|
What is needed today is a renewed catechesis on the
Eucharist. Catholic faithful must re-appropriate for themselves the
authentic teaching of the Catholic Church and the rich spiritual treasury
that is our faith in the Eucharist. In this regard, recently, Our Lord has
blessed his Church once again through our Universal Pastor and Shepherd,
Pope John Paul II. Fulfilling the ministry of Peter and the mandate given by
Jesus to St. Peter and his successors to "strengthen the brethren," the Holy
Father has issued a marvelous encyclical letter on the Eucharist entitled
Ecclesia de Eucharistia. All Catholics should obtain a copy of this document
and meditate upon it as they seek to gain a deeper understanding of the
centrality of the Eucharist in the Christian life. The Pope writes:
The Church was born of the paschal mystery. For this
very reason the Eucharist, which is in an outstanding way the sacrament of
the paschal mystery, stands at the center of the Church's life. This is
already clear from the earliest images of the Church found in the Acts of
the Apostles: 'They devoted themselves to the Apostles' teaching and
fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers' (2:42). The 'breaking
of bread' refers to the Eucharist. Two thousand years later we continue to
live that primordial image of the Church (#3, emphasis in original).
As the Pope makes clear, Sacred Scripture read in light of
the Living and Sacred Tradition of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church
gives us wonderful insights into the doctrine of our faith concerning the
Eucharistic mystery. The Church has been celebrating the Eucharist ever since
the dawn of her existence. There never has been a time in the life of the Church
when she did not celebrate the Eucharist. .
Long before there were Christian communities whose
doctrinal innovations and liturgical revolutions reinterpreted and restructured
the ancient worship of the Church by devising novel and ultimately
non-sacramental ways to encounter the Lord, the Catholic Church, which for the
first thousand years of the Church's history included those churches now called
"Orthodox", celebrated the Eucharist.
Those very same Orthodox churches whose existence today
constitutes a continuous witness to ancient forms of Christian life and worship,
though not in full communion with the Bishop of Rome, still have at the very
center of their life and worship the Holy Eucharist. Expressed in different
theological language and celebrated with different liturgical forms, the
essential faith in the Holy Eucharist as Christ's sacrifice on the cross, the
true presence of the Person of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist, and most
importantly the validity of the sacramental life by means of true apostolic
succession has resulted in so close a unity between the Catholic and Orthodox
churches that under certain circumstances, and with Ecclesiastical permission,
Catholic and Orthodox Christians may share Eucharistic communion, although full
and joint celebration of the Eucharist by both churches is not yet possible.
|
|
