Eucharistic Revival Quotes

Human beings were intended to be the means by which the whole earth would give praise to God, returning in love what God had given in love, uniting all things in a great act of worship.

There are two essential functions to the Christian priesthood: The first is eucharistic, the giving of thanks; the other is intercessory, praying. That is all. That is going on. The Church everywhere singing and praying and offering praise, and pleading with God. Every meeting is made up almost exclusively of these things.

The Church Father Irenaeus of Lyons commented that “the glory of God is a human being fully alive.

The deepest meaning of Christian discipleship is not to work for Jesus but to be with Jesus.

love is an act of the will, more precisely, the willing of the good of the other as other. To love is really to want what is good for someone else and then to act on that desire.

the glory of God is a human being fully alive.

One senses that we are poised here on a fulcrum, that a standing or falling point has been reached, that somehow being a disciple of Jesus is intimately tied up with how one stands in regard to the Eucharist. In response to Jesus’ question, Peter, as is often the case in the Gospels, spoke for the group: “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God” (John 6:68–69).

Aquinas responded, “Non nisi te, Domine” (Nothing but you, Lord).

Thomas Aquinas is arguing that, at the Eucharist, the appearances of bread and wine do not tell the deepest truth about what is really present and that, in point of fact, the authoritative word of Christ does.

The Mass is not only a relative (commemorative) sacrifice, but likewise an absolute sacrifice, and hence the Eucharistic Victim in the Consecration must be slain, either physically or morally. As Christ cannot be slain physically because of the glorified state of His Body, the slaying must be 11 Heinrich-Gutbcrlet, Dogmat. Theologie, Vol. IX, p. 862. 366 THE EUCHARIST AS A SACRIFICE moral. In matter of fact it consists in the volun tary reduction of His Body and Blood to the con dition of food (reductio ad statum cibi et potus), in virtue of which the Eucharistic Saviour, hu manly speaking, places Himself after the fashion of lifeless food at the mercy of mankind. This self-abasement or kenosis is comparable with that involved in the Incarnation, and in some respects even goes beyond it. 12 De Lugo's theory was adopted by Platel, Muniessa, Ulloa, Viva, Antoine, Holtzklau, Tamburini, and others of the older school. In modern times it was revived, after a long period of neglect, by Cardinal Franzelin, who in his profound treatise De Eucharistia has the fol lowing thesis: " We hold with Cardinal De Lugo and a great many later theologians, that the intrinsic form (essence) of the sacrificial act is in this: Christ . . . puts His Body and Blood, under the species of bread and wine, in a state of food and drink, by way of despoiling Himself of the functions connatural to His sacred Hu manity.