The Priest at Prayer, June 8

The Priestly Ministry

The Second Priestly Duty: The Holy Eucharist

Seventh Meditation - Belief in the Real Presence

I. Today I am going to give myself a reasoned answer to the question: how is it that this Mystery of the Holy Eucharist, one of the most baffling, one to which the human mind offers toughest resistance when left to its natural weakness, is nevertheless become for me one of the easiest and most soul-satisfying to believe?

I believe in the Real Presence of Jesus Christ, God and Man, in the most Blessed Sacrament; present in every Catholic Church where a priest, no matter how obscure he may be, has pronounced the formula of Consecration; present here beside me in the lowly taber­nacle of my church.

Why do I believe it? Because Christ has guaranteed it to me - wimess the four Gospels and one of St. Paul's Epistles - in terse and peremptory sentences that slam the door on all subterfuge or merely symbolical inter­pretation.

This is my body.
This is my blood.

These words, of themselves and in their context, admit of no other than the proper and natural meaning which the Church has ever given them from the very beginning, in Her inspired Scriptures, Her various litur­gies, Her Ecumenica1 Councils; in the exegetical homilies of the Fathers, and in the robust faith of Catholic peoples.

I believe, Lord, with a firm and gratifying faith that even when these words of Consecration may have sprung from my unworthy lips, like lilies from the mire, in obedience to them Thou were really and substantially present beneath the forms and appearances of bread and wine. I believe it because Thou, the Absolute Truth; Thou, the Essential and Unfailing Light; didst never deceive, art not one to deceive, much less the immense flock of little ones who adore Thee, seek Thee and receive Thee as being truly present; because Thou hast said it. Lord, I believe in Thy creative word.

II. Why do I believe? Because Christ, the sole Author of the Sacraments, is all-powerful.

He summons the bodies of the dead, and they return to life from the corruption of the grave. He utters a word of command to the most rebellious diseases, either in the sick person's presence or several miles away, and those diseases leave not a trace behind. He reproves the boisterous winds and waves, and they sing down calm and silent, like a class of prankish school-boys at the shout of a feared master. He treads the sea, and it sus­tains Him with rocklike solidity. Over a few loaves and fishes He bestows a single word of blessing, and they multiply indefinitely.

Not once did Christ give a command - and He gave many - to any element of the material world, that He was not obeyed without the slightest resistance or hesitation. In other words, He ever showed Himself absolute - we might even say tyrannical - Master over matter, doing with it and in it whatever He willed; for the simple reason that it was He who had brought it into existence out of nothing, endowing it with the capacities He pleased. Will He not, therefore, be able to do with it more, infinitely more, than anything my blunt mind can possibly cope with?

Lord, I believe. For Thou canst annihilate the whole world, if it should please Thee; Thou canst transform it to Thy liking; Thou canst change the substance of bread and wine into Thy own Body and Blood, and thus multiply Thy Presence beyond all human scope and measure.

What was possible for Thee became an actual fact, for Thou didst say but the word, and never was it necessary for Thee to voice Thy commands to inert matter twice over.

Ipse dixit, et facta sunt. (Ps. xxxii, 9)

III. Again, why do I believe? Because the whole Church believes. No, I am not alone; I share this belief with millions and millions of human beings from every nation, race, and climate; with all the centuries of Christian history, with people of every age and condition and temperament; with souls joyful and sorrowful, with souls raised aloft in the auroral splendours of grace, or sunk in the night of sin; with the little children who seal the first dawning of reason with an act of faith in Christ's Eucharistic Presence and their first Holy Communion, as with a morning star; with all who close their length of days with the heavenly clasp of Holy Viaticum.

I believe with the Church, whose faith in the Eucharist is Her very life. Wrench from Her this belief, and you will have destroyed Her entire liturgy, demol­ished Her cathedrals and churches, killed Her priest­hood, effaced from Her history the most brilliant and holy pages written with Her blood and tears. It was for Thee, O Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, that She allowed Herself to be persecuted and bled, and rem­nants of Her vesture and entrails to cleave to the claws of tyrants!

