Mysterium Fidei on Eucharistic Devotion in the
Catholic Church
Many
people ask about Catholic Eucharist devotion. Some see it as Idolatry. In this
reflexion based on Mysterium Fidei we want to give brief historical and
understanding of the Catholic church about Eucharistic devotion. In his 1965
encyclical on the Eucharist, Mysterium Fidei, Pope Paul VI wrote: “The mystery
of the Eucharist is the heart and center of the liturgy itself” (3). The focal
points of Eucharistic devotion are the Sacrifice of the Mass and the reception
of Communion. But from the very beginning the Blessed Sacrament was also
reserved, primarily for the administration of Viaticum and for Communion
outside of Mass. This led to adoration of the Blessed Sacrament reserved on the
altar, as an expression of belief in the Real Presence. This same teaching and
practice was supported by Pope Paul VI in Mysterium Fidei: “The Catholic Church
has always offered and still offers the worship of latria to the Sacrament of the Eucharist, not only during Mass, but
also by reserving consecrated hosts with the utmost care, exposing them to
solemn veneration by the faithful, and carrying them in procession to the joy
of the great crowds of the faithful” (MF56).
And: “This faith also gave rise to the feast of Corpus Christi. From it have
originated many practices of eucharistic devotion that, under the inspiration
of divine grace, have increased from day to day and that the Catholic Church
uses eagerly to show ever greater homage to Christ, to thank him for so great a
gift, and to implore his mercy” (63). Fifteen years later, on February 24,
1980, Pope John Paul II issued a letter to all the bishops, priests, and
deacons of the Catholic Church under the title Dominicae Cenae. After stating
that “the Eucharist is the raison d’être of the Sacrament of the Priesthood,
which came into being at the moment of the institution of the Eucharist,” the
Pope continues: Indeed, since the Eucharistic mystery was instituted out of
love, and makes Christ sacramentally present, it is worthy of thanksgiving and
worship. And this worship must be prominent in all our encounters with the
Blessed Sacrament, both when we visit our churches and when the sacred species
are taken to the sick and administered to them.
Adoration
of Christ in this Sacrament of love must also find expression in various forms
of Eucharistic devotion: personal prayer before the Blessed Sacrament, hours of
adoration, periods of exposition. Eucharistic benediction, Eucharistic
processions, Eucharistic Congresses. A particular mention should be made at
this point of the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ as an act of public
worship rendered to Christ present in the Eucharist, a feast instituted by my
predecessor Urban IV in memory of the institution of this great mystery. All this
therefore corresponds to the general principles and particular norms already
long in existence but newly formulated during or after the Second Vatican
Council (3)
In
addition to the forms of worship of the Blessed Sacrament mentioned above, it
is deserving of mention that various groups of cloistered contemplative nuns
dedicate themselves to perpetual adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. There has
also been a revitalization of devotion to the Blessed Sacrament among the
laity, thanks to the apostolic zeal of numerous pastors and preachers who
propagate this devotion throughout the country. There is a constantly
increasing number of parishes in which the Blessed Sacrament is exposed for
adoration twenty-four hours a day for the benefit of the parishioners, who see
to it that the Eucharist is never left unattended.
***
Jesus real present in the Eucharist: Tradition and
Scripture[1]!
Belief
in the Real Presence dates from the earliest days of the Christian era. St. Ignatius
of Antioch wrote against the Docetists, who denied the Real Presence of Christ
in the Eucharist. St. Justin, writing around the year 150, was one of the
earliest theologians to give a detailed description of the liturgy of the
Eucharist. He closes his comments with the following confession of faith from
the First Apology (65-67)[2]:
“This food is called among us the Eucharist, of which no one is allowed to
partake but the person who believes that the things which we teach are true,
and who has been washed with the washing that is for the remission of sins and
unto regeneration, and who is living as Christ has enjoined.” He goes on: “For
not as common bread and common drink do we receive these, but in like manner as
Jesus Christ our Savior, having been made flesh by the Word of God, had both
flesh and blood for our salvation, so likewise we have been taught that the
food which is blessed by the prayer of his Word, and from which our flesh and
blood by transmutation are nourished, is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who
was made flesh.”
Other great defenders of the Real Presence of
Christ in the Eucharist are St. Irenaeus, St. Cyprian, and St. Cyril of
Jerusalem, who stated: “And so we consume these [consecrated species] with
perfect certainty that they are the body and blood of Christ, since under the
appearance of bread the body is given to us, and the blood under the appearance
of wine, so that when you have taken the body and blood of Christ, you become
participators in his very body and blood” (Mystagogical Catechesis, 4, 1-3).
