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(AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)
As a follow up to my column on the Feast of Corpus Christi, I want to share Pope Benedict’s homily from this feast. The Vatican website just got the English translation posted. Do read the whole thing, but this paragraph was especially powerful:
St John Mary Vianney liked to tell his parishioners: "Come to communion.... It is true that you are not worthy of it, but you need it" (Bernard Nodet, Le curé d'Ars. Sa pensée - Son coeur, éd. Xavier Mappus, Paris 1995, p. 119). With the knowledge of being inadequate because of sin, but needful of nourishing ourselves with the love that the Lord offers us in the Eucharistic sacrament, let us renew this evening our faith in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. We must not take this faith for granted! Today we run the risk of secularization creeping into the Church too. It can be translated into formal and empty Eucharistic worship, into celebrations lacking that heartfelt participation that is expressed in veneration and in respect for the liturgy. The temptation to reduce prayer to superficial, hasty moments, letting ourselves be overpowered by earthly activities and concerns, is always strong. When, in a little while, we recite the Our Father, the prayer par excellence, we will say: "Give us this day our daily bread", thinking of course of the bread of each day for us and for all peoples. But this request contains something deeper. The Greek word epioúsios, that we translate as "daily", could also allude to the "super-stantial" bread, the bread "of the world to come". Some Fathers of the Church saw this as a reference to the Eucharist, the bread of eternal life, the new world, that is already given to us in Holy Mass, so that from this moment the future world may begin within us. With the Eucharist, therefore, Heaven comes down to earth, the future of God enters the present and it is as though time were embraced by divine eternity.
The Mass is not about us. It is not about giving us warm fuzzies of fellowship. The Mass is about the Eucharist. It is about the Mystery. It transcends time to make Christ fully present. Pope Benedict XVI wrote extensively about this in his book Spirit of the Liturgy:
This means that universality is an essential feature of Christian worship. It is the worship of an open heaven. It I never just an event in the life of a community that finds itself in a particular place. No, to celebrate the eucharist means to enter into the openness of a glorification of God that embraces both heaven and earth, an openness effected by the Cross and Resurrection. Christian liturgy is never just an event organized by a particular group or set of people or even by a particular local Church. Mankind’s movement toward Christ meets Christ’s movement toward men. He wants to unite mankind and bring about the one Church, the one divine assembly, of all men. Everything, then, comes together: the horizontal and the vertical, the uniqueness of God and the unity of mankind, the communion of all who worship in spirit and in truth.
This is not an easy book to read so I would not recommend it for your trip to the beach. However, this is a good book on which to meditate during your personal prayer time or during Eucharistic Adoration. Read it slowly. The goal is not to finish reading it. The goal is to absorb it.
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