Today, the same as in the catacombs, the same as in the Middle Ages, and in the century that witnessed tbe institution of the Feast of Corpus Christi; today, as truly as then, and perhaps even more so, this belief in the Eucharist urges the faithful on to the sublimest acts of adoration ever recorded in history. We have seen the Eucharistic Congress of Madrid, Rome, Chicago, Dublin, Buenos Aires, etc.; vast throngs of men, women, and children from every nation and class and walk of life kneeling and singing round the small white Host in the sumptuous boulevards and thoroughfares of our modem cities.

No, I am not alone. I believe, Lord, as all of these believe; and from the depths of my nothingness I adore Thee, my God, Whom love for me has brought to such depths of condescension!

IV. Finally, why do I believe? Because this dogma har­monizes so perfectly with the nature of God and the nature of man.

God, Who must needs be intimately and perpetually united to the least atom of His creation by the same Love that moved Him to give it existence; God, present everywhere in every creature, became Man: the Man humanizing, so to speak, the Attributes of the God­head; the God "divinizing," as it were, all the qualities of manhood; Flesh wherein God took up abode; God to Whom our flesh adhered. . . what wonder if this God-Man, feeling in the flesh the tendencies of His Divine Immensity, should decide to render effectual, even as Man, the Divine Attribute of being all in all and present in every part of the ransomed world!

Even this puny human heart of ours feels the urge to be at one and the same time in every place where there is something to see, something to hear, something to admire and love! The colossal strides of modern science, inventions already perfected and those still in the realm of dreams, what do they all seek to express?

They but express those secret forces of matter and spirit which man is gradually mastering and harnessing and enlisting in the service of that restless human longing to multiply his presence and action simultaneously: to see everything and hear everything at the same time; hence, our railways, steamers, cars, airplanes, telephones, radio and television sets. Man yearns to multiply his being indefinitely in time and space; he strives to imitate the Immensity of God Himself, of the God Who made man to His own image and likeness.

V. Christ, with His God-Man's love and His Omnipo­tence, solved the problem - a problem which has always been a blind-spot keeping the human race in continual restlessness - in three short sentences:

This is my body.
This is my blood.
Do this in remembrance of me.

Words of greater power than the first Fiat of creation!

With those three short sentences, pronounced by Jesus in the Upper Room at Jerusalem, all obstacles of time and place vanish. His love throws off all fetters. He will be with us until the end of time, at any point of our planet where there is a priest and a soul yearn­ing for Christ. Fulfilment will be given even literally to the promise with which He closed the cycle of His teachings:

Behold I am with you all days, even to the con­summation of the world. (Matt. xxviii, 20)

Praise to Thee, O Lord, Who, because Thou art true God, dost reach the remotest confines with Thy Wisdom and Strength; because Thou art true Man, art inflamed with the human longing to embrace and unite Thyself to all Thy redeemed; for Thou in Thy skill supreme hast effected with three short sentences what we mortals have been dreaming of and toiling for since the world began!

Resolutions
1. I will make more frequent acts of faith in the Real Presence of Jesus Christ upon our altars. I shall try to drink in and saturate my mind with this most true, divinely-infallible, and divinely-human idea: that throughout the whole world there is nothing more ador­able than a Consecrated Host. Oh, if only that radiant thought would one day become the very life of my mind and the fire of my will!

2. And this I will also teach the faithful time and time again, until they of their own accord go eagerly in quest of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament, loving Him and adoring Him in this Sacrament before everything and everyone else, preferring His Presence to every picture or statue or shrine, however devotional or mirac­ulous; giving Him precedence over every popular Saint, over the most Holy Mother of God Herself, over His most cherished and venerated images.
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Adapted from The Priest at Prayer
by Fr. Eugenio Escribano, C.M. (© 1954)
Translated by B.T. Buckley, C.M.

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