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Eucharist / Holy Mass
Eucharist / Holy Mass
Some Resources on Eucharist
Some Resources on Eucharist
140+ Articles on Eucharist
140+ Articles on Eucharist
Bread of Life - The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass 2 Apologetics
Circular Letter to Bishops on the Bread and Wine for the Eucharist
Decree on the Gift of an Indulgence during the 'Year of the Eucharist'
Denial of the Eucharist to Pro-Abortion Catholic Politicians: A Canonical Case Study
Devotion to the Holy Eucharist Advances Devotion to Jesus' Person
Draw Light and Strength for Christian Life from the Eucharist
Eucharist And Confession: Set Out Anew From God's Mercy To Rediscover Priestly Identity
Eucharist Renews Laity's Mission To Consecrate The World, The
Gift of Life, Gift Eternal: The Most Holy Eucharist and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass
Letter to Priests on the Eucharist and Pastoral Care of Children
Prayer and Song for Forty-Seventh International Eucharistic Congress
Saint John Vianney - On the Eucharist
Teachings of the Saints, Popes, The Catechism, The Bible etc.
The Eucharist a Reenactment of the Entire Opus Redemptionis: Witness of the Fathers
The Eucharist Inspires Forgiveness and Encounter with Others
The Eucharist, the Life of Christ in Our Lives: Spiritual Worship and Authentic Adoration
The Eucharist: Source and Summit of the Life and Mission of the Church
The Shape, Significance and Ecclesial Impact of Eucharistic Congresses
Worthy to Receive the Lamb: Catholics in Political Life and the Reception of Holy Communion
Videos on Eucharist
Videos on Eucharist
The Roman Missal 27 videos
75 Lectures on Eucharist
75 Lectures on Eucharist
75 Lectures on Eucharist
75 Lectures on Eucharist
(From Father John A. Hardon, S.J.)
When we speak of the Holy Eucharist, we can mean the Eucharistic Liturgy or the Mass; we can mean Holy Communion as the sacrament of the Lord; or we can mean the Real Presence of Christ…we concentrate on the third of these aspects, namely, the Eucharist as the abiding presence of Jesus Christ on our altars after the Sacrifice of the Mass is over and between receptions of Holy Communion.
The Real Presence is logically prior to the Eucharist as Sacrifice and Communion. The reason is obvious. Christ must first be really present on earth in the Eucharist, before we can intelligently speak of His offering Himself in the Mass and coming to us in Communion.
The center of the whole Catholic liturgy is the Eucharist. The Eucharist is most important in the life of the Church because it is Jesus Christ. It is the incarnation continued in space and time. The other sacraments and all the Church's ministries and apostolates are directed toward the Eucharist.
We do not usually associate Easter and the Holy Eucharist. But we should. Our faith tells us that God became man in order that, by His death on the Cross, He might redeem the world. But this same faith tells us that, when Christ died on Calvary, the Church came into existence. We may therefore say that we were delivered from sin by the Savior's death, and receive the blessings of His grace through the Mystical Body which came into being the moment Jesus expired on Good Friday.
When the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century defined the meaning of the Eucharist, it declared that "the Body and Blood, together with the Soul and Divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, and therefore the whole Christ, is truly, really and substantially contained in the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist."
Our focus will be on what we mean when we say the Sacred Heart is the Holy Eucharist. Then, we shall discuss why this is so and how we can put Sacred Heart devotion into practice.
The most important duty we have in life as believing Catholics is to understand what we believe. Not to understand what we are supposed to believe is to invite the evil spirit to rob us of the faith we once possessed.
One of the surprises of the church's teachings since the Second Vatican Council is its strong emphasis on devotion to the Real Presence. Worship of the Holy Eucharist, not only during Mass or when receiving Holy Communion but as reserved on the altar, has been part of Catholic life and practice since the earliest centuries.
Although I have said this before, I wish to emphasize that what I have been doing in these teleconferences, and surely in today's, is carrying out an explicit order of Pope John Paul II. The order is to do everything in my power to restore faith in the Real Presence where it has been lost. Strengthen that faith where it is weak. In the plainest language, Pope John Paul II declares, I repeat, unless faith in the Real Presence is strong, stronger than it is now, I fear for the survival of the Catholic Church in many dioceses in the United States.
