Ecclesia de Eucharistia

 

Hello, and Happy April! Megan and I are yet again here for now our 3rd Monthly Papal Document Linkup! We've decided this month to drop the linkup widget, but if you'd like to join in with our party and write a post about our document of the month, please drop a link to your post in the comments of either her or my posts, so that we can link to your post in our posts. And if you're not confused by now...kudos. 

To get a bit prepared for Holy Week...

Our papal document for April is Ecclesia de Eucharistia, published Holy Thursday 2003, by Pope St. John Paul II, pope from 1978 to 2005. 

(Fun fact! I was in utero when this document was published. You didn't need to know that, but I think it's cool.)

I thought it was appropriate, because Holy Thursday is the day of the Institution of the Eucharist and all that. :)

Before I Start: To any of my non-Catholic brethren who might be reading this, this whole thing might need a little bit of explanation! The Catholic Church believes that when we celebrate Mass, the bread and wine which are offered on the altar are truly, through the priest's words of consecration as he acts in the person of Christ (in persona Christi), transformed into the Holy Body and Precious Blood of Jesus. Yes, we know that they still taste like, feel like, smell like, and look like bread and wine. But we believe that Jesus's words ("This is My Body"..."This is the chalice of My Blood") were meant literally, and that at the Last Supper, through telling His disciples "Do this in memory of Me", He instituted the priesthood in order that His sacrifice might be made re-present for the faithful for all time, in the Eucharist. That's what this entire papal document is about, so there's your background. :)

Summary: There's such an incredible amount of material here that's going to be REALLY hard for me to summarize it! But here goes my long summary. The Eucharist is at the center of the Church's life. It's a re-making-present (re-presentation, in the Catholic sense of the word) of the Triduum, of Jesus's life, death, and resurrection, which we receive into ourselves. Our own participation in this true sacrifice is absolutely key. And yet, the whole of the Eucharist and the Paschal Mystery is just that...a mystery that we can't understand fully. It boggles the human mind to know that Jesus is truly present, body, blood, soul, and divinity, as something that looks like bread and wine. 

The Eucharist is the life of the Church inasmuch as it's what makes the Church to grow, and what brings redemption. The Eucharist is descended from the Apostles, and actually bears all four marks of the Church in itself--one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. It is vitally important for all celebrations of the Eucharist to be in an apostolic and ecclesiastical context, i.e. in union with the bishops and Pope. It's also exceptionally important for Catholics to only receive the Eucharist at Mass, and not to receive other "communions" from other denominations. The Eucharist is the source and summit not only of the Christian life, but also of priestly ministry. 

Although the Church wishes for the communion of all Christians, the incredible communion both with God and with the Church that the Eucharist constitutes can only be given when the outward bonds of communion are already there. Hence, the Eucharist may not be given to non-Catholics, nor to those in a state of mortal sin. 

The Eucharistic celebration, being profoundly important, needs to have dignity. It needs to stick to the forms which the Church has handed down. And we need to use our best for it in art, in architecture, in music, and so on!

Mary is the one who knows the Eucharist best, because she's the one who received Jesus into her womb at the Annunciation, which is analogous to what happens sacramentally when one of the faithful receives the Eucharist. The entire meditation on Mary's role and relationship to the Eucharist is incredibly beautiful. 

We must not by any means diminish the Eucharist but treat it as our greatest treasure! 

I'm a little tired this week, so this is going to be a bit more loosely associated than usual. :)

But I'm not sure where on earth to start...I could talk about any and all parts of this encyclical for ages! In fact, I think it's shot up to "my favorite thing that I've read by JPII" status. (To be fair, though, I haven't read all that much by him. XD) 

Just to go over a few of my favorite parts in really quick bullet points:

• The first sentence in English reads "The Church draws her life from the Eucharist", but in the Latin, literally says, "The Church lives from the Eucharist." 
• "The Divine Sacrament has continued to mark the passing of [the Church's] days, filling them with confident hope." (The continuity implied here, the rhythm of sacrifice! <3)
• JPII talks about the "oneness in time" between the Triduum and every Mass. 
• He gently but firmly emphasizes that no, the Eucharist is still only for Catholics in a state of grace, and that liturgical abuses are a horror. 
• He also emphasizes the Eucharist as true sacrifice, not only a "general sacrifice", but a gift to God first and foremost.
• "Saint Ambrose reminded the newly-initiated that the Eucharist applies the event of the resurrection to their lives: “Today Christ is yours, yet each day he rises again for you”"
  
• "This pledge of the future resurrection comes from the fact that the flesh of the Son of Man, given as food, is his body in its glorious state after the resurrection. With the Eucharist we digest, as it were, the “secret” of the resurrection. For this reason Saint Ignatius of Antioch rightly defined the Eucharistic Bread as “a medicine of immortality, an antidote to death”"
• "We can say not only that each of us receives Christ, but also that Christ receives each of us. He enters into friendship with us."
• "Could there ever be an adequate means of expressing the acceptance of that self-gift which the divine Bridegroom continually makes to his Bride, the Church, by bringing the Sacrifice offered once and for all on the Cross to successive generations of believers and thus becoming nourishment for all the faithful?"
  
• "And is not the enraptured gaze of Mary as she contemplated the face of the newborn Christ and cradled him in her arms that unparalleled model of love which should inspire us every time we receive Eucharistic communion?"

But beyond the bullet points, there were two things that struck me most in the document. 

First of all, Pope John Paul II's incredible humility and gratitude in the face of the sacrament, and his own priesthood. 

