and the heart of Jesus was
left to the silent entombment of His breast.
Saint Margaret Mary saw the incessant centuries of heartbeat of the
Sacred Heart of Jesus — not in Galilee, not in Judea, not even in His
glory in Heaven — but in the hiddenness and the lowliness of our
tabernacles.
Do you wish to let me tell you, in one final doctrinal affirmation,
what it was that forged the Eucharist? The Blessed Eucharist, which was
to be God’s atonement to God in the Mass, God’s Presence in our
tabernacles, God’s divinization of our spirits in the Blessed Sacrament,
and God’s incorporation into Himself of us in Holy Communion?
If you
wish to know what it was in Jesus that thought to plunge Himself, in His
divine and human majesty, into the semblance of wheat and wine and
leave Himself there for us to adore and love until His second coming on
the last day, I will tell you it was: — the Sacred Heart of Jesus. From
the shedding of His blood, came our redemption. From the beating of His
hear in love for us, came the Blessed Eucharist.
The Blessed Eucharist was too great a folly for the mind of Jesus to
have thought of, all alone. The Blessed Eucharist was the folly of His
heart. The folly of Love.
The one who knew that best, at the Last Supper, was John, the Beloved
Disciple. John paid tribute to the Jesus Who gave us the Blessed
Eucharist by resting his head on the breast of the Lord.
And now you know that it does hurt the heart of Jesus to be ignored and neglected in the Blessed Eucharist.
Faith is not merely an inner sense. It is an outward act — an
adoration, an opening of the mouth, an assent. How can I bring home to
you the enormity of the Gift of God to us in His Presence upon our
altars?
The Real Presence is the Incarnational overture of the Eternity of
God. So eternal is this beautiful Presence, so does It transcend all
time, that we say about Jesus, “Jesus Christ, yesterday, today, and the
same forever.”
God forever in eternity is wonderful to think about. But God, never
absent from our world since the night of the Last Supper, that is the
ineffable thing! And this, despite the fact that His Presence depends on
the frailties of wheat, of a host, of a bakery, of a priest’s hands —
the frailty of love! If that is not a thunderous edition of the Eternity
of God, I do not know what is.
In the Host, we have the Eternity of Jesus given to us humanly to
adore. He is an Eternal Person. His flesh is lifted to the power and the
grandeur and the dignity of that Eternal Person. The whole Beatific
Vision is contained on our altars! The Father and the Holy Spirit have
to be there with Jesus, personally, because where the Son is, the Father
must be. And where the Father and the Son are, the Holy Spirit must be.
And so, all Eternity is there!
Was is not Saint Anthony the Abbot who said that one of the surest
ways to drive out the devil is by watches and vigils? The vigil of all
vigils is the vigil before the Presence of Jesus. When He decided
between two saints at work — between Martha busy at many things and Mary
sitting at His feet —
Jesus said: “Mary hath chosen the best part,
which shall not be taken away from her.” (Luke 10:42.)
Nothing you could possibly do by way of activity: nursing, social
work, slum clearance, nothing you could do by way of anything could
equal your being in the Presence of Jesus in the Blessed Eucharist.
O Everlasting, O Holy God! Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus! Dominus Deus Sabaoth! O, Holy, Holy, Holy!
The Blessed Sacrament
The third purpose to which the Blessed Eucharist is put, is to be the Blessed Sacrament.
The Blessed Sacrament is not the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of
Our Lord, Jesus Christ without any further qualification. it is the
Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Our Lord, Jesus Christ, under the
species of bread and wine — under the accidents of bread and wine, the
appearances of bread and wine. If the accidents of bread and wine are
missing, you have no Blessed Sacrament.
Were Jesus to strip Himself of the outward appearance of the bread or
the outward appearance of the wine and walk down from the altar, you
would have Him really present to you, but you would have no guise, no
medium, for the Blessed Sacrament.
What is the purpose of the Blessed Sacrament — to be the Real
Presence? No! To be an offering to God for your salvation, or for the
good of the Church, or the interest of your friends in eternity? No!
That is a purpose of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.
