17 April, 2025
I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, and I will give up this flesh for the life of the world. – John 6:51
Almighty Father, Merciful and Compassionate God, in Your perfect goodness You have given us the sacramental representation of Christ’s sacrifice, crowned by the resurrection, in the Mass, a most special presence which – in the words of Paul VI – “is called ‘real’ not as a way of excluding all other types of presence as if they were ‘not real’, but because it is a presence in the fullest sense: a substantial presence where Christ, the God-Man, is wholly and entirely present”.
We are taught to believe that “The consecration of the bread and wine effects the change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord, and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood. And the holy Catholic Church has fittingly and properly called this change transubstantiation”. Truly the Eucharist is a mystery which surpasses our understanding and can only be received in faith. “Do not see – Saint Cyril of Jerusalem exhorts – in the bread and wine merely natural elements, because the Lord has expressly said that they are his body and blood: faith assures us of this, though our senses suggest otherwise”.
Before this mystery of love, human reason fully experiences its limitations. One understands how, down the centuries, this truth has stimulated theology to strive to understand it ever more deeply, to the extent that they are able to join critical thinking to the “living faith” of the Church… There remains the boundary indicated by Paul VI: “Every theological explanation… must firmly maintain that in objective reality, independently of our mind, the bread and wine have ceased to exist after the consecration, so that the adorable body and blood of the Lord Jesus from that moment on are really before us under the sacramental species of bread and wine”. Lord, strengthen our unbelief and may the Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ sustain us for everlasting life, in Jesus’ Name we pray. Amen
Excerpts: AnaStpaul
