See also:
Eucharist linksReparation for irreveren -cePreference for reception of Holy Communion on tongue and kneeling
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The Eucharist is the Lord, our life
"It is He who will guide our every step and direct our lives. Our mission will flow from our time in the Blessed Sacrament. He is our Beloved who will never abandon us!" -Lourdes Pinto, Jan 2010
CCC 1394 Since Christ died for us out of love, when we celebrate the memorial of his death at the moment of sacrifice we ask that love may be granted to us by the coming of the Holy Spirit. We humbly pray that in the strength of this love by which Christ willed to die for us, we, by receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit, may be able to consider the world as crucified for us, and to be ourselves as crucified to the world. . . . Having received the gift of love, let us die to sin and live for God. |
WHO- THE EUCHARIST IS JESUS
Fire that purifies
The Holy Eucharist is a fire that purifies and consumes all our miseries and imperfections. Do everything in your power to make yourself worthy of the Eucharist, and this Divine Fire will take care of the rest" -St. Hyacinth of Mariscotti.
The incarnation continued
"Our Lord so loved us that he could not separate himself from us, even in his state of glory. The Eucharist is his incarnation continued, multiplied, perpetuated to the end of time. . . . but how few there are for whom Jesus sacramental is the love of their life, their first love, their delight!" St. Peter Julian Eymard
"In the fullness of time, the Son of God was made man in order to give His life, to give salvation to each one of us, and He gives Himself as bread in the mystery of the Eucharist in order to make us enter into His covenant, which makes us His children. To such great heights do God's merciful goodness and the sublimity of 'His eternal love' attain." -Pope Benedict XVI, General Audience, Oct. 19, 2011.
Faith "Because He cannot be seen by human eyes in the Eucharist, because His presence in the Eucharist is sacramental and mysterious, the Eucharist is a challenge to the faith of men. By believing the truth of this great mystery, by believing that He Who could feed five thousand men with a few loaves of bread, can feed millions of men with His Body and Blood in the Eucharist, men prove the strength, the splendor and the perfection of their faith." -St. Thomas Aquinas
We see Jesus
"If we approach with faith, we too will see Jesus . ..; for the Eucharistic table takes the place of the crib. Here the Body of the Lord is present, wrapped not only in swaddling clothes but in the rays of the Holy Spirit" -St. John Chrysostom.
Prisoner of love
"Oh! If man but understood the love of the Eucharist! During His Passion Jesus was bound; He lost His liberty. In the Eucharist He is the One that binds Himself. He has chained Himself with the unconditional and perpetual chains of His promises. He has chained Himself to the Sacred Species to which the sacramental words bind Him inseparably. In the Eucharist as on the Cross or in the Tomb He has no movement, no action of His own, although He possesses within Himself the fullness of the risen life. "He is fully dependent on man like a Prisoner of love. He cannot break His bonds, or leave His Eucharistic prison; He is our Prisoner to the end of time. He pledged Himself to this; His contract of love goes as far as that." -St. Peter Julian Eymard.
WHY - FOR YOU
Burning love for you
Jesus is there in the tabernacle expressly for you, for you alone. He is burning with the desire to enter your heart. -St Therese of Lisieux
Gift of the Father and of Mary
“The Father of Mercies and the God of all consolation, in his exceedingly great and Fatherly love, gave us his well-beloved Son at the time of his Incarnation, and gives him to us daily in the most Blessed Sacrament. So, too, the most Blessed Mother of Mercy and Consolation, in the boundless charity of her maternal Heart, gave us her dear Jesus at his birth, and does so continually in the Holy Eucharist, because being one with him in spirit, in love, and in will, she wills all that he wills and does all that he does” -St. John Eudes:
"If you have this Eucharistic spirit, if your thoughts are tuned continually toward the Eucharist, the presence of our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament will never leave you." St. Peter Julian Eymard.
OUR RESPONSE
Adoration
"God is indeed ever-present. But again, the physical presence of the risen Christ is something different, something new. The risen Lord enters into our midst. And then we can do no other than say, with Saint Thomas: my Lord and my God! Adoration is primarily an act of faith – the act of faith as such. God is not just some possible or impossible hypothesis concerning the origin of all things. He is present. And if he is present, then I bow down before him. Then my intellect and will and heart open up towards him and from him. In the risen Christ, the incarnate God is present, who suffered for us because he loves us. We enter this certainty of God’s tangible love for us with love in our own hearts. This is adoration, and this then determines my life. Only thus can I celebrate the Eucharist correctly and receive the body of the Lord rightly." (Pope Benedict XVI, Christmas Address to Curia, Dec. 22, 2011)
Begin with love!
"Begin your worship with an act of love and you will open your soul deliciously to his divine action. It is due to the fact that you begin with yourselves that you stop on the road. If you start on another virtue other than love you are going in a false path ..... love is the only door of the heart. "
St. Peter Eymard
Learn from Mary
In the Holy Mother's act of wrapping the Baby Jesus in swaddling clothes and adoring Him, we learn to treat the Most Holy Eucharist with an ineffable love. (Card Piacenza, 11/28/11)
No time?
