Eucharist | WHY OUR LADY

EUCHARIST

At Betania, Venezuela in 1976, The Reconciler of People and Nations (Our Lady) made reference to the Eucharist as follows: "My daughter, My children, here I am... I beg each one of you to especially mend your lives, with penance, the needed prayer, to vindicate God's justice, so offended in these times by men... on the other hand, it is very important for you to attend Holy Mass frequently and to receive the Eucharist..."

“Attend devotedly the Sacrifice of the Holy Mass. Participate at the Eucharistic table which is

the center and culmination of the whole life of the human community. Those who dwell in silence before the Eucharistic Presence of Jesus become children of the light. They will be able to sow goodness. They will acquire the disposition of living the Gospel.”

... “I call you, for the great moment of reconciliation has arrived... and you need to prepare yourselves as soon as possible... for example: in the sowing of doctrine, catechism, spiritual exercises, the Gospel, and mainly the Eucharist. Daily Communion, the soul's nourishment, accompanied with work, in a task in which you can be productive, sowing the furrows with the holy seed of nourishment..."

At San Nicolas, Argentina in 1983, Our Lady of the Rosary made reference to the Eucharist as follows: “Jesus reveals Himself, accessible to all.”

“I tell you brethren, Jesus’ Eucharist is Live and Real Body! Adore Him and Love Him! My children, it is in the Eucharist where He again becomes Body and Blood and it is from the Eucharist that He wants to save the souls prepared to receive Him!”

“Adore the Body and Blood of My Son in the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar.”

“In Holy Mass, one not only receives the Body and Blood of Christ symbolically, Christ Jesus is present, and He offers Himself truly.”

“I want my consecrated children to give the Mother whatever She asks. The consecration must be made on a special day of the Mother’s. This is the consecration that I ask in my Sanctuary, that:

1) they devote at least one hour per day to prayer

2) they receive Communion daily

3) they be humble

4) they be at the complete service of Mary

5) they be pleasing to God each day by living as consecrated souls

6) they be united to the Love of Her Son

7) they ask for the grace to live under the Light of the Holy Spirit”

The following words re: the Feast of Corpus Christi were obtained in an article called: Eucharist and Church – the Radical Connection is in Us, from Littlemore Tracts dated June 6, 2015

In the final lines of St. Matthew’s Gospel, Our Divine Savior, who was about to ascend to the Father, reassures his disciples of his continued presence with them, with these beautiful words: “And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the world.”

The Feast of Corpus Christi is celebrated throughout the Catholic World to give thanks to the Father of Lights for this great gift of His Son, who remains with us always, and in many ways, till the end of time, but most especially and most wonderfully in the Sacrament of His Body and Blood. On this day we celebrate the faith of the Church in the continuing and marvelously real presence of Jesus in the Holy Eucharist, continually fulfilling his promise to remain with us always, but also fulfilling his even greater promise that we read in John 6:55: “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink.”

These words of Jesus will always force His disciples to make a fundamental choice, either to accept them at face value and hold to the literal truth of the Eucharist, as His true Body and Blood, or to reject their literal meaning and reduce them to some kind of symbolic meaning, or to take them literally but reject them completely and follow Jesus no longer. That last choice was made by some disciples who first heard Jesus speak this doctrine, for we are told that when he continued to insist on this kind of language: “After this, many of His disciples went back, and they no longer walked with Him.”

(Jn 6:67)

Of the three possible choices, the second one, the attempt to reduce Jesus’ words to purely symbolic language is really the most difficult to justify, and precisely because of this one fact recorded by John, that many who actually heard these words spoken by Jesus found them simply too hard to accept and they said: “This saying is difficult, who is able to listen to it?” (Jn 6:61) John then testifies that they stopped being His disciples because he spoke these scandalous words. They went away sad like the rich young man, and Jesus let them go with no explanation.

So when many Christians today, including most Protestant Christians, reduce these words of Jesus to pure metaphor, that is they reject their literal meaning which is taught by both Catholics and Orthodox Christians, how can they explain why these early disciples walked away, and yet Jesus did not call them back and simply explain to them the same metaphorical interpretation that these modern Christians place on His words. After all, Jesus did use parables and metaphors in his teaching, and yet here, when many of his disciples take his words literally and walk away because they are so hard to take, Jesus chooses to say nothing to correct their understanding of His words, and He simply asks the chosen 12 whether they too are so scandalized that want to leave Him.

Secondly, this denial of the real presence of Jesus, that is, of the literal interpretation of His words – “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink His blod, you will not have life in you.” (Jn. 6:54) – rejects the virtually unanimous teaching of the Christian world for the first 15 centuries of Christianity, until the time of the Protestant movements in the 16th century. How, then, are we to possibly explain how for 15 centuries virtually the entire Christian world misunderstood Jesus’ meaning when it came to the most important sacrament He left to his Church?

