The Eucharist — Source And Summit Of Christian Life

By DON FIER

To complete our treatment of Confirmation, it is fitting to end with a concise summary from the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) on the sacrament’s purpose and the benefits it bestows to help us live a fully Christian life:
“Confirmation perfects Baptismal grace; it is the sacrament which gives the Holy Spirit in order to root us more deeply in the divine filiation, incorporate us more firmly into Christ, strengthen our bond with the Church, associate us more closely with her mission, and help us bear witness to the Christian faith in words accompanied by deeds” (n. 1316).
Just as the apostles were “filled with the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:2) on that first Pentecost, so too we “receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:38) and are fortified with the infused supernatural virtues and gifts necessary to bear fearless witness to our faith through worthy reception of the Sacrament of Confirmation.
The Catechism now devotes a generous portion of its text (98 paragraphs) to the treatment of the third of the sacraments of initiation, the “Sacrament of Sacraments”: the Holy Eucharist. As we begin, as noted so aptly by the Servant of God Fr. John A. Hardon, SJ, “we should immediately remind ourselves that we are studying the Mystery of Faith toward which all the other sacraments are directed” (Basic Catholic Catechism Course [BCCC], p. 135). Each of the seven sacraments, by definition, operates ex opere operato (“by the very fact of the actions being performed” [CCC, n. 1128]), but the Eucharist is unique.
While each sacrament confers the graces signified by the sensibly perceptible signs by which it is administered, the Eucharist stands alone in that it contains the very Author of grace, our Lord Jesus Christ.
As discussed earlier in this series (see volume 148, n. 42; October 22, 2015), “the sacraments of Christian initiation — Baptism, Confirmation, and the Eucharist — lay the foundations of every Christian life” (CCC, n. 1212).
In his 1971 apostolic constitution Divinae consortium naturae, Blessed Pope Paul VI explains: “The faithful are born anew by Baptism, strengthened by the sacrament of Confirmation, and receive in the Eucharist the food of eternal life.”
Fr. Hardon elaborates further: “Baptism marks the beginning of our new life in Christ, enabling us to enjoy the dignity of Christ’s royal priesthood. Confirmation strengthens that life, configuring us more deeply to Christ. Finally, with the entire community, we participate in the saving sacrifice of Jesus on Calvary through the Eucharist, which nourishes us with Christ’s own Body and Blood. The Eucharist thus completes our Christian initiation” (BCCC, pp. 135-136).
In the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, the Vatican II fathers describe the institution of the Holy Eucharist and its purpose in beautiful language: “At the Last Supper, on the night when He was betrayed, our Savior instituted the eucharistic sacrifice of His Body and Blood. He did this in order to perpetuate the sacrifice of the Cross throughout the centuries until He should 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 eaten, the mind is filled with grace, and a pledge of future glory is given to us” (Sacrosanctum Concilium [SC], n. 47; as cited in CCC, n. 1323).
Drawing again from the documents of Vatican II, the Catechism refers to the Eucharist as “the fount [source] and apex [summit] of the Christian life” (Lumen Gentium, n. 11; CCC, n. 1324). As Christoph Cardinal Schönborn explains in Living the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “Here is the intersection of the two movements of the Christian life, the ‘descent’ from God to man and the ‘ascent’ from man to God” (volume 2, p. 79).
That Christ is the source of Christian life can perhaps be best demonstrated by Sacred Scripture in that God first offers Himself in His Son to man: “I am the living bread that came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live forever;…he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life and…abides in me, and I in him” (John 6:51, 54, 56). In the Eucharist, then, God “descends” to meet man.
The Holy Eucharist is also the summit or apex, the culmination of the Christian life.
St. Thomas Aquinas refers to the Eucharist as the “consummation of the spiritual life and the end of all the sacraments” (Summa Theologiae III, Q. 73, art. 3). Authentic Christian living leads up to and culminates in our participation in the Eucharistic Sacrifice, where, as members of the Body of Christ, “the sacrifice of Christ becomes also the sacrifice of the members of his Body. The lives of the faithful, their praise, sufferings, prayer, and work, are united with those of Christ and with his total offering, and so acquire a new value” (CCC, n. 1368). By surrendering and uniting ourselves totally, mind and heart, in self-offering to God during the Mass, the faithful “ascend” to God through the offering of the priest, who acts in persona Christi.
In the Decree on the Ministry and Life of Priests, the Vatican II fathers explain the central importance of the Holy Eucharist in the lives of the members of the Mystical Body of Christ: “The other sacraments, as well as with every ministry of the Church and every work of the apostolate, are tied together with the Eucharist and are directed toward it. The Most Blessed Eucharist contains the entire spiritual boon of the Church, that is, Christ himself, our Pasch and Living Bread…giving life to men who are thus invited and encouraged to offer themselves, their labors and all created things, together with him” (Presbyterorum Ordinis, n. 5).
In his 2003 encyclical Ecclesia de Eucharistia, Pope St. John Paul II emphatically affirms that “the Church draws her life from the Eucharist” (n. 1). In a later paragraph, he goes on to say that “the Eucharist is indelibly marked by the event of the Lord’s passion and death, of which it is not only a reminder but the sacramental re-presentation….This sacrifice is so decisive for the salvation of the human race that Jesus Christ offered it and returned to the Father only after he had left us a means of sharing in it as if we had been present there. Each member of the faithful can thus take part in it and inexhaustibly gain its fruits” (n. 11).
In his excellent work entitled Divine Love Made Flesh: The Holy Eucharist as the Sacrament of Charity, Raymond Cardinal Burke further explains the unparalleled importance of the Holy Eucharist in the life of a Christian:
“The Holy Eucharist is not just one of the many gifts which Christ has left to the Church. It is the gift of Christ’s true Body and Blood, the gift of the whole fruit of His saving Passion and Death. All the other gifts of Christ to us are only fully understood in relationship to the gift of the Eucharistic Sacrifice and Banquet” (p. 19).