"Do not say that you have no time. Rather, acknowledge that you do not love Him enough. If you did, you would leave everything in order to visit Him [in the Blessed Sacrament]." (Fr. Jose Guadalupe Trevino)
Adore Jesus + offer mind, heart, will
"Adore Jesus in the Divine Host by offering the sovereign homage of your mind to him who is its sovereign truth, of your heart to him who is its God, of your will to him who is its Lord." (St. Peter Julian Eymard).
Give Him your whole heart as a sacrifice of love.
-St. Peter Julian Eymard: "He who makes Jesus Christ in the Most Blessed Sacrament the center of his life directs all his thoughts, all his study, all his virtues toward him"
One heart to love -St. Peter Julian Eymard: “Our Lord does not ask you to have two hearts, one for Him and one for those you love here below. Mothers, love our Eucharistic Lord with a mother's love. Love Him as your son. Wives, love Him as your husband. Children, love Him as your Father. There is only one faculty of love in us”
Become Eucharist
-Pope Benedict XVI: "Becoming the Eucharist: let this be our constant desire and commitment! So that the offer of the Body and Blood of the Lord we make upon the altar may be accompanied by the sacrifice of our own lives. Every day we draw from the Body and Blood of the Lord the free and pure love that makes us worthy ministers of Christ and witnesses to His joy" -Homily for the Solemnity of Corpus Christi, June 11, 2009.
Share the Lord's passion
"Although failure to observe the paschal solemnity would be a very grave offense, it would be still more dangerous to take part in the liturgy without sharing in our Lord´s passion... We can give authentic worship to the suffering, dead, and risen Christ only if we ourselves suffer, die, and rise again with him." -Pope St. Leo the Great
Go to daily mass. Adore the Eucharist. It is our very life from which flows charity
“The Eucharist is the ‘treasure’ of the Church, the precious heritage that her Lord has left to her. And the Church preserves it with the greatest care, celebrating it daily in holy Mass, adoring it in churches and chapels, administering it to the sick, and as viaticum to those who are on their last journey . . . . “On this feast day, the Christian Community proclaims that the Eucharist is its all, its very life, the source of life that triumphs over death. From communion with Christ in the Eucharist flows the charity that transforms our life and supports us all one our journey toward the heavenly Homeland. -Pope Benedict XVI, Homily for the Solemnity of Corpus Christi, June 11, 2009.
Adore Him
"Outstanding among the forms of prayer fervently recommended by St. Alphonsus is the visit to the Most Blessed Sacrament or, as we would say today, adoration--brief or prolonged, personal or in community--of the Eucharist. 'Certainly,' wrote Alphonsus, 'among all the devotions this one of adoration of the sacramental Jesus is the first after the sacraments, the dearest to God and the most useful to us. O, what a beautiful delight to be before an altar with faith and to present to him our needs, as a friend does to another friend with whom one has full confidence!'" -Pope Benedict XVI, March 30, 2011, General Audience.
"Adoration! It is no little comfort to me, I confess, when before the Tabernacle I think that all those whom I have loved here on earth are adoring with me the same God—they face to face, I under the mystic veil. Members of the Church Triumphant and the Church Militant, we are kneeling before the same Redeemer, the same Father. My prayer rises to melt into the hymn of love which my dear ones beyond the tomb are lifting around the throne of the Lamb in their eternal dwelling, I meet them again in this sacred assembly" -Bl. John Baptist Scalabrini.
Visit Him often “We ought to visit Him often. How dear to Him is a quarter of an hour spared from our occupations or from some useless employment, to come and pray to Him, visit Him, and console Him for all the ingratitude He receives! When He sees pure souls hurrying to Him, He smiles at them” -St. John Vianney, Patron of Priests
The Eucharistic apostolate to which you dedicate your efforts is very precious. Persevere in it with commitment and passion, encouraging and spreading Eucharistic devotion in all its expressions. Enclosed in the Eucharist is the treasure of the Church, namely, Christ himself, who on the Cross immolated himself for the salvation of humanity" -Pope Benedict XVI, Nov. 11, Audience.
"Adoration leads to compassion for all human beings, and from this compassion comes the thirst to evangelise.... I exhort you to develop your spiritual life, giving pride of place to the personal meeting with Christ, Emmanuel, God with us. An authentically Eucharistic life is a missionary life." -Pope Benedict XVI, Feb. 3, 2011, address to Emmanuel Community.
Love Him like Mary "With how much faith and love the Virgin must have received and adored the Blessed Eucharist in her heart. For her, each time was like reliving the entire mystery of her Son Jesus, from conception to resurrection" -Pope Benedict XVI, June 14, 2008.