He mentions that he was able to celebrate Mass in the Cenacle of Jerusalem, the place where, according to tradition, the Last Supper took place (and so the place where Mass was first celebrated...by Christ Himself! On Holy Thursday, which is coming right up!), and says about this experience,

I am grateful to the Lord Jesus for allowing me to repeat in that same place, in obedience to his command: "Do this in memory of me", the words which he spoke two thousand years ago. 

I love this so much. The pope is saying, "Look, my lord (my boss, the person who I'm answerable to for the whole Church) allowed me to be obedient to Him, and to imitate Him, and I'm grateful." 

He's grateful for the opportunity to be obedient to the One whom he loves. 

I kind of want to do a post on this at some point, with Lewis on obedience, but as a preliminary...people don't like obedience anymore. It gets a bad rap. It sounds like being the brainwashed pansy person who just does what people tell you or something.  

Papa JPII doesn't subscribe to that. He's grateful to be under obedience to Christ, because it means that he can be close to Him and do His will and if that obedience allows him to imitate Christ even more closely, by speaking the same words in the same place, though 2000 years apart, he's even more grateful. 

Obedience isn't easy. I'm sure there were times in JPII's priesthood where obedience to Christ, and obedience to Christ in his superiors was hard. But at one time obedience meant the sweet and tremendous gift of exercising his priesthood on the very spot where Christ instituted the priesthood. Truly, "His yoke is easy". 

And that just about moved me to tears, y'all. His humble gratitude to Christ! I'm not expressing how it made me feel very well, but I hope you can grasp some of what I mean, though my words be fumbling after a week of homework. :)

The next quote I'm thinking of is from the part where he talks about Eucharistic Adoration:

If in our time Christians must be distinguished above all by the “art of prayer”, how can we not feel a renewed need to spend time in spiritual converse, in silent adoration, in heartfelt love before Christ present in the Most Holy Sacrament? How often, dear brother and sisters, have I experienced this, and drawn from it strength, consolation and support! 

How often does the pope talk about what is efficacious in his own spiritual life? Probably not all that often. Simply the way he describes his renewal in Adoration is absolutely beautiful. I can imagine him kneeling before the tabernacle, head humbly bowed, just talking to his Lord, the one to whom he was under obedience. And I love that mental picture. 

Last quote:

 For over a half century, every day, beginning on 2 November 1946, when I celebrated my first Mass in the Crypt of Saint Leonard in Wawel Cathedral in Krakow, my eyes have gazed in recollection upon the host and the chalice, where time and space in some way “merge” and the drama of Golgotha is re-presented in a living way, thus revealing its mysterious “contemporaneity”. Each day my faith has been able to recognize in the consecrated bread and wine the divine Wayfarer who joined the two disciples on the road to Emmaus and opened their eyes to the light and their hearts to new hope (cf. Lk 24:13-35).

Time and space in some way "merge"...what a beautiful way of thinking about the Eucharistic mystery. I love his emphasis of the transcending of time and space, and the re-presentation...but I also love, as above, getting a tiny window into his mind while he says Mass. 

Speaking of time and space, though...on to the other thing that really struck me. That was this quote:

"This varied scenario of celebrations of the Eucharist has given me a powerful experience of its universal and, so to speak, cosmic character. Yes, cosmic! Because even when it is celebrated on the humble altar of a country church, the Eucharist is always in some way celebrated on the altar of the world. It unites heaven and earth. It embraces and permeates all creation." 

I think that here, he's using "cosmic" to mean universal to the planet, but it made me think about a reflection that I was musing on a couple of weeks ago. As I may have mentioned, I'm in an astronomy class this semester, and earlier in the class, we were talking about how small the Earth really is, among the other stars and planets and galaxies, and the whole universe.

It's a pinprick, really, in the grand scheme of things.

And yet, that pinprick has the incredible privilege of having the Creator's presence on it, Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity. All. Over. The. Planet. In every church, on every altar. Think about it like spots of light shining out from the planet, one for each tabernacle lamp in the world. From a cosmic view, from far enough away, from another galaxy...it would look like our entire world was diffused with the presence of Jesus. I'm not explaining my mental image very well, but think about looking at Earth from space and being able to see that it's the only place in the universe where Jesus is Truly Present in the entire cosmos.

And yet, the fact that He is Truly Present here does have cosmic ramifications. The Creator is somewhere in His creation, even though that somewhere is seemingly small and insignificant, and yet, it's the place where Jesus conquered death and the devil. The spiritual shock waves from that cannot but have rippled out through the entire universe. 

It's the darkened planet, and yet, it's the light-ened planet. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it. 

It's almost not fair to every other planet, star, galaxy, and galactic object, really.

The quote also reminded me of a part of Awesome Glory by Jeremy Driscoll where he talks about the wedding of heaven and earth. He quotes the Exultet, 

O truly blessed night, when things of heaven are wed to those of earth, and divine to the human.

And says that it is meet that it's the blessed night when heaven is wed to earth, as it is in the night that marriages are consummated, and it's in the night between Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday, when Jesus rises from the dead, that the marriage between heaven and earth is consummated. 

That doesn't have a ton to do with the Eucharist (although it's more-or-less the completion of the Paschal Sacrifice, and the Eucharist is the representation of the entire Paschal Sacrifice, both the death and the resurrection, and that's how it's the wedding of heaven and earth, so I guess it does have quite a bit to do with it), but the wording reminded me of that, and I thought it was cool. :)

And on that note...Samantha out! I need to work on a few other bloggy things and do homework (2000+ word final research paper, here I come *dies*), so I will see y'all next week. :)

Do you have a favorite document by JPII? What are your thoughts on obedience? Are you looking forward to the Triduum???