Sr. Brigitte Maria Hoegemann FSO
In his first term at Oxford, on Sunday, 30th November 1817, John Henry Newman walked for the first time to “the communion table” in Trinity Chapel, his college. He had not mentioned preparations for confirmation and first communion in the long weekly letters home and did not refer to the event in the one that he wrote a week later (13th, 21st, 28th Nov., and 8th Dec., see LD I 44-48). The entry in his diary simply reads: “made first communion” (LD I 48).
In the Apologia, almost fifty years later, Newman passed over his first communion, though he had described what he called his first conversion, the “beginning of divine faith” in the school-boy in the autumn of 1816, when he “fell under the influences of a definite Creed” (Apo I 4) and embraced the two fundamental doctrines on God the Creator and the Holy Trinity with a lasting effect on his life (Apo I 5, 7). When in his seventies Father Newman reflected on a photograph of the Trinity communion table at the Birmingham Oratory, he remarked that he had been in mourning for Princess Charlotte that day and recollected in detail his difficulties in getting off the black silk gloves and that he ruined one in his “flurry”, when he “had to receive the Bread” (Ph. N. 195f).
To the fifteen-year-old schoolboy, God the Creator became as a certain as his own existence; soon afterwards, the one God in three Persons became an overwhelming reality for him, which should last all through his long life. The sixteen-year-old Oxford student may not have been fully aware of the fact, that Christ the Lord did not only come symbolically to him in the Eucharist but really, yet he certainly knew that communion required respect and awe. Two years later, he remarked in a letter to his former mentor at Ealing upon “the habitual negligence of the awfulness of the Holy Communion” among many of his fellow students, who went to communion on Trinity Sunday, having drunk all through the night at the College Gaudy. Still, more than a decade and a half passed after his first communion, before, through the influence of his dear friend Froude, he gradually came to believe that the Lord was truly and really present in the Eucharist. (cf Apo I 25)
It would be both fascinating and rewarding to follow the development of Newman’s belief in the Real Presence and to show how it is central to the development of his understanding of the nature of the Church. Such a scholarly piece of research on Newman’s thinking on the Eucharist would have to start with a discussion of it in the context of the Oxford Movement as a “eucharistic movement”1, and as such opposed to the rationalism and liberalism in religion at Oxford University, which the Tractarians called the religion of the day, and then show how Newman’s understanding of the Eucharist changed and how he was finally led to embrace the full Catholic doctrine on the Eucharist together with the full doctrine on the Church, before characterising his later preaching on the Eucharist.
Expect here something much simpler! Pope John Paul II was called home in the middle of the Eucharistic Year, which began on 7th October 2004. We now recognise it as his last wonderful gift to the Church. Newman the pastor can help us, as he helped his contemporaries – expressed with the late Holy Father: “to contemplate, praise and adore in a special way this ineffable Sacrament … the incomparable treasure which Christ has entrusted to his Church.” (Mane Nobiscum Domine 29) It had been Newman’s aim – as that of Pope John Paul II – to “encourage a more lively and fervent celebration of the Eucharist, leading to a Christian life transformed by love.” (Ibid.)
Not only in his sermons, prayers and meditations, but in many of his letters, Newman wrote on different aspects of the mystery of the Eucharist; also in the Tracts for the Times, in his Via Media, his Lectures on the Doctrine of Justification, his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, his Idea of the University, in both of his novels and even in his late philosophical book, The Grammar of Assent.
With the pastoral aim in mind, let us focus particularly on selected sermons of Newman, both as Anglican and Catholic, as well as on his Meditations and Devotions to elucidate some of the features of his teaching on Christ’s presence in the species of bread and wine, which he in the Catholic tradition calls the Real Presence. As he did not ponder as a theologian on the Eucharist in his sermons, but preached about it as a pastor in different contexts and in relation to other mysteries of our faith, it seems right to pick up some of the themes, which were closest to his heart when meditating and preaching on the Eucharistic Lord.