The teaching of Jesus that the Eucharist is his real body and blood cannot be sidestepped, or reduced to metaphor so easily. He could not have been more shockingly clear about this sacrament. “For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink.” (Jn. 6:56) The bread becomes His true body and the wine becomes His true blood, and that is why the Church from the beginning believes that Christ is truly, really and entirely present under both sacramental signs. Indeed, at first the apostles themselves were also offrended (“Does this offend you? Jn. 6:62) by this teaching, and Jesus knew it, and that’s why He asked them also: “Do you also want to go away?” (Jn. 6:68) That was it; nothing more; no explanations; no symbolic interpretations to set them straight; just those awful words: “Do you also want to leave?”

And John tells us that many in fact did abandon Jesus then and there because of these words of His on the Eucharist, and many Christians over the past 500 years have denied their straightforward meaning in favor of some symbolical or metaphorical meaning. Today, depending on the poll one looks at, only between 30 and 45 percent of baptized Catholics actually believe that the consecrated elements really and truly contain the body and blood of Christ. A significant number of Catholics have never even heard of this teaching. The Church has a huge problem on its hands.

There is no question that these words of Jesus, and the Church’s constant teaching on the real presence based upon them, are not easy to accept if we take them at face value. It requires a tremendous act of faith to hold to this doctrine of the Eucharist, yet no more tremendous than our act of faith in the Incarnation itself. If one has a full and unreserved faith in the literal truth that God has actually become man, without ever ceasing to be God, then one can surely also come to believe in the literal truth of the Eucharist: that the bread, when consecrated, is changed into His body, and the wine, when consecrated is changed into His Blood, and that His sacred body and blood become the food we must consume if we would have eternal life in us – “Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you.” (Jn 6:54)

Catholic faith in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, however, is not just a matter of words. If we really believe this truth, unlike those in the religious polls who do not or who try to dodge its true meaning, then the Eucharist will be for us the most sacred, the most precious and the most valued treasure of our faith. If we really believe in the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, surely we will never be careless or thoughtless in receiving this sacrament. We will never receive this sacred guest with indifference, never receive and walk out the door without a thanksgiving, as if Jesus were not present within us. We will never miss Sunday Mass and the gift of the Bridegroom to us.

Moreover, a deep faith and devotion to the Eucharistic Lord will surely make us much more conscious of just how close Christ remains to us always and how we are organically united to Christ and His Church. There is a most intimate connection between the Eucharist, the Eucharistic Body of Christ, and His Mystical, Body the Church. This was understood already by the early Fathers and Doctors of the Church. The mystery of the Church is tremendous because in the Church we are organically united to Christ and all the other members like ourselves. And the Eucharist is the organic food – analogous to organic nature – of the Mystical Body, that which unites our bodies and souls to Christ and through Him to all our brethren. We draw supernatural life (grace) and spiritual energy (charity) from the Eucharistic Body of Christ, and these gifts deepen our organic unity with the whole Mystical Body.

We can never even begin to exhaust this great dual mystery of the two Bodies of Christ, Eucharistic and Mystical, and their inner, organic and necessary relationship. Jesus did not give us Himself in this most concrete way in the Eucharist just to test our faith, but to save our souls, and our bodies, and make us one with Him and through Him one with the whole Church most intimately. The Church is not just a gathering of people but a living organism, and its food is Christ Himself, in the whole of His humanity and the saving power of His divinity.

Think of this great truth. In the Eucharist our God comes to us in the most humble possible way, under the outward appearances of ordinary bread and wine, but He is the real substance of this meal. He comes under these humble signs to remind us that He alone is our super-substantial food and drink that brings us Eternal Life. He comes to feed us and transform us into creatures of light, and to fill us with the same love that motivates Him to come to us in this humble fashion.

The Church’s teaching on the real presence is certainly at times a challenge to our faith: do we really believe in Him and in the Eucharist as He created it? Do we live in Him and from Him as the Church teaches us. Or will we eventually abandon our early faith and like the men of old, just go our own way, sadly, and follow Him no longer? We cannot avoid His awful question every time we are seriously confounded by the full truth of the Eucharist: “ “Do you also want to go away?” But with Simon Peter we too must answer firmly, “Lord, to whom would we go? You have the words of eternal life. And we have believed, and we recognize that you are the Christ, the Son of God.”

One of the greatest things that we can do to help the souls in Purgatory finally get to Heaven, is to spend at least one-half hour, one-on-one, with Jesus Christ in adoration of the Eucharist, the Blessed Sacrament. Participation in Adoration of Jesus in the Eucharist can earn either a Plenary indulgence, or at least a partial indulgence for the souls in Purgatory. The souls are not able to help themselves when they are in Purgatory; but it is the belief of the Catholic Church that we can help them get to heaven by prayer and by obtaining indulgences for them. So, our participation in Eucharistic Adoration of Jesus just may be what is needed for our loved ones, or any other soul, to finally get to Heaven.