For
the first fifteen hundred years of the Church’s existence there was a firm
belief in the dogma of the Real Presence. Even Berengarius of Tours, who at the
outset denied this teaching, ultimately accepted the statement in the
profession of faith that the bread and wine “are substantially changed into the
true, proper and life-giving flesh and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.” After
the Protestant Reformation, the Council of Trent issued two definitive
statements concerning the Real Presence: “After the consecration of the bread
and wine, our Lord Jesus Christ, true God and man, is truly, really and substantially
contained under the perceptible species of bread and wine.” And: “If anyone
denies 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 present in the sacrament of the most holy Eucharist,
but says that Christ is present in the Sacrament only as in a sign or figure,
or by his power, let him be anathema.”
The
presence of Christ in the Eucharist under the appearances of bread and wine is
clearly revealed in the New Testament, whose authors are reliable witnesses of
what Jesus said and did. Thus, in the sixth chapter of the Gospel according to
St. John, in the discourse on the bread of life, we read the astonishing
revelation made by Jesus: “I myself am the living bread come down from heaven.
If anyone eats this bread he shall live forever; the bread I will give is my
flesh, for the life of the world.” At this the Jews quarreled among themselves,
saying, “How can he give us his flesh to eat?”
***
Part II: Scripture about the Real Presence
Jesus
said to them: “Let me solemnly assure you, if you do not eat the flesh of the
Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. . . .
For my flesh is real food and my blood real drink. The man who feeds on my
flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him” (Jn 6:53-56). The
promise of the sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ was fulfilled at the
Last Supper, according to the Scriptures. The authors of the Synoptic Gospels
and St. Paul are in complete agreement in stating that Jesus consecrated bread
with the words “This is my body,” and
did the same with the cup of wine with the words “This is my blood.” Then he
told the Apostles to eat and drink and to do likewise in memory of him (Mt
26:26-29, Mk 14:22-25, Lk 22:15-20, 1 Cor 11:23-25). St. Paul completes his
description of the institution of the Eucharist with these words: “Every time,
then, you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the death of the Lord
until he comes” (1 Cor. 11:26).
In
each celebration of the Sacrifice of the Mass, the faithful are reminded that
the Eucharist is “the mystery of faith.” St. John Chrysostom told the
Christians of his day: “Let us submit to God in all things and not contradict
him, even if what he says seems to contradict our reason and intellect. . . .
Let us act in this way with regard to the mysteries, not limiting our attention
to those things which can be perceived by the senses, but instead holding fast
to what he says. For his word can never deceive.” For the believing Christian,
the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist is indisputable. Thus, St. Paul
asks: “Is not the cup of blessing we bless a sharing in the blood of Christ?
And is not the bread we break a sharing in the body of Christ?” (1 Cor. 10:16).
Christ
is present in the Church in many ways – in her faith, preaching, and teaching;
in her prayer and worship; in her liturgical actions; in her works of mercy; in
the faithful as members of the Mystical Body. But Christ is present in a unique
way in the Eucharist. Pope Paul VI stated in the encyclical On the Holy
Eucharist, Mysterium Fidei (1965): “The presence of Christ in the Eucharist is
called the real presence not to exclude the other kinds as though they were not
real, but because it is real par excellence, since it is substantial, in the
sense that Christ whole and entire, God and man, becomes present” (39). The
manner of his Eucharistic presence cannot be explained in physical terms
because it transcends the natural limitations and dimensions of space and
quantity as Saint Thomas taught us.
When
Jesus instituted the sacrament of the Eucharist at the Last Supper with the
words “This is my Body” and “This is my Blood,” and when the priest at Mass
says those same words, the bread and wine are changed into the Body and Blood
of Christ. However, unlike other substantial changes, the Body and Blood of
Christ already exist even before the change takes place. Christ is in a
glorified state, and he does not leave heaven to become consubstantial with the
bread and wine of the Eucharist as Luther taught. Rather, the bread and wine
are instantaneously changed into the Body and Blood of Christ. After the words
of Consecration, nothing substantial remains of the bread or wine; they have
been completely replaced by Christ’s already existing Body and Blood. This
change has been described in theology and in councils of the Church as
transubstantiation, meaning that the entire substance of bread and of wine has
been changed into the entire substance of his Body and Blood.
[1] This article
is inspired by chapter three of our Eucharist note: Patristic and later Development.
[2] Quoted
in the class notes of Eucharist, Fr George Kocholickal 2013 II A.