My purpose will be to defend the following thesis: that the Holy Eucharist is Jesus Christ, who is in the Blessed Sacrament both as Reality and as Presence. He is in the Eucharist as Reality because the Eucharist is Jesus Christ. He is in the Eucharist as Presence because through the Eucharist He affects us and we are in contact with Him - depending on our faith and devotion to the Savior living really in our midst.
Hope in general is the confident desire of obtaining some future good that is difficult to obtain…Christ gave us the Real Presence so we might profess our hope in Him as our final destiny.
The most popular book in the world, after the Bible, is The Imitation of Christ. Since it was published in the early fifteenth century, it has deeply influenced the spirituality of millions of believing Christians. Its basic theme is that, since Jesus Christ is true God and true man, by imitating Christ as man, we become more and more like Christ, who is God.
The Eucharist as the Real Presence is the touchstone of sanctity. As evidence of this fact we have the witness of the saints who, when they speak or write about the power of the Blessed Sacrament to sanctify, seem to be positively extreme in their claims about what the Real Presence can achieve in making a sinful person holy.
This, then, is an article of our undivided and immutable Catholic faith: the Holy Eucharist is Christ. He is present in the fullness of His divine nature and in the fullness of everything that makes Him a human being. As Catholics, we believe that there is absolutely no difference—none whatever—between Jesus in the Eucharist and Jesus, as we profess in the Creed, at the right hand of His heavenly Father.
We live out the mystery of Christ's resurrection by our devotion to the Eucharist...because the Holy Eucharist is the Risen Christ…now on earth in our midst.
We know that in Sacred Writing and in the teachings of the Church, the Mass has acquired a variety of synonymous names. It is called the Eucharistic Sacrifice, the Eucharistic Liturgy, or simply, the Liturgy; it is the Eucharistic celebration, the Holy Sacrifice, or the Sacrifice of the Altar. All of this reflects the richness of mystery revealed to us by Christ when He instituted the Mass on the night before He died. It also indicates that there has been a remarkable development of doctrine regarding the Mass.
The phenomenal growth of devotion to the Real Presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist has puzzled not a few sincere people. Nocturnal Adoration societies, Perpetual Adoration groups, national associations of the faithful promoting organized visits to the Blessed Sacrament, Holy Hours before the tabernacle, monthly, weekly and even daily exposition of the Eucharist in churches and chapels, in one country after another, have become commonplace. … It is authentic Catholic doctrine and it rests on the unchangeable truth of our revealed faith. But it needs to be explained, and the explanation is a classic example of what we call development of doctrine.
104. Against what does Pope Paul VI especially warn the bishops? He warns them to be perfectly loyal to the teaching of Christ on the Real Presence and to promote tirelessly the worship of Jesus Christ who is living among us in the Blessed Sacrament. (MF 75)
For if the sacred liturgy holds the first place in the life of the Church, the Eucharistic Mystery stands at the heart and center of the liturgy, since it is the font of life by which we are cleansed and strengthened to live not for ourselves but for God, and to be united in love among ourselves.
As we reflected on the power of the Eucharist to achieve miracles, we kept insisting that these miracles will be performed by Our Lord only if we believe.
We know adoration is due to God alone because He alone is worthy of veneration as the source and destiny of our being. We have also seen that since God became man in the Person of Jesus Christ, our adoration of Jesus is really the adoration of God in human form. Since Christ in the Blessed Sacrament is here on earth in the fullness of His Divinity united with the humanity He received from Mary, we are to adore Him in the Holy Eucharist. This is the highest form of worship we can render to God and the most powerful source of grace we have on earth in our journey to a heavenly eternity. On all these counts, the Blessed Virgin is our model of what our adoration of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament should be.
My purpose in this conference will be twofold: first to identify and explain what the Catholic Church understands by the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and then to see how basic to Protestantism is the denial of the Real Presence.