The Missionaries of the Blessed Sacrament have identified for us the following three Biblical reasons to help us understand the value of spending an hour a week with Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament:

1. HE IS REALLY THERE! “I Myself Am the Living Bread come down from Heaven.” (Jn 6:51)

2. When you look upon the Sacred Host, YOU LOOK UPON JESUS, the Son of God. “Indeed, this is the will of My Father, that everyone who looks upon the Son and believes in Him shall have eternal life. Him I will raise up on the last day.” (Jn 6:40)

3. Each hour we spend with Jesus on earth will leave our soul EVERLASTINGLY MORE BEAUTIFUL AND GLORIOUS in heaven. “They who humble themselves shall be exalted …” “All of us, gazing on the lord’s glory with unveiled faces, are being transformed from glory to glory into His very image.” (Lk 18:14; 2 Cor 3:18)

The Missionaries of the Blessed Sacrament have identified for us the following three Church teachings to help us understand the value of spending an hour a week with Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament:

1. The best time you spend on earth is with your Best Friend, Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament!” “How great is the value of converse with Christ (in the Blessed Sacrament), for there is nothing more consoling on earth, nothing more efficacious for advancing along the road of holiness.” (Article 67)

2. With transforming mercy, Jesus makes our hearts one with His. Jesus stays in the Holy Eucharist so all may learn to be, like Himself, meek and humble of heart and to seek not their own interests but those of God. (Article 67)

3. If Jesus were actually visible in the Church, everyone would run to welcome Him. But He remains hidden in the Sacred Host, under the appearance of bread, because He is calling us to faith: The Blessed Sacrament which is …the living heart of each of our churches. “And it is our very sweet duty to honor and adore in the blessed Host which our eyes see, the Incarnate Word whom they cannot see, and who, without leaving heaven, is made present before us.” (Article 26)

Here are just three of the messages given to us by Our Lady referencing the Eucharist:

July 2, 2016: "Dear children, my real, living presence among you should make you happy because this is the great love of my Son. He is sending me among you so that, with a motherly love, I may grant you safety; that you may comprehend that pain and joy, suffering and love, make your soul live intensely; that I may call you anew to glorify the Heart of Jesus, the heart of faith, the Eucharist. From day to day through the centuries, my Son, alive, returns among you - He returns to you, though He has never left you. When one of you, my children, returns to Him, my motherly heart leaps with joy. Therefore, my children, return to the Eucharist, to my Son. The way to my Son is difficult, full of renunciations, but at the end, there is always the light. I understand your pains and sufferings, and with motherly love I wipe your tears. Trust in my Son, because He will do for you what you would not even know how to ask for. You, my children, you should be concerned only for your soul, because it is the only thing on earth that belongs to you. You will bring it, dirty or clean, before the Heavenly Father. Remember, faith in the love of my Son will always be rewarded. I implore you, in a special way, to pray for those whom my Son called to live according to Him and to love their flock. Thank you."

August 2, 2019: "Dear children, great is the love of my Son. If you were to come to know the greatness of His love, you would never cease to adore and thank Him. He is always alive with you in the Eucharist, because the Eucharist is His Heart. The Eucharist is the heart of faith. He has never left you. Even when you tried to go away from Him, He has not left you. That is why my motherly heart is happy when I watch how you - filled with love - return to Him, when I see that you are coming to Him by the way of reconciliation, love, and hope. My motherly heart knows that when you set out on the way of faith, you are shoots - buds. But along with prayer and fasting you will be fruits, my flowers, apostles of my love; you will be carriers of light and will illuminate all those around you with love and wisdom. My children, as a mother I am imploring you: pray, think, and contemplate. Everything beautiful, painful and joyful that happens to you - all of this makes you grow spiritually, so that my Son may grow in you. My children, surrender yourselves to Him, believe Him, trust in His love, let Him lead you. Let the Eucharist be the place where you will feed your souls, and afterwards, will spread love and truth - will bear witness to my Son. Thank you."

May 2, 2018: "Dear children, all that my Son, who is the light of love, has done and does, He has done out of love. Also you, my children, when you live in love and love your neighbors, you are doing the will of my Son. Apostles of my love, make yourselves little; open your pure hearts to my Son so that He can work through you. With the help of faith, be filled with love. But, my children, do not forget that the Eucharist is the heart of faith. This is my Son who feeds you with His Body and strengthens you with His Blood. This is a miracle of love: my Son who always comes anew, alive, to bring life back to souls. My children, by living in love you are doing the will of my Son and He lives in you. My children, my motherly desire is for you to always love Him more, because He is calling you with His love. He is giving you love so that you may spread it to all those around you. As a mother, through His love, I am with you to speak the words of love and hope to you - to speak to you the eternal words that are victorious over time and death - so as to call you to be my apostles of love. Thank you."