The Church, the Eucharist and the Body of Christ

In 2007, Pope Benedict XVI wrote a teaching letter on the topic of the Eucharist to the entire Church following a synod of bishops. In that letter he writes, “The Eucharist is constitutive of the Church's being and activity.
This is why Christian antiquity used the same words, Corpus Christi, to designate Christ's body born of the Virgin Mary, his eucharistic body and his ecclesial body” (Sacramentum Caritatis, 15).

In these words, the Holy Father reminds us that, ultimately, the mystery of the incarnation, the Holy Eucharist and the Holy Catholic Church is one single mystery – the Body of Christ.
 
This is not mere theological fancifulness, but a profound and striking truth of our faith. If we can allow this truth to penetrate our hearts, it will impact how we approach not only the celebration of the Mass but also the reality of the Church itself.

In our world, which so often thinks exclusively in sociological or political terms, this profound truth liberates us from being entrapped in applying that same logic to the Church.

The Church is not a mere organ of society, an aggregate of persons or groups of persons, but is the Body of Christ. The Church is not to succumb to the ideologies of the day, because it preexists them, as the Church is one with Christ, the eternal Word of the Father.

This is not a new idea, but, like Benedict said, a way of speaking from the earliest days of the Church. We can trace this thread back to the 1st century in the writings of Saint Paul: “The bread which we break, is it not a communion in the Body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Cor 10:16-17).

It is the Eucharist, which is not so much an after-the-fact celebration of the community we have formed on our own, but it is the divine action that not only transforms the sacred species, but also the gathered assembly. It is not so much that the Church makes the Eucharist, but the Eucharist makes the Church.

It is in this light that the inclusion of the Holy Eucharist among the sacraments of initiation has the most clarity. In baptism, we are adopted by the Father, incorporated (see the word corpus, body, here!) into the Body of Christ and so made co-heirs with Christ and members of his Church. 

It is in the Holy Eucharist that this fact is so powerfully renewed, not in the sense that it had grown stale, but in the sense in which we are re-presented to the Paschal Mystery itself in the Holy Mass.

Saint John Paul II beautifully articulated this when he wrote, “Our union with Christ … makes it possible for us, in him, to share in the unity of his body, which is the Church. The Eucharist reinforces the incorporation into Christ that took place in Baptism” (Ecclesia de Eucharistia, 23).

We are one with each other because we are one with him. The unity of the Church is Christ, and not a social or political reality we bring about by our action. In submission to Christ and his lordship, we find communion with the ecclesial Body of Christ.

It is, therefore, impossible to overstate the necessity of the Holy Eucharist in the life of the Church – it is the life, or better, the living of the Church.

The Church comes to be in the Holy Eucharist. The heart of the life of the Church – universal, diocesan and parochial – is the celebration of the Eucharist on Sunday. On Sunday, the first and the eighth day of creation, the day of the resurrection, the Lord’s Day, the Holy Church of God gathers to be actualized in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

It is not what we do leading up to the Sunday Eucharist or flowing out from it that is the heart of the life of the Church. 

His Holiness, Pope Francis, expressed this poignantly in a recent teaching: “There is no aspect of ecclesial life that does not find its summit and its source in the Liturgy. More than being the result of elaborate programs, a comprehensive, organic, and integrated pastoral practice is the consequence of placing the Sunday Eucharist, the foundation of communion, at the center of the life of the community” (Desiderio Desideravi, 37).

It is the Sunday Eucharist that gives the Church its existence. The mystery offered on the altar is extended in the life of the faithful into every zone and sphere of daily life.

In these years of Eucharistic Revival, we renew our recognition, not only of the wonder of the Real Presence, but of the entire Eucharistic mystery by which we are re-presented time and again to the paschal sacrifice of Christ. We not only remember this mystery, but we are transformed to embody it.

The mystery that is celebrated is consummated when that mystery is lived. The incarnation not only is extended in time through the sacred species on the altar, but also before the altar in the Church gathered in the pews. This sacramental communion enables us to be a different presence among the ideologies of the day, often torn by ideology and conflict.

It is my prayer that in this Eucharistic Revival we will see the unity between the communion of the altar and the communion of the Church, and that from seeing this unity we will receive it!