Somewhere near the center of the crisis in the Catholic Church today is confusion about the meaning of the Real Presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist. Pope Paul VI recognized this crisis before the close of the Second Vatican Council. He identified the two principal errors about the Real Presence that were already current in his day.
Out of what is becoming a Eucharistic library of the Pope's teaching, I wish to concentrate on what he says in his first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis. My plan is to explain what the Holy Father's teaching on the Eucharist in this document means, while drawing on his other writings to fill out the explanation.
Of the many subjects that we could talk about on Christmas day, I thought the most appropriate would be to speak on Christmas and the Eucharist. There are many aspects to their relationship, but I believe that there are mainly three: (1) both Christmas and the Eucharist are facts; (2) both reveal a mystery; and (3) both are meant to teach us a profound and not easily learned lesson.
Does anyone doubt that America needs to be converted? When the Holy Father spoke to the youth in Denver in 1993, his urgent theme was to pray that America might not lose its soul. The soul of America is Christianity. Christianity is the principle of our national life. As our nation becomes increasingly de-christianized, it loses more and more of its source of vitality. Unless the moral disease is cured, America as the nation we still call the United States, will disappear.
Faith therefore in the Holy Eucharist is THE TEST of whether a person is a Catholic or not. And no one cheats here because God knows whether a person believes or not. Given this foundation, the faith in the Holy Eucharist is the test of being a true Catholic.
If there is one mystery of our Faith that is being widely challenged today it is the Real Presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. Pope John Paul II is deeply concerned about this weakening of belief in the cardinal truth of Catholic Christianity.
Let us focus on two features of this mystery: first reflecting upon the Eucharist as Reality and secondly as Presence. What is this Reality to which the Church strongly directs our attention?…This Reality is God present in a different special way. The essence of what we believe here is that God is present as man. The Eucharist began with the Incarnation, in the womb of Mary. Except for her there would be no Jesus and without Him there is no reality to speak of, in the Eucharist. The Eucharist is unqualifyingly Jesus Christ!
The moment we say that the Eucharist is the source and summit of the Christian life, we are faced with an avalanche of ideas that contradict this statement. It was this concern about the Eucharistic errors in our day that occasioned Pope Paul VI to issue his historic encyclical Mysterium Fidei, the Mystery of Faith, during the Second Vatican Council. The pope foresaw two major errors which threatened the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.
The worship and custody of the Holy Eucharist, independently of Mass and Holy Communion, can be traced to post-apostolic times. St. Justin, writing in his Apology around the year 150, says that deacons were appointed to carry the Blessed Sacrament to those who were absent from the liturgy. The young St. Tarsisius was taken captive and put to death while carrying the consecrated Species on his person.
The Eucharistic crusade is a special part of the Apostleship of Prayer. It concentrates on the spiritual and doctrinal formation of children and adolescence. Through the Eucharistic crusade young people are prepared to live an above ordinary Christian life and become trained in the apostolic spirit of bringing others to know and love Jesus Christ.
Our conference this evening is on the Eucharist as communion and sacrament. There is generally no difficulty in speaking about the Eucharist as Sacrament. In fact, that’s the way most Catholics understand the Eucharist. However, our focus is more specific. We wish to explore how the Holy Eucharist is a sacrament three times over as present sacrament, as communion sacrament, and as sacrifice sacrament. Tonight’s focus is on the Holy Eucharist as communion sacrament.
My plan is to cover three areas of the relationship between Mary and the Eucharist, by making three statements of our Catholic faith, and then proceeding to prove each in sequence. First statement: "Without the Blessed Virgin, we would not have the Holy Eucharist." Second statement: "Without the Eucharist, we could not now adore on earth, Jesus Christ, the Son of God who became the Son of Mary." Third statement: "From the Eucharist we obtain the grace we need to become more and more like the Immaculate Virgin Mary and more and more loving like the loving Heart of Mary."
Shortly before his elevation to the Pontificate, Cardinal Pacelli was commissioned by Pius XI to preside at the International Eucharistic Congress in Budapest in 1938. In the opening address on May 25, he exhorted the assembled multitude to cultivate their faith in the Blessed Sacrament with as much devotion as they would give to the study of Christ Himself, because the Eucharist, he told them, is Christ. "It is that unsearchable mystery by which we believe that the earthly life of Christ our Redeemer, though apparently closed at His Ascension into heaven, still goes on and will go on until the end of time. It is nothing less than the invisible continuation now of His visible presence in times past."
