The Mystery of Faith: Reflections from Ecclesia de Eucharistia

Greetings dear parishioners!

Every day we have the privilege of experiencing on earth the heavenly liturgy. Our Eucharist is a foretaste of the marriage feast
of the Lamb, of which Isaiah said the Lord will provide an abundance of rich foods and fine wine (Isaiah 25:6). We are afforded
the opportunity to share in the One Bread broken for the life of the world, and drink of the One Cup poured out for many. We
derive life from Christ, who says “if anyone eats this bread they will live forever” (John 6:51). The Eucharist is a mystery which
makes eternally present the one sacrifice of Calvary offered once and for all for the salvation of the world. Thus, we who are
removed from the Golgotha events both in time and space, become contemporaneous with the saving events, and become
inheritors of the blessings that flow from them. In the coming weeks I intend to invite us to reflect along with the saints and the
magisterium on this awesome mystery we have received. This week let us reflect on these words from Pope St. John Paul II’s
“Ecclesia de Eucharistia”

“Mysterium fidei! - The Mystery of Faith!”. When the priest recites or chants these words, all present acclaim: “We announce your death,
O Lord, and we proclaim your resurrection, until you come in glory”.

In these or similar words the Church, while pointing to Christ in the mystery of his passion, also reveals her own mystery: Ecclesia de
Eucharistia. By the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost the Church was born and set out upon the pathways of the world, yet a decisive
moment in her taking shape was certainly the institution of the Eucharist in the Upper Room. Her foundation and wellspring is the
whole Triduum paschale, but this is as it were gathered up, foreshadowed and “concentrated' for ever in the gift of the Eucharist. In this gift Jesus Christ entrusted to his Church the perennial making present of the paschal mystery. With it he brought about a mysterious
“oneness in time” between that Triduum and the passage of the centuries.

The thought of this leads us to profound amazement and gratitude. In the paschal event and the Eucharist which makes it present
throughout the centuries, there is a truly enormous “capacity” which embraces all of history as the recipient of the grace of the
redemption. This amazement should always fill the Church assembled for the celebration of the Eucharist. But in a special way it
should fill the minister of the Eucharist. For it is he who, by the authority given him in the sacrament of priestly ordination, effects the
consecration. It is he who says with the power coming to him from Christ in the Upper Room: “This is my body which will be given up
for you This is the cup of my blood, poured out for you...”. The priest says these words, or rather he puts his voice at the disposal of the
One who spoke these words in the Upper Room and who desires that they should be repeated in every generation by all those who in
the Church ministerially share in his priesthood.

(John Paul II, Ecclesia De Eucharistia, April 17, 2003, no. 5)