Our People

“He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life” (WYD 2005)

Homily for Votive Mass of the Holy Eucharist for World Youth Day Pilgrims at St. Rochus Church, Düsseldorf, Cologne

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
18 August 2005

One of the greatest Catholic philosophers of our time, Elizabeth Anscombe, told the story of a child—perhaps her one of her own—who at three years old was only then beginning to talk. The child had been introduced to the mystery of the Eucharist in simple language by his parents at Mass. The woman was coming back from communion when she met by the child in the free space at the back of the church. ‘Is He in you?’ the child asked.

‘Yes,’ she replied. And to her amazement he immediately prostrated itself in front of her.

What this infant had grasped, with childish innocence, was one of the Church’s central proclamations: this really is Christ’s Body and Blood we share in today. Christ really is present here in a way, with an intensity, with a presence that He is nowhere else. When the Minister of Holy Communion offers the host and says ‘The body of Christ’ he or she does not mean: ‘This holy bread is a symbol which reminds us of the body of Christ’, or ‘here’s a nice poetic metaphor, a friendly reminder call’. No, the Church says with an audacity only a direction from Jesus himself could justify: this really is Jesus Christ whole and entire.

The story, which every generation of Christians from the Apostles through to own has never tired to retelling is this: that on the night He was betrayed, Jesus took bread and wine and offered His own Body and Blood, His very self, to us under the signs of that bread and wine. He gave Himself to us and continues to do so in His Eucharist in a way which no mere metaphor, symbol, holy bread, could ever do. And He does so with a power that can transform us, divinize us, join us to the Blessed Trinity, and so transport us beyond all time and space, and to every time and every space.

“Behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the world,” promised Jesus. Christ, the God-Man, the pivot of human history, has left us the Holy Eucharist as the golden thread with which He binds together His Church in every age and in every place. When we approach the altar of God to offer with the priest our sacrifice of praise we also recline beside the apostles as at the Last Supper, we stand beside Our Lady and the Holy Women beneath His Cross, we run to the Empty Tomb with Peter and John, we join the two disciples at the Eucharist at Emmaus, we are gathered in the Upper Room with the early Church awaiting the Holy Spirit. We journey with the Apostle Paul to the Gentiles, and with the Apostle Thomas who took the Good News as far as India—as he tried to make his way to Australia. We join those early Christians whom the Acts of the Apostles tell us gathered each Sunday for ‘the prayers and the breaking of the Bread’. We are there in the catacombs with persecuted Christians offering God their frightened prayers and their very lives as the Romans hunted them down. We are there in the caves of the hermit, offering Mass in the loneliest desert on earth. We are in choir with ancient monks and mediaeval friars, chanting their sacrifice of praise in monasteries and gothic cathedrals. We are hiding with the Catholics who even today in some Communist or Muslim countries gather silently by night for fear of torture or death and who add their merits to those of the whole Church whenever we offer Mass. The poorest of the poor in the jungle or the desert or the frozen waste or the urban wastelands bestow upon the Church the inestimable wealth of the Eucharist when they join their hearts to the Saviour of us all. Perhaps in the far distant future Christians travelling to far off galaxies might also join the great Hymn sung by the Eternal Son to the Eternal Father in which we are all made participants by the action of the Holy Spirit.

It is encouraging to recall the timelessness and oneness of this Holy Eucharist. The Mass we will celebrate at Marienfeld with the Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, this coming Sunday is the one Sacrifice offered by God’s Church throughout every age. We are one with every Christian who has ever reverently received his Lord in Holy Communion, because Christ the High Priest comes to each of us and renews His one sacrifice in us and for us. This is the true meaning of the Creed when we recite the words “I believe in One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.” This is why we can offer the Mass for all the living and the dead. Time and Place are given a new meaning in the resurrected life of Christ. They are no longer obstacles to our communion. The Eucharist bridges all histories and all geographies. All times and all places are now servants of our Cosmic Lord. They bend to His will. “All time belongs to Him”, says the Blessing of the Pascal Candle on Easter Night.

When you go home after these days of pilgrimage, friendship and joy remember this. The Mass in your parish church, in your school chapel or on university campus, even with the most ordinary priest and congregation, is the One Sacrifice of Christ. It is fitting that we adorn the sacred ceremonies with beauty and song and all the ritual and fellowship that comes so naturally to us as human beings, as we are doing today. But never turn aside from Our Eucharistic Lord even if He comes in rags. It is not our warm feelings or elaborate spectacle that make the Mass holy. It is Christ who makes the Mass holy. And He is the same today, yesterday and forever.

If you return home and say, “It was a great experience, I made lots of good friends, it was all very inspiring” and do not find Christ in your parish Church, then all this will have been a waste. More than a waste: a tragedy. Christ is in your parish Church. Every Sunday, day by day, week by week, Christ’s Church gathers in every corner of the globe. In every city and town and village and school we are one in Him.

You are, all of you here, the future of the Eucharist. It is the bread of your lives that Christ will transform into Heavenly Bread, into His Body. But for the celebration of the Eucharist the Church needs priests. And for the Adoration of the Eucharist she needs religious. And so we must all offer prayers and penance for vocations. But I appeal to you young people directly to offer the whole of your lives to Him and some of you to do so as priests or religious, as servants of the Eucharist. As the youngest of the apostles I say to the young people here thinking of their vocation: be ready to respond to that stirring in your heart to give God all you are and he will do great things with you!

God gives to His Church the priests and religious we need. When He calls you, do not turn aside from His voice. Do not listen to those other voices that spread despair and hopelessness, that make you fear you are unworthy or could not flourish in God’s service, that fix on every human failing of the Church or of yourself, that are willing to embrace every madness rather than whole-heartedly accept Jesus Christ and the teaching of His Church. Listen to the Holy Spirit speaking in your heart, as He spoke to the Magi in their search for God, as He spoke to John at the Last Supper resting on the breast of Christ, as He spoke to the great Saints that surround us on this pilgrimage and are buried in Cologne: like Ursula and her martyr-companions, all young women; like St Gereon and his martyr-companions, all young men; like St Albert the Great, who was one of the greatest teachers of the young; like St Edith Stein who experienced a radical conversion when she was your age and gave herself over completely to God’s service. Listen to that Spirit as have thousands of faithful priests and religious throughout the ages. As King David sang: “I will go up to the altar of God, to the God who gives joy to my youth.”