First of all the presence of the Lord, “the body and blood, together with the soul and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ” (as formulated in the Council of Trent, 1551: DS 1651) in the Eucharist has to be seen in the context of the manifold personal communion of God and man, starting with God’s presence in mankind’s paradise and in the first parents before their fall.
1. The Presence of God – the Life of Man (PPS IV 15,229)
“When Adam fell”, the young don and vicar of the University Church described the effects of the fall of man, “his soul lost its true strength; he forfeited the inward light of God’s presence, and became the wayward, fretful, excitable, and miserable being which his history has shown him to be ever since; with alternate strength and feebleness, nobleness and meanness, energy in the beginning and failure in the end… It lost its spiritual life and health, which was necessary to complete its nature, and to enable it to fulfil the ends for which it was created.” (PPS V 22, 313) With the presence of God, which was not only around them, making God’s creation their paradise, but also in them as the supernatural life of the Spirit that the Maker had breathed into them, Adam and Eve, and with them mankind, lost with the light of their souls their guidance and strength to fulfil the aim of their lives: which is to praise God in whose image and likeness they were created. The presence of God had been their spiritual life, it had been their grace, which complemented and completed their nature and had been the cause of their happiness.
The human being, Newman explained in another sermon to his Anglican congregation, “is not sufficient for his own happiness: he is not happy except the Presence of God be with him…. he has a void within him which needs filling, and he knows not how to fill it.” He reminded his parishioners that though many people did not even know their own need, their actions showed that they felt it, for they were “ever restless when… not dull and insensible, seeking in one thing or another that blessing… lost.” (SSD XXI 312)
He made his congregation aware of the fact that the soul receives pleasure through a person’s affections as the body does through the channels of its senses. To “love, to hope, to joy, to admire, to revere, to adore” make the person reach out towards the object of love, hope, joy or admiration. He pointed out that lastly “He alone is sufficient for the heart who made it.”(Ibid.) Newman speaks here with the existential experience and the words of Saint Augustine. Many of us will remember the beginning of the Confessions, when the bishop prays: “Great art Thou, o Lord, and greatly to be praised…and man desires to praise Thee… For Thou hast made us for Thyself and our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee.”(Conf. I, 1)
2. A Higher Gift than Grace (VVO Praise to the Holiest)
God’s answer to mankind’s restless search for happiness, after they had lost paradise when they lost His presence, is His own coming, the incarnation of the Word of God and His redemption of mankind in the fullness of time. Although Jesus Christ came once only, a man among men and still God, until He had fulfilled His mission to live and die for our salvation and returned to His Father, He has remained with His Church and will stay with it until the end of time.
Years before Newman was received into the fullness of the Catholic Church, he claimed in his sermon one Easter Sunday that in the Church Christ had come so close to us “that we cannot gaze upon Him or discern Him … He makes us his members … He is over us and within us” (PPS VI 10,121f.) This is the period of the Church, “the Day of the Gospel, the Day of Grace” from Christ’s coming into the world and His remaining with the Church to the “eternity of blessedness in God’s presence for all believers” (1253). Newman expresses the mystery unforgettably: “The Holy Spirit causes, faith welcomes the indwelling of Christ in the heart.” (PPS VI 10,126)
Referring to the Emmaus event, he reminded his congregation:
“Only by faith is He known to be present; He is not recognized by sight. When He opened his disciples’ eyes, He at once vanished. He removed his visible presence and left but a memorial of Himself. He vanished from sight that He might be present in a sacrament; and in order to connect His visible presence to His presence invisible, He for one instant manifested Himself to their open eyes; manifested Himself, if I may so speak, while He passed from His hiding place of sight without knowledge, to that of knowledge without sight.” PPS VI 10,132f.)