****
“The church makes Eucharist and
Eucharist makes the Church”
Augustin Fene-Fene Santime, mccj
There
is a strong relation between the Church and the Eucharist. We may be tempted to
say that there is no Church without Eucharist
and no Eucharist without Church. Benedict XVI confirms this relation by
pointing out the fact that “the Eucharist, causal
principle of the Church” (the Sacrament of Charity 14) and John Paul II
concludes , “The Church was born of the paschal mystery. For this very reason
the Eucharist, which is in an outstanding way the sacrament of the paschal
mystery, stands at the centre of the Church's life. This is already
clear from the earliest images of the Church found in the Acts of the Apostles:
“They devoted themselves to the Apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the
breaking of bread and the prayers” (2:42). The “breaking of the bread” refers
to the Eucharist. Two thousand years later, we continue to relive that primordial
image of the Church.”( Ecclesia de Eucharistia 3) Thus, both the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy and
the General Instruction of the Roman Missal (2000) view the Eucharist as the Church’s
most fundamental work. It is at the Eucharist that the Church finds its true
meaning and is strengthened for its mission.
We may conclude that, the two phrases, which are
true, in fact tend to identify two rather different perceptions of the Church.
If we say that the Eucharist makes the
Church then we will readily understand that the Church is itself a family
of Eucharist communities, a communion of local churches, which was the
patristic model. However, de Lubac showed that the community dimension of the
Eucharist suffered greatly as a result of Eucharistic controversy at the start
of the second millennium “Much more attention was paid to the fact that bread
and wine are changed into the body and blood of Christ”[1]
than to the fact that the Church then receives these transformed gifts and is
itself transformed in Christ. The Eucharist ceased to shape the Church and
became one of seven sacraments that the Church celebrates.
Augustin Fene-Fene Santime, mccj
Eucharist as Sacrifice
One
month ago after reading the Babylonian
captivity of Martin Luther I was really disturbed by the Objection
concerning Mass or Eucharist. In fact Luther inspired by the Letter to the
Hebrews 10: 14, rejected the understanding of mass as Jesus’ sacrifice. Moved
by this situation I put this question to the Lecturer of Eucharist[1]: how to reconcile the Letter to the Hebrews
which says: “By virtue of that one single sacrifice, He has achieved the eternal
perfection of all who are sanctified” with the Second Vatican Council which
proclaimed that the Eucharistic sacrifice is “the source and summit of the
Christian life” (LG11)? In this reflection I am going to share shortly the
answer I got from the lecturer and my personal reading as well.
To
reconcile these two notions which are not really opposed we have first of all
to note that it was not by some aberration that so much controversy on the
Eucharist has centred on the real presence. For the mystery of Eucharist as
sacrifice is encompassed within the doctrine of real presence. In this point
Martin Luther is removed from the competition because he is not for the idea of
real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. Coming to our question, the church
understands that the sacrifice of Jesus, the
total and voluntary giving over of his human life to the Father, achieved all
the values inherent in every true sacrifice offered throughout time by our race
to the Supreme Being. When Christ becomes presents at Mass he does so not in
order to repeat the sacrifice of the cross but to draw us into it, to make us
participants in his one sacrifice.
Moreover,
the church by presenting Mass as sacrifice believes that the last supper, Calvary
and Mass are all the same sacrifice, not because
the historical acts of the past are repeated or re-represented but because of
the intrinsic unity that all these actions, past and present, possess in the
one priest and victim. The realization that the Mass is the sacrifice of the
Church has helped me toward an understanding of how each Mass is itself a
sacrifice and not just an effective memorial of Calvary.
To
say with Luther that the Mass adds nothing to the sacrifice of the cross is an
imperfect understanding of how Christ effects our redemption. The sacrifice of Calvary was sufficient for the reconciliation of the
entire world. Nonetheless, Christ willed and wills to associate us with that
sacrifice. As sacrificial offerings we bring ourselves, and our own lives with
their joys and sufferings. Taken up into the sacrifice of Christ, these too
become part of the sacrifice of praise and propitiation presented to the
Father. Thus, each Mass is a sacrifice in which something new is being offered.
This is
my understanding of Eucharist as sacrifice and I attend Mass bearing in mind
this idea and bringing my life as sacrifice to the Father. I really thank God for this opportunity given
to me through this course.
Augustin
Fene-Fene Santime, mccj.
11131T
I would like to agree that each time I attend mass, it is as opportunity for me to participate more intensely in the life of Christ himself.
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