Our People

A quick thought on the Eucharist for the Archdiocesan Clergy Forum

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
19 May 2005

Last year I visited some US dioceses in order to see whatI could learn from those that are doing well for vocations. One thing Vocations Directors and young men in seminaries repeatedly mentioned to me was Eucharistic Adoration. There has been an interesting resurgence of Exposition and Benediction in the US and it seems to have caught imagination of many young people. But what is the connection with vocations? One obvious link is that if we pray the Lord of Harvest to send labourers into his vineyard he has promised he will do so. So the more people pray for vocations—including praying before the Blessed Sacrament—the more likely it is that some people will ‘hear the call’. Eucharistic Exposition mediates divine calling.

There is another reason, I think: the Eucharist, both in Mass and outside of it, gives young people a place to go with their questions about their lives and their vocations; a place to kneel or sit before the Lord and ask for the grace of discernment and the courage to see through what they discern. Eucharistic Adoration offers young people a space with God in which to raise the big questions and perhaps hear some answers. Eucharistic Exposition assists vocational discernment.

But I think there is also a third very important reason: public Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament says that priesthood and the things of the priest are valued highly in that place, that the Eucharist really matters to people, and that it really matters to them that there be men to provide it. The more priesthood and the things of the priest are public valued, the more likely they are to appear on the radar screens of young people and be considered amongst the real possibilities for them, and the more likely that other people will encourage and support them in this. Eucharistic Exposition nurtures and supports priestly vocations.

As a theologian I love St Thomas Aquinas’ masterly words of metaphysics and spirituality of the Eucharist; but as a Dominican I find most moving our family stories of his relationship to it. Brother Thomas used to spend hours in prayer before the Eucharist looking for wisdom and he would even put his head in the tabernacle to talk to Christ in the Blessed Sacrament and ask him questions. He worried himself sick as he wrote the tract De Eucharistia for the Summa Theologiae. In fact it was the last he completed. After some kind of mystical experience and perhaps a stroke he refused to write any more, saying all seemed like straw compared to the mystery he had glimpsed. He died a few months later.

Our late great John Paul II also focussed his dying years on the Eucharist and gave us two great letters and this Year of the Eucharist. It was as if, like Aquinas, at the end he realized what was really important and gave it his last energy and dying attention.

The tragedy of declining Mass attendances is not a numbers thing, as if we are empire builders or accountants: we know lots of those who do not come to Mass are still joined to us in various ways. The tragedy is, however, that they do not have the Eucharist in their lives as regularly as they could and as Jesus would. No doubt they have their reasons, some better than others. But at the heart of the problem, it seems to me, and therefore the heart of the challenge for our Eucharistic evangelisation, is the mismatch between what some people want and imagine they need and what the God who knows our deepest needs and longings offers.

The Eucharist is about a Last Supper surrounded by strange and terrifying words and actions; about the humiliation, torture and death of a man by Crucifixion; about flesh and blood, combat with evil, sins and failure, dreams and nightmares. To this day I find myself shaking with awe at the Consecration as I consider what is happening through my hands as Christ speaks in me and joins me to that Last Supper and that Passion. The Mass is altogether too real, too down-to-earth, neatly to satisfy our taste for unreality, comfort, entertainment, edification.

Yet, paradoxically, if the Eucharist is far more down-to-earth than popular entertainments, it is also far more up-to-heaven: it leads us from the Cross to the Resurrection and the Ascension. So that joined to that shiver of fear we call awe is a shiver of delight. That this really is the Body and Blood of Christ, his very substance and being, in which we share and which we have to offer our people, is mind-blowing and heart-expanding.

And now, as a Parish Priest, I’ve had a wonderful experience of giving out communion to ‘my’ people: ‘mine’ not in sense of my possessions, but those given into my care. I find myself praying for them very easily and naturally in their various needs as I hand them the Body of Christ and I think that at that moment the affection I sometimes feel for them is Christ loving them in me.