What He left to the disciples in Emmaus is what He left to us: His memorial, and more than that: His living presence spiritually in the Church and – through the Holy Spirit – in each of its members through baptism, and His Real Presence, communion with Himself, the living God and man in the Blessed Eucharist and in the Christians who have just received Him in the Blessed Eucharist and adore Him in this Most Blessed Sacrament of the Altar. Christ’s real presence is given to each communicant in a most personal, and if accepted with a sincere and humble heart, transforming way. With Newman’s own words:
“Christ then took on our nature, when he would redeem it; He redeemed it by making it suffer in His own Person; He purified it, by making it pure in His own Person. He first sanctified it in Himself, made it righteous, made it acceptable to God, submitted it to an expiatory passion, and then He imparted it to us. He took it, consecrated it, broke it, and said, “Take, and divide it among your-selves.” (PPS V 9, 117f)
It seems worthwhile to reflect on the amazing rhythm of this text, in which Newman describes the redeeming actions of the Only-begotten-of the-Father who became man to save mankind. When describing Christ’s healing and sanctifying of the human nature in His own person, action by action, first sentence after sentence, then phrase by phrase, one after the other in one sentence and breath, Newman must have left breathless those who listened to him.
Moreover, after he spoke of Christ’s “expiatory passion” they must have expected him to refer to Christ’s death and his resurrection, but these most important deeds in the sequence of Christ’s sacrificial actions were not even mentioned by the preacher. Instead he said into the void, created by the expectancy of the congregation: “He imparted it to us”, taking up the words of the priest during consecration which introduce Christ’s own words in the Eucharistic Prayer. He, Christ gave Himself to us, He gave His body and blood, the refined human nature, and with it His whole person, man and God. Newman had felt no need to refer to the Last Supper before he mentioned the passion. When he led his congregation directly from the passion to the Eucharistic prayer, it seems that he wanted to bring home to them that Christ’s offering of Self to His friends in breaking the bread and passing on the cup in the cenacle and the bloody sacrifice on Golgotha are one and the same with the sacrifice on the altar, wherever and whenever mass is celebrated; that the human nature, which Christ took on in His incarnation, the body, which He received from the Virgin Mary, in which He suffered the passion, died for us on the cross, rose, and in which He conversed with His disciples before He – mystery after mystery – took it, glorified in the Holy Spirit, to His Father, that this same glorified body is the one in which the Lord comes to us in holy communion.
Newman was convinced that no one “realises the mystery of the Incarnation but must feel disposed towards that of the Holy Communion.” (PPS VI 11,151) Both are mysteries of the coming of Christ, longed for as the hope of mankind for salvation. If we accept that God unites Himself, His divinity and His spirit, to humanity, nature and matter in his birth as man, then we can also accept that He binds His presence to the species of bread and wine. When Jesus says, “This is my body, this is my blood”, this remains a mystery, but our faith in it is not against our reason.
Years later the Catholic priest wrote in The Dream of Gerontius:
“O wisest love! That flesh and blood
Which did in Adam fail,
Should strive afresh against the foe,
Should strive and should prevail.”
“And that a higher gift than grace
Should flesh and blood refine,
God’s presence and His very Self,
And Essence all-divine.” (VV 360)
In one of his discourses, Newman elucidates the beautiful lines from the second and third stanza of “Praise to the Holiest: “It was not enough to give man grace… a celestial light, and a sanctity such as Angels had received”. To redeem fallen mankind, “the Wisdom of God, who is eternally glorious and beautiful”, resolved “to impress these attributes upon men by His very presence and personal indwelling in their flesh” – the Only-begotten Image of the Father became also “the First-born of every creature”. The Giver of all graces, the higher gift than grace, became man in Jesus Christ, not only redeeming and sanctifying human nature in His own person but enabling His disciples by His example and His teaching, and foremost by His indwelling in them to imitate Him and remain in union with Him as He does in the Holy Spirit with His and our Father, the Almighty.
The lost gift of God’s presence in Adam could only be restored to mankind by God Himself: The Giver of everything good did so in a superabundant way, once and for all in the life and death of Jesus Christ 2000 years ago, and through all times in the Church person by person by means of the sacraments. We are baptized into Christ’s death and through His resurrection reborn, supernatural grace re-enlightening our nature, so that we can fight the good fight against the inclination to sin. We are strengthened in Holy Communion by Christ’s real presence, so that we can imitate His life, and in His strength are enabled to assent like Him to the Father’s will.