The phenomenal growth of Eucharistic adoration and worship in the Catholic Church stands to reason. Once the faithful realized who is on earth, no less than He was in first century Palestine, it is no wonder that those who believe will flock to be in His presence, to honor and thank Him as their God, and to ask Him for the graces they so desperately need. Experience shows that as a parish or a diocese, or a country develops its worship of Christ in the Holy Eucharist, the life of the people wonderfully improves. Why not? It is the same Jesus who worked miracles during His visible stay on earth. He promised to work even greater miracles, mainly through the Blessed Sacrament, for those who believe.
On Holy Thursday night, Jesus did three things: He changed the common elements of bread and wine into His own living Body and Blood. He offered His human life to His heavenly Father, to be accomplished on Calvary, when He would bleed to death in order to restore eternal life to a fallen human family. He gave the disciples His flesh to eat and His blood to drink in order to sustain them in His grace and raise them up on the last day. Then Jesus did one more thing. He ordained His apostles to the priesthood and thus gave them and their successors the power to continue doing what He had done — until the end of time.
This, then, is my principal message to you today. Train the Eucharistic faith of young Catholics today to become the living martyrs of Christ in the next century.…Christ needs martyrs who are willing to shed their blood, if need be, and who do shed their acceptance by the world, out of loyalty to Jesus Christ.
The Eucharist is the center of Christianity. To understand the Eucharist is to begin to understand why God became man in the person of Jesus Christ.
The Fathers of the early Church defends with vigor the permanence of the Real Presence. Already in the second century the faithful frequently carried the Holy Eucharist with them to their homes.
The Catholic faith cannot just be believed to be retained. It must be understood. There is no option. We so frequently, and correctly, insist on developing the virtues of patience, charity, chastity, humility and obedience. But the one virtue upon which all the other virtues depend is faith. And it is so important to remember this: we believe with the intellect. Either our minds are thoroughly convinced and our conviction keeps growing with increased intelligibility or the inevitable happens — not only will the other virtues weaken or be lost, but faith itself will disappear. That is why the strength of the Catholic Church in any period of her history depends on the depth professed Catholics understand the faith.
As the religion of history, Christianity has two levels of existence, its past and it’s present.
But whatever else we have learned by now, it ought to be the constancy and stability of Catholic doctrine on the Real Presence. We should also begin to see how any tampering with the Church’s Eucharistic doctrine is tampering with the foundations of Catholic Christianity. The Church’s strength lies in her consistency of teaching on the Real Presence. Yet as we saw, and will continue to see, this constancy of doctrine in teaching what Christ had revealed at the Last Supper and the never waning faith in the Real Presence is a single principle reason for the stability and unity of the Catholic Church.
The main source of information is found in the Council of Trent, which met for 18 years from 1545 to 1563. During these sessions, the Council issued three extensive documents on the Holy Eucharist in this order: on the Real Presence (October 11, 1551), on the Holy Communion (July 16, 1562), and on the Sacrifice of the Mass (September 17, 1562).
By the late eighteenth century, throughout the nineteenth century and especially in our own twentieth century, forces hostile to Catholic Christianity became more organized, more effective, and more devastating than ever before. I believe these forces can be reduced to two: modernism and secularism.
To guide us through this meditation, we will address three questions: What is a sacrament? How is the Holy Eucharist a sacrament? And, why is the Holy Eucharist a sacrament?
Note: A Eucharistic Retreat - Meditation #7 - Not Available
There is generally no difficulty speaking about Holy Eucharist as Communion Sacrament. In fact, this is the most common way most Catholics think of Holy Eucharist. However, our perspective will be more specific. We will reflect on the meaning of Holy Eucharist as a channel of grace and on how Holy Communion is a means of obtaining supernatural sustenance for the divine life we received at baptism.
