Mysterium Fidei the Eucharist, the Church, and Vatican II Paul Mcpartlan
Mysterium Fidei The Eucharist, the Church, and Vatican II Paul McPartlan It is a great pleasure to address this 2015 National Meeting of Diocesan Liturgical Commissions, and I am very grateful for the kind invitation. The overall theme this year is ‘The Church at Prayer: Faith Received, Fostered and Formed,’ and I am particularly delighted to have been asked to reflect with you on the relationship between the Eucharist and the Church. As we know, all of the Church’s prayer centers on the Eucharist. This weekly, and even daily, celebration is, indeed, the focal point of the Church’s life, the place where the Church is regularly renewed, re-forged, we might even say. We can see this from many angles. The Church is the body of Christ, as St Paul teaches, and in the Eucharist we receive the body of Christ. St Augustine invited the early Christians to reflect on the significance of St Paul’s words to the Corinthians: ‘Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread’ (1Cor 10:17) — one bread, one body. If you are the body of Christ, he said, then it is your mystery that is there on the Lord’s table and that you receive. You hear it said, ‘The Body of Christ,’ and you reply ‘Amen’; well then, ‘be a member of the body of Christ,’ he said, ‘in order to make that Amen true.’ ‘Be what you see, and receive what you are.’1 Receive what you are: famous and wonderful words! If, in the Eucharist, we receive what we are, then this surely is the celebration by which the Church lives; the Eucharist is the Church’s lifeline.
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