3. God’s Condescension – Omnipotence in Bonds (DMC 14, 284, SVO VI,75)
God did not only become man, the Creator a creature, but He was as man subject to men. He was not only subject (Luke 2:51) to his creatures, Newman wrote in his Sermon Notes but He even became their captive and prisoner. As the head of the planned Catholic University in Dublin he preached on that topic in the University Church in 1857. (SVO VI, 81) Both times he enumerated and described the many ways in which – for our redemption – the Almighty was subjected to his creatures: In the person of Jesus, Omnipotence was helpless in His Mother Mary’s womb, carried about in His infancy, a refugee in Egypt; then subject to His parents in Nazareth in His youth, adolescence and manhood, bound by His specific trade, then laid hold of by His relatives as beside Himself. Christ Jesus was even handled by “the foul spirit” who came to tempt the Saviour in his manhood, “the rebel archangel, who would not be in subjection” to God and as the devil has become the worst enemy of mankind, jealous of God’s plan of salvation for men. Jesus Christ suffered the devil to take Him up and transport Him “according to his will” – allowing him that momentary possession of Himself. Finally He allowed, “to be given into the hands of the violent” who betrayed, slandered, tortured and killed Him. (SVO, VI, 81-86, SN 140) “O marvellous dispensation, full of mystery!”, Newman exclaimed, “That the God of Nature, the Lord of the Universe, should take to Himself a body to suffer and die in…” (Ibid.)
But the marvel is even greater and of far reaching consequences for every Christian in every age. Newman reminded his Irish congregation that Christ’s voluntary subjection goes on in the lasting miracle of His Body and Blood under visible signs, the species of bread and wine. He explained: “He took bread, and blessed, and made it His Body; He took wine, and gave thanks, and made it His Blood; and He gave His priests the power to do what He had done. Henceforth, He is in the hands of sinners once more. Frail, ignorant, sinful man, by the sacerdotal power given to him, compels the presence of the Highest; he lays Him up in a small tabernacle; he dispenses Him to a sinful people. Those who are only just now cleansed from mortal sin, open their lips for Him; those who are soon to return to mortal sin, receive Him into their breasts; those who are polluted with vanity and selfishness and ambition and pride, presume to make Him their guest; the frivolous, the tepid, the worldly-minded, fear not to welcome Him. Alas! Alas! Even those who wish to be more in earnest, entertain Him with cold and wandering thoughts, and quench that Love which would inflame them with Its own fire, did they but open to It.” (SVO VI, 87)
In such words, Newman brought home to his congregation that though our senses experience but the species, bread and wine, in faith we know that under these visible signs we do see and touch and eat and drink and communicate with the invisible Lord Himself. In overwhelming condescension Christ makes Himself food and drink for us – not for our growth, but that He may grow in us, so that with St. Paul we may say, it is not I that live, but Christ lives in me! Therefore the communicants ought to approach the altar in great respect and receive the Lord with awe and great love, but we do handle the consecrated host negligently and might do so even blasphemously. Newman referred to St Paul, who in 1 Cor. shows how easy it is to profane the Lord’s Supper.
The One who came down to be with his creatures, God and man with men, reconciling them by His own sacrifice with Almighty God, His and our Father, went also up again to his Father in his once broken, then resurrected and glorified human body. He did so, Newman explained to his congregation, “to present (as it were) before the Throne that sacred Tabernacle which was the instrument of His passion, – His pierced hands and wounded / side, – in token of the atonement which He has effected for the sins of the world.” (PPS II 18 207/8) With the Fathers of the Early Church Newman was certain already as Anglican that in the Eucharist we meet Christ Jesus, man and God, the one who died and the one who is everlasting with his Father and has drawn our human nature into the Holy Trinity. As he comes to us in communion in the fullness of His person as man and God, Newman was certain that we should not envy the Apostles’ closeness to their master, as we are privileged more than they were who lived with Him.