Trust in Despair "When tempted to despair, I have only one resource: to throw myself at the foot of the tabernacle like a little dog at the foot of his master." -St. John Vianney
"O Jesus, hidden in the Blessed Sacrament...with the trust and simplicity of a small child, I give myself to you today" -St. Maria Faustina of the Blessed Sacrament, Divine Mercy Diary, 228
St. John Vianney on the Eucharist:
Increase our merits in heaven
"Each time we contemplate with desire and devotion the Host in which is hidden Christ’s Eucharistic Body, we increase our merits in heaven and secure special joys to be ours later in the beatific vision of God." (St. Gertrude the Great, Benedictine & Patroness of the West Indies, 1256-1302, Germany, Feast, Nov. 16)
The mystery of insensibility
"There is a mystery, the greatest of all mysteries—not that my adored Lord is in the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar—His word has said it, and what so simple as to take that word which is truth itself?—but that souls of His own creation, whom He gave His life to save, who are endowed with His choicest gifts in all things else, should remain blind, insensible, and deprived of that light without which every other blessing is unavailing!" -St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, Convert, Widow, Mother, Religious.
FRUITS
-MAKES ALL THINGS NEW
Changes natural into supernatural life of love
There is only one means of changing a natural life into a supernatural one; that is the triumph of the Eucharist, in which Jesus Christ Himself sees to the education of man. The Eucharist develops faith in us. It elevates, ennobles, and purifies love in us. It teaches us to love. Love is the gift of self. Now, in the Eucharist Jesus gives Himself in His entirety. -St. Peter Julian Eymard
Without the Eucharist the Church would simply cease to exist. In fact, it is the Eucharist which renders a human community a mystery of communion, capable of bringing God to the world and the world to God. The Holy Spirit, which transforms the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ, also transforms those who receive it with faith into limbs of Christ's Body, thus the Church truly is a Sacrament of men's unity, with God and with one another. In an increasingly individualistic culture such as that in which we live in western societies and which is tending to spread throughout the world, the Eucharist constitutes a kind of 'antidote', working on the hearts and minds of believers and continually infusing them with the logic of communion, service and sharing, the logic of the Gospel." -Pope Benedict XVI, June 26, 2011, Angelus
We are transformed by the Eucharist
"Eternal life" begins in us even now, thanks to the transformation effected in us by the gift of the Eucharist: "He who eats me will live because of me" (Jn 6:57). These words of Jesus make us realize how the mystery "believed" and "celebrated" contains an innate power making it the principle of new life within us and the form of our Christian existence. By receiving the body and blood of Jesus Christ we become sharers in the divine life in an ever more adult and conscious way. -Sacramentum Caritatis #70
Gives desire for union and supernatural understanding.
Eucharistic souls are attracted instinctively, easily, and habitually to the Holy Eucharist. Therein is their happiness, their peace; there they find a supernatural knowledge of all things. That is why after holy Communion we often understand some things which before were incomprehensible to us. That is why some saints who were very ignorant spoke admirably of God. -St Peter Julian Eymard.
Tenderness and grace Jesus speaks to St. Gertrude the Great (1256-1302): "I have done My utmost to manifest the tenderness of My Heart in the Blessed Eucharist" Jesus revealed that by uniting ourselves to the Holy Eucharist we win graces for souls on earth and purgatory.
Strength to build a new society
"Communicate the hope of the Gospel and the strength to build a society that is more just and more worthy of man...from the source, from the Eucharist. Indeed it is from the Eucharist, in which Christ makes Himself present in His supreme act of love for us all, that we learn to live as Christians in society, so as to make it more welcoming, more united, richer in love, and more attentive to everyone's needs especially those of the weakest." -Pope Benedict XVI, Mar. 26, 2011
Power to help others
Saint Faustina: "I went at once before the Blessed Sacrament and offered myself with Jesus, present in the Most Holy Sacrament, to the Everlasting Father. Then I heard these words in my soul: Your purpose and that of your companions is to unite yourselves with Me as closely as possible; through love you will reconcile earth with heaven, you will soften the just anger of God, and you will plead for mercy for the world. I place in your care two pearls very precious to My Heart: these are the souls of priests and religious. You will pray particularly for them; their power will come from your diminishment. You will join prayers, fasts, mortifications, labors (9) and all sufferings to My prayer, fasting, mortifications, labors and sufferings and then they will have power before My Father.
Receiving & adoring leads to union
Receiving the Eucharist means adoring the One Whom we receive. Precisely in this way and only in this way do we become one with Him." (Pope Benedict XVI)
Makes us community
-Pope Benedict XVI: "Christ is truly present among us in the Eucharist. His presence is not static. It is a dynamic presence that grasps us, to make us his own, to make us assimilate him. Christ draws us to him, he makes us come out of ourselves to make us all one with him. In this way he also integrates us in the communities of brothers and sisters, and communion with the Lord is always also communion with our brothers and sisters. And we see the beauty of this communion that the Blessed Eucharistic gives us...He is the one same Christ who is present in the Eucharistic Bread of every place on earth" -June 1, 2005, L'Osservatore Romano.
Eucharist at the center of life and community
-Pope John Paul II: "Eucharist and mission are two inseparable realities. There is no authentic celebration and adoration of the Eucharist that does not lead to mission. At the same time, the mission presupposes another essential Eucharistic element: union of hearts....Never tire of celebrating and adoring it, together with the whole Christian community, especially on Sunday. Know how to put it at the center of your personal and community life so that communion with Christ will help you to undertake courageous options" -Oct. 11, 2004, Address to Young People, Rome.