The purpose of the Blessed Sacrament is to move into an action which
will divinize us. The Blessed sacrament is Pure Act in action in the
created order. There is no action in the created order which of itself
will divinize us. There is no action which of its intrinsic worth makes
Pure Act act upon us. There always has to be covenant and institution.
As the Blessed Sacrament, the Blessed Eucharist moves over and takes its
part along with six other outward signs which Christ, for His own
purpose and by reason of His own choice, made Sacraments.
The Blessed Sacrament in action is an outward sign attached to which,
in time, the Eternal nature of God flows into us and divinizes us. The
Blessed Sacrament in action is not just the Blessed Eucharist there on
the altar — the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Our Lord, Jesus
Christ, under the appearances of bread and wine in repose. The Blessed
Sacrament in action is: the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Our Lord,
Jesus Christ, under the appearances of bread and wine, eaten or drunk by
us!
Because it is so important for you to understand the innocent
overture of God fully, let me repeat it all to you again: The Blessed
Eucharist is a sacrament which contains the Body, Blood, Soul and
Divinity of Our Lord, Jesus Christ, under the appearances of bread and
wine. If those species of bread and wine are not there, it is not the
Blessed Sacrament, and it can do no sacramental work. If Our Lord walked
into this room tonight, he would not be a sacrament — even if He took
us in His arms, or washed our feet. It would be beautiful to have Him
here. It would be beautiful to be in His presence, and it would be
marvelous to listen to Him and to talk to Him. He would speak to us out
of two depths — out of time and out of eternity.
But He would not be a sacrament. Jesus in sacrament is the Body,
Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ under the species of bread and
wine. If you want to find out what is the indispensable, added thing
that makes the Incarnate Second Person of the Blessed Trinity a
sacrament, it is the species of bread and wine. Take them away, and
there is no sacrament.
Those little species of bread and wine are things taken out of our
order. That white look in the bread, that red look in the wine — that
wheat taste and that wine taste — were there before Jesus came. Jesus
made use of them. Whenever He speaks about the divinization of us, Jesus
says, “Whoever eateth this bread and drinketh this wine. . .”
I am divinized by reason of the fact that two little local things —
bread and wine — have surrendered their species to the Body and Blood of
Jesus, so that I can swallow them; so that I can eat His Body and drink
His Blood, in order to have life in me; in order to be divinized!
The individuating sacramental note in the Eucharist is the species of
bread and wine. They give us the tangible — touching Immensity! The
dimensioned — touching the boundless depths of God! Do you see that?
I would say in the Real Presence, that it is eternity coming down to
time; and in the Blessed Sacrament, that it is time going back to
eternity. The Blessed Sacrament is time dealing out eternity. It is
helplessness dealing out power. It is finiteness dealing out infinity!
Holy Communion
And now I shall go on to the last purpose of the Blessed Eucharist: to Holy Communion.
Holy Communion is Jesus, not giving, but taking me in.
When we receive the Host, — the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of
Jesus Christ — and swallow It, we are divinized because to that act is
attached the increasing of sanctifying grace in our souls. When this
Blessed Eucharist comes into our poor bodies as sacrament, we know that
immediately all our powers move over to deal with It as food. The
nutritive parts of us are very innocent. They do not know how deeply
faith has taken hold of the communicant!
And so, when the Blessed Eucharist goes down into our stomach and our
digestive processes move over and attack It, as if it were ordinary
food, as far as species go, it is child’s play. Our powers of
assimilation have all the devices for dealing with what rests like
bread, folds up like bread, and seems to decompose like bread.
So, our
powers of assimilation attack the species, and in ten minutes the
species are destroyed. Because the Blessed Eucharist in Sacrament is the
Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Our Lord, Jesus Christ, plus the
species of bread and wine, when the species are gone, there is no more
Blessed Sacrament.
But there is Holy Communion.
All the Blessed Sacrament asks is that it be an action — that it be
the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Our Lord, Jesus Christ, plus the
species of bread, traveling into our bodies. Its sacrament work is ever
the minute It reaches our stomachs. Holy Communion work then takes over.
