Dear Friends,
Congratulations to the children who received their First Communion on Saturday, 15 August 2020! Parents/guardians, thank you for your commitment to continued sacramental preparation in your homes during this unprecedented and challenging time. I am indebted to our Faith Formation team – catechists and staff alike – for their thoughtfully creative approach to teaching and prepping our children for this significant event in their lives.
Also on 15 August, the Feast of the Assumption of our Lady, we began praying the 54-Day Rosary Novena together as a parish. It will end on 7 October, 2020, the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary. We will pray this novena Monday through Friday from 3 to 4 p.m. during the Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. During this Holy Hour, we will pray both the Divine Mercy Chaplet and the Rosary. If you are not able to join us in the church, please gather your family and pray the Rosary with the same intentions, namely praying for our country, the Church, and for an end to the pandemic.
We will soon be starting Religious Education, and I’d like to request that parents please register online and commit to ensuring that your children participate to the fullest extent possible, remaining connected as a family to the Church and Jesus Christ.
Have a Blessed Week!
With love,
Fr. John
Ecclesia De Eucharistia
For this week, we shall reflect on paragraphs 14 and 15 of the encyclical, “Ecclesia De Eucharistia” (The Church draws her life from the Eucharist) by St. John Paul II on the vital role the Eucharist plays in the life of the Church:
- Christ's Passover includes not only his passion and death, but also his resurrection. This is recalled by the assembly's acclamation following the consecration: “We proclaim your resurrection”. The Eucharistic Sacrifice makes present not only the mystery of the Savior’s passion and death, but also the mystery of the resurrection which crowned his sacrifice. It is as the living and risen One that Christ can become in the Eucharist the “bread of life” (Jn 6:35, 48), the “living bread” (Jn 6:51). Saint Ambrose reminded the newly- initiated that the Eucharist applies the event of the resurrection to their lives: “Today Christ is yours, yet each day he rises again for you” (De Sacramentis, V, 4, 26: CSEL 73, 70). Saint Cyril of Alexandria also makes clear that sharing in the sacred mysteries “is a true confession and a remembrance that the Lord died and returned to life for us and on our behalf” (In Ioannis Evangelium, XII, 20: PG 74, 726).
- The sacramental re-presentation of Christ's sacrifice, crowned by the resurrection, in the Mass involves a most special presence which – in the words of Paul VI – “is called 'real' not as a way of excluding all other types of presence as if they were 'not real', but because it is a presence in the fullest sense: a substantial presence whereby Christ, the God-Man, is wholly and entirely present” ( Encyclical Letter Mysterium Fidei (3 September 1965): AAS 57 (1965), 764). This sets forth once more the perennially valid teaching of the Council of Trent: “the consecration of the bread and wine effects the change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord, and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood. And the holy Catholic Church has fittingly and properly called this change transubstantiation” (Session XIII, Decretum de ss. Eucharistia, Chapter 4: DS 1642). Truly the Eucharist is a mysterium fidei, a mystery which surpasses our understanding and can only be received in faith, as is often brought out in the catechesis of the Church Fathers regarding this divine sacrament: “Do not see – Saint Cyril of Jerusalem exhorts – in the bread and wine merely natural elements, because the Lord has expressly said that they are his body and his blood: faith assures you of this, though your senses suggest otherwise”( Mystagogical Catecheses, IV, 6: SCh 126, 138).
Adoro te devote, latens Deitas, we shall continue to sing with the Angelic Doctor. Before this mystery of love, human reason fully experiences its limitations. One understands how, down the centuries, this truth has stimulated theology to strive to understand it ever more deeply.
These are praiseworthy efforts, which are all the more helpful and insightful to the extent that they are able to join critical thinking to the “living faith” of the Church, as grasped especially by the Magisterium's “sure charism of truth” and the “intimate sense of spiritual realities” (Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation Dei Verbum, 8) which is attained above all by the saints. There remains the boundary indicated by Paul VI: “Every theological explanation which seeks some understanding of this mystery, in order to be in accord with Catholic faith, must firmly maintain that in objective reality, independently of our mind, the bread and wine have ceased to exist after the consecration, so that the adorable body and blood of the Lord Jesus from that moment on are really before us under the sacramental species of bread and wine” (Solemn Profession of Faith, 30 June 1968, 25: AAS 60 (1968), 442-443).