“At the Last Supper, our Savior instituted the Eucharistic sacrifice of His Body and Blood. This He did in order to perpetuate the sacrifice of the cross throughout the ages until He comes come again, and so to entrust to His beloved Spouse, the Church, a memorial of His death and resurrection: a sacrament of love, a sign of unity, a bond of charity, a Paschal banquet in which Christ is consumed, the mind is filled with grace, and a pledge of future glory is given to us.” (CCC 1323) 

The Lord, having loved those who were His own, loved them to the end. In order to leave them a pledge of this love, in order never to depart from His own and to make them sharers in His Passover, Christ Jesus instituted the Eucharist as the memorial of His death and Resurrection, and commanded His apostles to celebrate it until His return; “thereby He constituted them priests of the New Testament.” (CCC 1337) 

The Eucharist is “the source and summit of the Christian life.” The other sacraments, and indeed all ecclesiastical ministries and works of the apostolate, are bound up with the Eucharist and are oriented toward it. For in the blessed Eucharist is contained the whole spiritual good of the Church, namely Christ himself, our Pasch. (CCC 1324) We unite ourselves to Christ, who makes us sharers in His Body and Blood to form a single body. (CCC 1331) 

The Holy Eucharist completes Christian initiation. Those who have been raised to the dignity of the royal priesthood by Baptism and configured more deeply to Christ by Confirmation participate with the whole community in the Lord’s own sacrifice by means of the Eucharist. (CCC 1322) 

By the Eucharistic celebration, we also unite ourselves with the heavenly liturgy, the anticipation of eternal life, when God will be all in all. (CCC 1326)  

The mode of Christ’s presence under the Eucharistic species is unique. It raises the Eucharist above all the sacraments as “the perfection of the spiritual life and the end to which all the sacraments lean.” In the Most Blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist “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 present.” This presence is called ‘real’ – by which is not intended to exclude the other types of presence as if they could not be ‘real’ too, but because it is presence in the fullest sense: that is to say, it is a substantial presence by which Christ, God and man, makes Himself wholly and entirely present.” (CCC 1374)  

It is by the conversion of the bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood that Christ becomes present in this sacrament. The Church Fathers strongly affirmed the faith of the Church in the efficacy of the Word of Christ and of the action of the Holy Spirit to bring about this conversion. Thus St. John Chrysostom declares: It is not man that causes the things offered to become the Body and Blood of Christ, but He who was crucified for us, Christ himself. The priest, in the role of Christ, pronounces these words, but their power and grace are God’s. “This is my body,” he says. This word transforms the things offered. (CCC 1375) 

The Council of Trent summarizes the Catholic faith by declaring: “Because Christ our Redeemer said that it was truly His body that He was offering under the species of bread, it has always been the conviction of the Church of God, and this holy Council now declares again, that by the consecration of the bread and wine there takes place a 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. This change the Holy Catholic Church has fittingly and properly called transubstantiation.” (CCC 1376) 

Thus, it is highly fitting that Christ should have wanted to remain present to His Church in this unique way. Since Christ was about to take His departure from His own, in His visible form, He wanted to give us His sacramental presence; since He was about to offer Himself on the cross to save us, He wanted us to have the memorial of the love with which He loved us to the end, even to the giving of His life. In His Eucharistic presence, He remains mysteriously in our midst as the one who loved us and gave Himself up for us, and He remains under signs that express and communicate this love. 

The Church and the world have a great need for Eucharistic worship. Jesus awaits us in this sacrament of love. Let us not refuse the time to go to meet Him in adoration, in contemplation full of faith, and open to making amends for the serious offenses and crimes of the world. Let our adoration never cease. (CCC 1380) 

Last week, we started our FIRST COMMUNION here at Holy Spirit Parish and will continue until the 23rd of May. Let us pray for our little brothers and sisters that they may truly be given the strength, wisdom, and grace from our Lord Jesus Christ Himself.