The Mystery Of Christ

To further illuminate the meaning of the Holy Eucharist as “the source and summit of the Christian life,” the Catechism cites an instruction issued in 1967 by the Sacred Congregation of Rites entitled Eucharisticum Mysterium.
“The Eucharist,” the instruction says, “both perfectly signifies and wonderfully effects that sharing in God’s life and unity of God’s people by which the Church exists. It is the summit of both the action by which God sanctifies the world in Christ and the worship which men offer to Christ and which through him they offer to the Father in the Spirit. Its celebration is the supreme means by which the faithful come to express in their lives and to manifest to others the mystery of Christ and the true nature of the Church” (n. 6).
The Eucharist, moreover, pertains not only to this present life but also to the life to come. “By the Eucharistic celebration,” the Catechism teaches, “we already unite ourselves with the heavenly liturgy and anticipate eternal life” (CCC, n. 1325). As expressed by the Vatican II fathers, “In the earthly liturgy we take part in a foretaste of that heavenly liturgy which is celebrated in the holy city of Jerusalem toward which we journey as pilgrims, where Christ is sitting at the right hand of God” (SC, n. 8).
Every Eucharistic liturgy that is celebrated on earth, in other words, is an anticipation of the eternal heavenly liturgy, when God will “be everything to everyone” (1 Cor. 15:28).
The Catechism closes its first section of catechesis on the Holy Eucharist by recalling the words of the second-century bishop and Church Father St. Irenaeus of Lyons. “The Eucharist is the sum and summary of our faith: ‘Our way of thinking is attuned to the Eucharist, and the Eucharist in turn confirms our way of thinking’ (Against Heresies, vol. 4, chap. 18, n. 5)” (CCC, n. 1327). It is through the Holy Eucharist that we “draw near to God and he will draw near to [us]” (James 4:8).

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(Don Fier serves on the board of directors for The Catholic Servant, a Minneapolis-based monthly publication. He and his wife are the parents of seven children. Fier is a 2009 graduate of Ave Maria University’s Institute for Pastoral Theology. He is doing research for writing a definitive biography of Fr. John A. Hardon, SJ.)