Now we enter directly into the heart of this Eucharistic Retreat. Our aim here is to better understand what we mean when we say the Holy Eucharist is not only the Sacrifice Sacrament of the Mass or the Communion Sacrament, but the Presence Sacrament. When we speak of "Presence Sacrament," we are saying the Real Presence of Christ on earth in the Eucharist is the source of grace four times over.
We are now asking ourselves not why God became man, but why the God-man remains on earth in the Eucharist. Why did Christ do this?
But why did God become man? For two basic reasons. First, God became man so that He might assume a human free will and by His death on the cross, freely sacrifice His human life for our salvation.
The most powerful source of Christ’s grace comes from adoring Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. Our purpose here is to focus on Eucharistic Adoration as this potent fountain of graces.
Our present focus on why Christ instituted the Real Presence also can be summed up in one word: "profession." Christ gave us the Real Presence in order that we might profess to Him in the Blessed Sacrament our faith, hope and love.
We continue our reflections on why Christ instituted the Real Presence. In this meditation, we will consider the fact that Christ gave us the Real Presence so we might profess our hope in Him as our final destiny.
This is the hub of our prayerful reflection. What does it mean when we say we profess our love for God in the Real Presence? We mean any one or all of the following three "P’s": prayer, practice and promotion.
But there is one more profound reason why God became man and remains man on earth in the Blessed Sacrament. He did so and He does so in order that we might imitate Him.
After having seen something of the rule of the Real Presence and the pattern for our imitation of Jesus Christ, we are now in the position to look at three of Christ’s virtues which we are invited to imitate in our Eucharistic Lord: the humility of Christ, the poverty of Christ and the chastity of Christ.
We must brace ourselves against this prevalent ideology if we are to truly imitate Christ’s poverty in the Real Presence. And let us also bring to mind what St. Francis De Sales warned the followers of Christ: "To desire to be poor but not to be inconvenienced by poverty is to desire the honor of poverty and the convenience of riches."
We will ask two questions in this conference: how does Christ practice patient charity in the Real Presence and how are we to imitate His patient charity in our own lives?
Throughout these meditations we have been learning how we are to practice our faith in Christ’s Real Presence in the Blessed Sacrament. However, up to this point, our reflections have been mainly concerned with our own spiritual lives. Now we turn our attention to the apostolic dimension of our faith in the Holy Eucharist: How can we become apostles of the Real Presence in the modern world?
This meditation will help deepen our understanding of how the one Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist has three dimensions by being a sacrament three times over: a Sacrament as Sacrifice, a Sacrament as Communion and a Sacrament as Christ’s Presence.
By training, we mean both instruction of the mind and inspiration of the will. In Catholic vocabulary, training means enlightening the mind in order to motivate the will. God came into this world not as some "Divine Philosopher" but as the Divine Teacher, a teacher who wants the human race to obey the divine will of God. Thus, the purpose of Catholic training, teaching and educating is to instruct the human mind in order to motivate the human will, so that the will conforms to the will of God.
As we come to the end of our Eucharistic Retreat, we still have one more important area to prayerfully consider: the motivation for promoting Eucharistic Adoration. Here we ask ourselves, "How do we convince people that Eucharistic Adoration is desirable?" I use the word "desirable" advisedly because I believe Eucharistic Adoration is necessary.
No retreat on the Holy Eucharist would be complete without at least one meditation on the Blessed Virgin Mary. We know adoration is due to God alone because He alone is worthy of veneration as the source and destiny of our being. We have also seen that since God became man in the Person of Jesus Christ, our adoration of Jesus is really the adoration of God in human form. Since Christ in the Blessed Sacrament is here on earth in the fullness of His Divinity united with the humanity He received from Mary, we are to adore Him in the Holy Eucharist. This is the highest form of worship we can render to God and the most powerful source of grace we have on earth in our journey to a heavenly eternity. On all these counts, the Blessed Virgin is our model of what our adoration of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament should be.
Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus goes back to the early Church in the time of divine revelation. Just like all other true devotions in the Catholic Church, devotion to the Sacred Heart is based on true doctrine and divinely revealed truth. Two passages in Sacred Scripture are the revealed foundations for Sacred Heart devotion. The first is Christ’s invitation to His followers, "Learn from Me, for I am meek and humble of heart." The second revealed foundation is Christ’s Sacred Heart being pierced on the Cross by the soldier’s lance. From the very beginning, the followers of Christ were devoted to the Heart of Jesus. This meditation will focus on what we mean when we say the Sacred Heart is the Eucharist. Then, we will discuss why this is so and how we can put Sacred Heart devotion into practice.
…our answer is or should be, we make the Mass more vital in our religious life by knowing the Mass, second by living the Mass and thirdly, by participating in the Mass.
The title of our present meditation is certainly strange. In fact, it is really two titles wrapped in one. Both parts of the title are contrasts. The first is between the Holy Mass and the innocents who were killed by King Herod. The second is a contrast between the sacrifice of Christ and the sacrifices of human beings.
Abortion is the ultimate crime. Other crimes can be perpetuated for some profit or gain. But there is no gain in abortion, except a lifetime of pathetic quiet. Other crimes can be provided by some deadly passion, like lust, or anger or revenge. But there is no real passion in abortion, except an idolatrous self-love or inhuman self-will.
Our present conference is on, “How to Cope with the Abuses in the Eucharistic Liturgy.” The moment you hear that title you realize that this will be the most unusual conference we have so far engaged in. It will be unusual on several counts. We shall deal here with one of the most delicate and difficult features of what I do not hesitate calling the revolution going on in the Catholic Church today. We shall identify some of the features of this revolution which involves the most sacred element in Christianity - nothing less than Christ Himself in the Blessed Sacrament.
Our purpose in this conference will be very simple. We shall first briefly explain what we mean by the liturgy. Then, at greater length, identify the sacraments. And finally, in the time at our disposal, show how the sacraments belong to the heart of the liturgy.
Since Cardinal Roger Mahony published his pastoral letter on the Sunday Liturgy, September 4, 1997, it has provoked widespread discussion throughout the country. This is not surprising, because the document both symbolizes the liturgical conflicts in the Catholic Church and raises issues that touch on the foundations of historic Christianity. It is not my purpose here to go into a detailed analysis of the pastoral letter. I will only deal with one fundamental question, and do my best to answer it: What is the overriding impression of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist which this document leaves on an enlightened Catholic reader?
I doubt if any single aspect of the Catholic Church since the Second Vatican Council had caused more confusion and worry among the faithful than the Eucharistic Liturgy. From many parts of the Western world come reports of not a few Catholics who have simply stopped going to Mass, others who insist on having the Mass celebrated only in Latin and adoring to the Tridentine Ritual. How many times I have been seriously asked by people whether the present celebration of Mass in the vernacular and following one of the new canons was valid. I have heard of people walking out of Sunday Mass, and there are movements and publications crusading for a return to the pre-Vatican liturgy and some even daring to question the authority of the Second Vatican Council because it sanctioned what these people call a betrayal of Catholic liturgical piety…Whatever else the Mass is, it is meant by Christ to be a prayer, in fact, the most sublime prayer that a creature can make to the Creator and the one most pleasing to God.
The purpose of our present meditation is to explain how the Mass is the sacrifice sacrament of the Eucharist. Again, we will draw on the church’s teaching on the Mass, especially focusing on definitions from the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century. We will also examine Pope Pius XII’s teachings on the Mass, upon which the Second Vatican Council built its base document on Eucharist liturgy.
"We believe that the Mass, celebrated by the priest representing the person of Christ by virtue of the power received through the Sacrament of Orders, and offered by him in the name of Christ and the members of his Mystical Body, is in true reality the Sacrifice of Calvary, rendered sacramentally present on our altars." What, then, do we believe is the Sacrifice of the Mass? It is the Sacrifice of the Cross which Christ is now offering to his heavenly Father, through the hands of his ordained priests. But we ask: How is the Mass the same as the Sacrifice of Calvary and how does it differ?
In our present conference I thought we would address ourselves to the subject of the sacrifice of the Mass. There is no doubt that the most distinctive feature of the Catholic faith is our belief that although Christ died once on the Cross, He renews the sacrifice of Calvary every time that Mass is offered.
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