"The mystery of the Eucharist in the life of the church"
From the USCCB conference in November 2021
The link to the document “The Mystery of the Eucharist in the Life of the Church” can be found here. It is a beautiful, well-written and rich document composed by the conference of Bishops.
It is my sincere belief that the devil wants us to be tormented by all sorts of thoughts, ideas, calamities, dissensions, divisions and the like. He wants us to be twisted and contorted so that we live in constant pain and with a constant unsettled feeling. He is doing his job well. Even within the Catholic community we cannot agree on everything. One of the main attacks coming at us is that the Council of Vatican II (VII) has cheapened the faith. However, if one reads the actual documents of VII, it does not. For example, it is said that VII has compromised the church because it says that Islam is an equal faith with Christianity with regard to who is heaven bound. The naysayers say that the “new Mass” is not a valid Mass. They say you must receive the Eucharist on the tongue while kneeling. They say the Mass must be said in Latin. There are many of these sort of arguments but when one examines them by reading the documents from Vatican II you won’t find anything to substantiate these claims. The words of VII must be twisted and contorted to get there.
Just before the pandemic in late 2020, there was a poll taken and it found that many within the church did not understand the Eucharist or the Real Presence. Since then, within the Catholic world this poll has been cited countless times by the traditional types who think we must return to the Latin Mass and to the Mass prior to the Rubrics we have now. Only by doing this, they claim, can we get to understand the Eucharist better. It may be true that a return to tradition may instill a better understanding of the Eucharist within existing Catholics but what would that do to those in Africa and Asia? Would the return to tradition be good for evangelization? I recently listened to someone who said that Christianity is growing in Africa and Asia but dying in Europe and North America as a percentage of total population. The Mass after VII allows it to be said in the vernacular and allows the laity to participate in ways they couldn’t before. The United States bishops have responded to this crisis. That is why we have bishops. We should listen to them and hear what they have said.
The Eucharist is God’s gift to us, one of many, but the premier one. It is our food for the journey.