So far we looked with Newman (1) at the presence of God as man’s spiritual life, the grace of mankind, which was lost through disobedience and regained by (2) Christ’s coming in person as a higher gift than grace to fallen mankind. A third strand was (3.) the loving obedience that Christ Jesus in His manhood shows to the will of His Father, atoning for the wilfulness and disobedience of mankind by making Himself subject to His creatures, first humble as man among men: By taking on Adam’s nature (God acted “as if even humility … was in the number of His attributes.” (DMC 14,298)), then as the Crucified and Risen, the glorious Lord giving Himself to us as food – under the species of bread and wine – until the end of time.
4. The Holy Sacrifice and Mass – a Standing Fact for all Times (MD 407)
Opening up for us three aspects of the mystery of the ongoing presence of Christ in the world, Newman helped us to ponder on what we first adore: the mystery of the full, true, real, and essential presence of our Saviour in the holy Eucharist: The incarnation was, and the ongoing “Real Presence” is a mysterious condescension for God. For man, Christ’s incarnation and His real presence, into which we are drawn when we open ourselves for His coming not only to us, but into us, receiving Holy Communion, is a higher gift than grace:
The restored human nature in the person of Christ Jesus is immeasurably more beautiful than the original nature of mankind in Adam and Eve, in their state of grace before the fall. God Himself became man and with His divine nature, He took on a second, our human, nature. In this way, Christ healed and sanctified the human nature in His own body.
But He did immeasurably more for human nature, for us: He not only suffered death on a cross, but the Lamb of God took on Himself all the suffering of sin-laden mankind and all the evil ever committed by men, atoning in His human nature for all the atrocities which had been committed through the ages before He came to live among us and those which would be committed even after His sacrificial death. The Lord’s mental suffering in Gethsemane surpassed to such a degree the strength of His body, that it shed blood before being scourged and crucified. Newman expressed some very deep, if not mystical, insights into the mystery of Our Lord’s suffering in Gethsemane in His sermon The Mental Suffering of the Lord (DMC 16, 323ff)
And even more: By instituting the Holy Eucharist, the Lord did not leave his disciples alone, once He took His resurrected, glorified human nature home into the unity of the Holy Trinity. By the power of the Holy Spirit who dwells in the baptized making them members of Christ’s Church, the Lord comes to us in Holy Mass making us participants in His Last Supper, in His sacrificial death on Golgotha, and even – if we may dare to say so – in His resurrection. He gives us His real presence, His person, as our stay in the passing of time and as our strength, enabling us to fight the good fight in the events, matters and encounters of everyday life.
No wonder that besides the weekly Communion Service on each Sunday, Newman the Anglican pastor introduced very early on a daily service in the parish church, leading his parishioners to continuous prayer as a more and more continuous awareness of their living in the presence of God, “in preparation for the Holy Communion” on a Sunday. (PPS III 21, 315). Ordained in Rome on Trinity Sunday 1847, Newman celebrated his First Mass in the small Jesuit Chapel upstairs in the Collegio di Propaganda on Corpus Christi. (LD XII, p.86). Seven years later he preached about this feast: “There is no feast … which …shows more wonderfully what Christianity is.” He claimed that the doctrine is nearer to our life as Christians than any other feast in the Church’s year, as the Eucharist is God’s present gift and privilege to us. (SN 127) In his long life he would advice his parishioners and friends, who wanted to come closer to the Lord, to participate in daily mass whenever possible, but at least to make a short visit to the Blessed Sacrament their daily privilege.
4. 1 The Eucharist – the record of a present miracle, a present dispensation of God towards us (SN 127)
We cannot return to the time when Jesus Christ lived and died, but Christ Himself has met our difficulty, for in every Mass He makes us participants in His death and in His resurrection. By giving Himself to us as our food, He gives us all we need to follow Him, enabling us live virtuously, if we but learn to do what He told his disciples and keeps on telling us.
