Eucharist

It is the Catholic Church that is the supernatural organism in which men, by sacramental incorporation into Christ, are elevated into the life of the Holy Trinity and, by the Sacrament of the Eucharist, are maintained therein.

The diocese, gathered round its bishop, is thus not merely a part of the Church of God , but is its full manifestation in a particular place. Like the cell in a living organism, it is a coherent organic entity, yet it lives only because it coheres in the whole body. Like the sacramental Body of Christ in the Eucharist, the mystical Body of Christ which is the Church is not divided into portions by its extension in space and time; it is tota in toto, et tota in aliqua parte.

For the pastoral activity of the Christian minister is concerned with saving men into the Church as members of Christ, so that they may be offered in Christ to the Father in the totality of their functions and activities, that their life and their liturgy may become one. The Eucharist is therefore both the source and the focus of the priest's pastoral action. And the Christian priest is a priest only by participation in the priesthood of the Good Shepherd, who gave his life for the sheep in order to bring them into the Father's fold and who identified himself with them to the point at which he himself became the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world.

Any description of it must be highly analogical. But it does give its recipient a share (a full share if he is a bishop, a partial share if he is a presbyter) in the Apostolate with which Christ has endowed his Church as the organ of its unity; and, while that apostolicity will be most clearly manifested in the priest's sacramental ministrations and supremely when he stands at the altar as the celebrant of the Eucharist, it attaches in one way or another to everything that he does, for it arises out of something that he is. And so he will take it with him beyond the grave. It should be added that though, according to the common teaching, sacraments will cease in heaven, there is a sense in which the liturgy will not cease. For the worship of heaven is an organic, symphonic, differentiated and corporate worship; and it is significant that in the Apocalypse it is described under the figure of the Eucharist. So, after the Second Coming of Christ at the Last Day, in the General Resurrection (which is the Resurrection of Christ's Body the Church), there will be transfiguration but not destruction. The apostles will have received their thrones as the judges and patriarchs of the New Israel.

It is impossible to consider either the sacraments in general or the Sacrament of the Eucharist in particular with any approximation to adequacy unless we see them as organically related to the Catholic Church. It is one of the great tragedies of Christian history that the great efflorescence of sacramental theology, which began in the Middle Ages and continued right through the controversies of the Reformation and after, took place in the almost entire absence of any comparable development in the thought of theologians about the Church itself, and indeed at a time when the primitive Catholic conception of the Church had fallen almost entirely out of view. It must of course be admitted that in the minds of the greatest of the mediaeval thinkers some grasp of the Church's true nature and of the organic connection between the Church and the sacraments was not altogether lacking. Does not St. Thomas Aquinas tell us that the ultimate effect, the res, of the Eucharist is the unity of the mystical Body? But where, even in St. Thomas , shall we find an adequate discussion of the mystical Body itself?

It is important to recognise at the start that the whole question of the origins and history of the Christian Eucharist is a highly complicated and difficult one in which at the present time a large number of historical and textual scholars are engaged.