In the Blessed Sacrament, I have taken in Jesus. In Holy Communion, Jesus takes in me.
Holy Communion is Jesus incorporating me into Himself. Jesus, as you
know, has two natures, the nature of God and the nature of man. And we,
it seems, have also to be little images of that hypostatic union, that
union of Christ’s two natures, when we move into eternity. We have to
have both a divine and a human phase to us. We must be both God and man —
God by adoption and man by incorporation with Jesus. We must be other
Christs!
Let me call the Sacrifice of the Mass, “when God meets God,” and let
me call Holy Communion, “when Man meets man.” The Man is the God-Man.
Holy Communion is the incorporation of my heart, my blood, my veins, my
feet, my hands — everything, every part of me — into the Jesus of the
Incarnation.
By way of the Blessed Sacrament, Jesus makes divine entrance into my
soul. By way of Holy Communion, Jesus makes my body one with His. How do
you like that? “The Father and I are one; and you and I are one. I am
the Vine and you are the branches. Abide in Me, and I in you. . . .”
It is a terrible thing that some Catholics who go to Mass do not
receive Holy Communion. In the early ages of the Church, when martyrs
were made, holy Communion was the life of the Christians.
Even little
babies received a drop of the Precious Blood in their mouths!
Saint John Chrysostom said, in the fourth century, “Do you know how
low the Faith has fallen? Some people come to Mass and do not receive
the Holy Eucharist!”
The Blessed Eucharist is the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus
Christ under the sacramental appearances of bread and wine. Let us now
see how the Divinity is hidden in this great gift of God to man.
Before Our Lord went over to die on Golgotha, he offered, at the Last
Supper on Holy Thursday night, the first Sacrifice of the Mass. When
Jesus said, “This is My Body” and “This is My Blood,” His Body, Blood,
Soul and Divinity replaced the substance of the bread and the substance
of the wine, although the appearances of both remained.
In the Host sense — in the material order, that is — it is surprising
and beautiful that the Body, Blood and Soul of Jesus could be hidden
under the species of bread and wine. But what takes your heart away, and
makes your mind almost die in adoration is how the Godhead could be
there! After all, the human nature of Our Lord has a limited space. But
for Infinity to become so finite, for Omnipotence to become so helpless .
. . !
When you want to meditate on how powerful God is in His effects in
the world — when you want examples of His omnipotence — you think of His
mountains, rivers, oceans, planets, meteors, all His great physical
forces. They give you some idea of His Divine majesty. Now, try to
consider what would be the smallest, tiniest thing in which His
omnipotence could be hidden? I think any little bug or worm would be
more potent than a frail piece of bread, barely sticking together, and
so fragile that it is the easiest thing in the world to break it.
I cannot imagine anything more frail than a host in the order of
solid, nor anything more frail that wine in the order of liquid. I
cannot imagine God going any lower in the material order than into these
two things. “Adoro Te Devote,” says Saint Thomas Aquinas, in his hymn
to the Holy Eucharist. “I adore Thee devoutly, Oh buried Godhead!”
On Golgotha, Jesus Christ died once, and He will never die again. On
Golgotha, Jesus died in his manhood. At the Last Supper, the night
before Golgotha, Jesus died mystically, in his Godhead. The Godhead, as
we know, of course, can never die, even once, and since a “mystical
death” might be misunderstood, let us call that which befell the
Divinity of Our Lord at the Last Supper, what Saint Thomas called it.
Let us call it a burial.
Let us see what happened in that burial at the Last Supper, that
burial which seemed so easy. “This is my Body,” Our Lord said. “This is
My Blood. Do this in commemoration of Me.”
“Do this in commemoration of Me” meant that every man at that table
was given the power to do what Jesus did! Jesus squandered Himself for
us in His humanity, on the Cross. But Good God! have you ever seen such
helplessness as that which Jesus inflicted on Himself when He handed His
very power in the Godhead over to the men who were His followers? That
power meant a death for the Body of Jesus. And that power meant a burial
for the Godhead!