“In the Holy Mass” – Newman expressed the teaching of the Church – “that One Sacrifice on the Cross once offered is renewed, continued, applied for our benefit.” To bring this thought home to those with whom he prayed, he gave his voice to our Lord in one of His meditations for devotional service:
“He seems to say, My Cross was raised up 1800 years ago, and only for a few hours – and very few of my servants were present there – but I intend to bring millions into my Church. For their sakes then I will perpetuate my Sacrifice, that each of them may be as though they had … been present on Calvary. I will offer myself up day by day to the Father, that every one of my followers may have the opportunity to offer his petitions to Him, sanctified and recommended by the all-meritorious virtue of my Passion…. My priests shall stand at the Altar- but not they, but I rather will offer…not …mere bread and wine, but I myself will be present upon the Altar…” (MD 203)
The celebrant of the mass acts in the Person of Christ who is the true agent, the Lord of the Eucharistic meal and host for his guests; he is also the High priest, who offers the sacrifice through the hands of the ordained priest to Our Father, the Almighty. Christ offered Himself on Golgotha and was Himself the hostia, the sacrifice. In every mass Christ makes “that great act of sacrificial atonement” (SN 192) present for those who are gathered for the liturgy and for all who are by them spiritually brought to Him in intercession.
The unique historical act of Christ Jesus’ sacrifice, Newman explained,
“was not to be forgotten. It was not to be-it could not be-a mere event in the world’s history, which was to be done and over, and was to pass away except in its obscure, unrecognised effects. If that great deed was what we believe it to be, what we know it is, it must remain present, though past; it must be a standing fact for all times. Our own careful reflection upon it tells us this; and therefore, when we are told that Thou, O Lord, though Thou hast ascended to glory, hast renewed and perpetuated Thy sacrifice to the end of all things, not only is the news most touching and joyful, as testifying to so tender a Lord and Saviour, but it carries with it the full assent and sympathy of our reason. Though we neither could, nor would have dared, anticipate so wonderful a doctrine, yet we adore its very suitableness to Thy perfections, as well as its infinite compassionateness for us, now that we are told of it. Yes, my Lord, though Thou hast left the world, Thou art daily offered up in the Mass; and, though Thou canst not suffer pain and death, Thou dost still subject Thyself to indignity and restraint to carry out to the full Thy mercies towards us. Thou dost humble Thyself daily; for, being infinite, Thou couldst not end Thy humiliation while they existed for whom Thou didst submit to it. So Thou remainest a Priest for ever.” (MD 407)
In Holy Mass the Lord, comes to us Sunday after Sunday or, if we manage to participate in daily mass, even day after day to be our strength for here and now. He gives us His continual presence for our ongoing conversion. Mass brings us into real contact with Him. Having our stay in Him, we are enabled more and more to distinguish, in our lives, in our times, and in our world, not only the good from the bad, but that which comes from Him and is leading us to Him from the many things and events which we might not be bad as such, yet are not anything more than a pastime, preventing us from living in the presence.
4.2 In every Mass Christ comes to us, in the Blessed Eucharist Christ remains with us – Christ counteracts Time and the World (SN 129)
Newman reminds his congregation: What makes Christianity in its fullness much more than a historical religion – though Protestants claim their religion to be just that, and, indeed, Christ died long ago – is the fact that He is “living among us with a continual presence”. (SN 128)
In every Holy Mass we are touched by Christ’s spiritual presence when the Gospel is proclaimed. We are touched by His real, full and personal presence in the Eucharist. When we walk up to receive the Eucharist, Christ Jesus comes to us. He remains with us in the Blessed Sacrament, whether in the tabernacle or exposed for our adoration. With Newman’s words from a sermon of 25th May 1858:
He is not past, He is present now. And though He is not seen, He is here. The same God who walked the water, who did miracles, etc., is in the Tabernacle. We come before Him, we speak to Him just as He was spoken to … years ago.” (SN 128/9)
We receive Christ Jesus, when we receive the consecrated host. We adore Him, we listen to Him, and we dare to speak to Him. When we receive Holy Communion, He wants to grow in us and wants us to grow towards Him.
