← All Classes

The Eucharist

The Eucharist

  • CCC 1322 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.

The Source and Summit of Ecclesial life

  • CCC 1324 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 1325 "The Eucharist is the efficacious sign and sublime cause of that communion in the divine life and that unity of the People of God by which the Church is kept in being. It is the culmination both of God's action sanctifying the world in Christ and of the worship men offer to Christ and through him to the Father in the Holy Spirit."
    • Eucharist → an act of thanksgiving to God → for creation, redemption, and sanctification.
    • The Lord’s Supper/Breaking of the Bread → the action that will allow Christ’s disciples to identify who he is after his Resurrection and designate the eucharistic assembly.
    • The Eucharistic Assembly → celebrated amid the assembly of the faithful.
    • The memorial of the Lord’s Passion and Resurrection
      • The Holy Sacrifice → makes present the one sacrifice of Christ the Savior and includes the Church’s offering.
      • The Holy and Divine Liturgy → The Church’s whole liturgy finds its center in the Eucharist.
    • Holy Communion → bread of angels, bread from heaven, medicine of immortality, viaticum (food for the journey).
    • Holy Mass (Missa) → the liturgy in which the mystery of salvation is accomplished concludes with the sending forth (missio) of the faithful.

The Eucharist in Sacred Scripture

  • Prefigured in the Old Testament (Melchizedek)
  • CCC 1334 In the Old Covenant bread and wine were offered in sacrifice among the first fruits of the earth as a sign of grateful acknowledgment to the Creator. But they also received a new significance in the context of the Exodus: the unleavened bread that Israel eats every year at Passover commemorates the haste of the departure that liberated them from Egypt; the remembrance of the manna in the desert will always recall to Israel that it lives by the bread of the Word of God.
  • John’s Prologue, Multiplication of the loaves, the bread of life discourse:

Institution of the Eucharist

  • CCC 1337 The Lord, having loved those who were his own, loved them to the end. Knowing that the hour had come to leave this world and return to the Father, in the course of a meal he washed their feet and gave them the commandment of love. 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, he 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."
    • Luke 22:14-23
    • CCC 1341 The command of Jesus to repeat his actions and words "until he comes" does not only ask us to remember Jesus and what he did. It is directed at the liturgical celebration, by the apostles and their successors, of the memorial of Christ, of his life, of his death, of his Resurrection, and of his intercession in the presence of the Father.

Components of the Sacrament

  • Minister: Bishop/Priest
  • Form: Words of Institution/Epiclesis
  • Matter: Bread and Wine
  • Effects: Union with Christ, detachment from sin, conformity to Christ, nourishes our charity. Union with the Church, commits us to the poor.
  • Other: Transubstantiation of bread and wine, as well as ourselves.
    • Receive at least once year, in a state of grace.

Parts of the Mass

  1. Liturgy of the Word and Liturgy of the Eucharist connection
    • Done since the beginning of the Church, and influenced the writing of some of the New Testament
  2. Preparation of the gifts
    • Gifts/offerings → NOT sacrificial offerings (p. 182)
    • Meaning of the bread/wine: Creation, Community, Personal Self
    • Preparatory step, not sacrifice, because:
  3. Eucharistic Prayer
    • Preface- Eucharistia – toda – berakah
      • Giving praise and invocation: recalling what God has done and what Jesus said and did (especially at the Last Supper/Calvary)
    • Epiclesis and the Words of Institution
      • Through Christ, we are lifted up into the Father’s presence.
      • Epiclesis → Calling Down, call upon the Holy Spirit to transform these gifts of bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood.
      • Words of Institution: said by the priest, in the person of Christ, obeying his command to do this in remembrance of him. Not mere recitation, but their actualization. These words effect what they signify (like at creation: “let there be light”)
    • Anamnesis and the Offering of Sacrifice
      • Anamnesis: remembering. Not a mere psychological remembrance, but the making present of the saving events of Christ’s mystery.
      • Allows us to participate in Christ’s Passover, making it present again, and receiving from it its inexhaustible/infinite value.
    • Communion Rite
      • Unites us together, just as common food does, but this Eucharistic food unites us in Christ. (194)
      • Conforms us to Christ, transforming our souls AND our bodies by healing and elevating them (purifies our passions and desires → reject sin)