Into such a state of summons and call, into such bondage and such
helplessness did God go, that for nineteen-hundred odd years, wherever
there has been in the world a man commissioned by Holy Orders to say:
“This is My Body” and “This is My Blood,” all the brightness of God, all
the power and splendor and glory, all His Divinity, must hide in the
little round whiteness of a Host.
The priest who says “This is My Body” and “This is My Blood” does not
even have to have the Faith! He does not even have to have love! All he
has to have is will and intent. He can be a schismatic, or a priest who
just goes through the Mass perfunctorily. He can be a cold show-off,
much more interested in his own sermon and his own interests.
But, once he is ordained, every single time a priest says, “This is
My Body” and “This is My Blood,” the Godhead will come. It will never
fail — no matter how sinful the priest may be, no matter how much he has
crucified Christ on different scores — such as belittling His Mother.
That which is food, in his hands can become the Body and Blood of
Christ. The priest may never refer to the Blessed Eucharist in his
conversations for the rest of the day. He may go off and lunch and talk
with heretics and infidels, who deny and hate Jesus Christ. But once the
priest says the words of consecration, the Godhead will come.
If the little Host should fall on the floor and the priest did not
notice It, the eternal and everlasting power of God would be there on
the floor!
Good God, what a thought there is in the Blessed Eucharist! When you
know it is God! Oh, the panoply of Its power, and the richness of Its
love!
At night, when the sexton blows out the candles and when all the
lights are quenched, you would think that the Godhead would pull away.
There is no purpose for being there, there is no one present to love It.
But no, It abides all through the night, all through the lonely night,
in the tabernacle. So faithful has been the Godhead to the burial
bequeathed to It in the Blessed Eucharist that in every single city in
the United States, in this unconverted country of ours, It is there in
Its place. Think of New York City, and Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. God in
Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. President Truman or General Eisenhower rides
by, in a parade. General MacArthur goes by.
The Ambassador from France
goes by. And never once does God get an acknowledgment from any of these
men being honored, or from their followers, or from the people lining
the street, watching them go by!
Think of Saint Paul’s Church, across the street from us, and the
steady stream of scoffing students and sceptical professors passing all
day long, to and from Harvard classrooms. The only worshipper in the
church is probably some sleepy old man, saying his beads in front of the
Blessed Eucharist.
You can never destroy God.
But you can snub Him. God’s loneliness in
the tabernacles of the world is enough to break one’s heart. All the
display that sometimes goes on in the sacristies, with how little real
love of the Faith! The exhibitions of reverence — and the cold, tepid
hearts! Think of all the years when people were so little mindful of the
great Life-giving powers of the Blessed Eucharist that they received It
only once a year! Other things were more important: painting,
sculpture, architecture, science, education, culture.
You feel like saying: “This is too much. Why not call off this covenant — this Sacrament?”
There is a special censure reserved to the Holy Father for those who
desecrate the Sacred Species. The fact that that censure is there
indicates that the sin of desecration must have been committed, and more
than once. In the recent Spanish Civil War, the first thing the Spanish
Communists did was to desecrate the Blessed Sacrament.
It is true,
Jesus can no longer receive any physical injury, nor is it possible to
unseat Him as the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. But oh! what a
return for Love!
The work of our life as Catholics is to be thinking, not of the
heights of God only, but of the depths and the lowliness to which He,
the ineffable God, has plunged Himself for our love. What a reparation
and what a delight is there possible in the love of the Blessed
Eucharist!
That would be our great opportunity — to love the Blessed Eucharist.
Why does Jesus endure whole decades of being unloved? Why does He
come, morning after morning, in the Mass, with no appreciation in those
to whom He comes, of the majesty of What is in their midst? Why?
Jesus would do it through a whole century for the sake of the one boy
or girl who will appreciate Him. He would rather be snubbed for a
century than miss the love that might await Him when the century is
finished. He would do it for the one bowed head, for the one adorational
heart.
Jesus feels Himself repaid in His saints. They are worth the bounty,
the abandon, the Divine recklessness, the absolute folly of giving
Himself into our frail substance by way of food and drink.
By way of, the easily spilled cup! The easily broken bread!