In every holy mass and especially in communion, but also whenever we adore Christ Jesus, kneeling before the tabernacle or before the exposed Blessed Sacrament, our fleeting lives touch eternity as the living God touches us.
If Mass is a present dispensation of God towards us, as Newman, the Catholic priest, described it, then it is not just a celebration of something that happened hundreds of years ago – a kind of a memorial service as the Communion Service in a Protestant Church, and not an enacting of past events as in a Passion Play.
God, Newman preached, does not “merely present Himself before us as the Object of worship, but God actually gives Himself to us to be received into our breasts. He adds: Wonderful communion”. (SN 129)
The Eucharist brings Christians of all times, whether in the action of holy Mass or in the stillness of the Blessed Sacrament into the presence of Christ and is the living reminder that we live at all times in the presence of God and have the presence of God within us and before us in a passing world. It makes us realize that although every day and hour passes and will never come back, we are held and find our stay in the presence and love of God. The real presence of God in the Holy Eucharist makes us realize that eternal life, our life with God, has begun for us with baptism and cannot be lost to us by any outward force, only by severe sin. Therefore Newman can say that by the Holy Eucharist “We are brought into the unseen world.” (SN 129)
This last insight shows, that The Holy Eucharist also takes from us the limits of place. First of all the presence of Christ makes us not only, if we may say so, touch eternity, but opens up for us the Kingdom of God. The texts of the liturgy express that with the Saints of all ages of the Church, the Angels are around us and we join their unceasing praise. We can, moreover, say, that the Eucharist also counteracts death here and now: United with Christ we are in Him not only united with all Christians in the world who live in His grace, but we are also united with those who have departed before us in His grace, whether they are not yet seeing Him face to face or whether they have joined the Angels and the Saints. This unity with those who were called home before us is never more intimate than in Holy Mass. In every mass the Church remembers those who sleep in Christ, and the faithful are invited to join in this act bringing those to the Lord whom they owe this act of love.
Our real communion with the Lord is our true life already here and now, when we are called to live this communion with Christ to the full – and in its strength in unity with our neighbours, be they friend or foe, a lasting challenge in this life. Wherever mass is offered in the world, it is the same, and all of us on all continents are sharing in the one presence of the Lord in the Eucharist, when we participate and eat and drink Him. In the strength of Holy Communion we are called to reach out to our neighbour in need and to bring him not only help in temporal needs, but also the Helper for all needs, Christ.
Newman’s insights are helpful to us as they were to his congregation 150 years ago. Not only is the Eucharist, the presence of Christ here and now, the stay of our souls in the passing of time; it is also our strength in leading a Christian life in a world that does not want to know Him and opposes Christianity. How easily could we be dispirited by it or weighed down by the opposition or even misled and go along with it, But the presence of Christ is our safeguard.
In many of his sermons, this great pastor put over clearly to his congregation how the Eucharist gradually has to change our lives. Newman’s Parochial and Plain Sermons are in print and also his Meditations and Devotions. They could be helpful to you for your Christian life from the Eucharist, even when the YEAR OF THE EUCHARIST will soon come to an end.
It seems right to conclude with a prayer of the old Cardinal after meditating on the Mass:
My Lord,
I offer Thee myself in turn as a sacrifice of thanksgiving.
Thou hast died for me,
And I in turn make myself over to Thee.
I am not my own. Thou hast bought me:
I will by my own act and deed complete the purchase.
My wish is to be separated from everything of this world;
To cleanse myself simply from sin;
To put away from me even what is innocent,
If used for its own sake, and not for Thine.
I put away reputation and honour, and influence and power,
For my praise and strength shall be in Thee.
Enable me to carry out what I profess. (MD 400f)
1 Alf Härdelin, The Tractarian Understanding of the Eucharist, Uppsala 1965, p. 22.