The Mass

EWTN Global Catholic Radio and St. Joseph Communications proudly present Life is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Sheen. This 50-part series was recorded on phonograph records in the 1960s and the sound quality is sometimes limited. But the word of God spoken by Archbishop Sheen is timeless and now here is Archbishop Fulton Sheen. Peace be to you. A great American patriot once said that he regretted he had only one life to give for his country. He meant that his love was greater than his sacrifice. But his life could be given only once in time and therefore could not be repeated. It is very different over the life of our Lord. Though the life was given once, it is eternally given and it is eternally given and repeated in the sacrifice of the Mass. In this lesson we are going to describe the Mass in terms of three of its principal parts. The offertory, the consecration, the communion. First the offertory. This takes place when the priest offers red and wine to God. Our Blessed Lord at that moment, if we may draw an image, is looking out from heaven's say, I cannot die again in the human nature that I took from Mary, that human nature is now glorified at the right hand of the Father. The pledge and the promise of what your human nature is to be. But I can die in you and you can die in me. Will you therefore offer yourselves to me? I can add nothing to the sacrifice of my love except by and through you. Now we begin to offer ourselves to him under the species of red and wine. Let me tell you how this was done in the early church. If you would have come to Mass in the early church, you would have brought some bread and wine. You also might have brought some in, fruits, wheat, oil, wool and other things that were needed by the religious community. That is by the church. The priest would have taken all of the used gifts, piled them up at the side of the communion rail to distribute them to the poor after Mass, but the bread and wine which was brought, he would take some of that and use that for the offering of Mass. Now we no longer bring either bread and wine, nor do we bring these other things. Simply because today we live in a modern world where money is the medium of exchange. Instead of bringing bread and wine, we bring that which equivalently buys bread and wine. The important thing is that when we offer ourselves to God, we do so under the appearances of red and wine. Lined at our blessed Lord, use bread and wine as the symbols of our offer tree. I can immediately think of three reasons. First in order to signify our unity with one another and in him in the mystical body of Christ, just as a unity of grains of wheat make bread and just as wine is made up for many grapes, so to we who are many are one in Christ. That is the first reason. Another reason is perhaps no two substances in nature traditionally have so much nourished man as bread and wine. Bread is the narrow of the earth. Wine is very blood. In bringing bread and wine, therefore, we are bringing those substances which have no nourish ourselves given us life. Therefore we are equivalently offering our lives or ourselves on the altar. The third reason, we can grapes have to suffer a great deal in order to become bread and wine. We have to pass through a winter and then it has to be subjected to a mill and to fire before the wheat can never become bread. Rates in their turn have to pass through the gifts and many of the wine press before they can become wine. So to we who offer ourselves to Christ are destined to sacrifice. Therefore let us take those substances from nature which are given us life with which indicates in their very beginning the need of sacrificing and suffering in order to be united with Christ himself. We therefore at the moment of the offer tree of the mass are not passive spectators as we might be in the theater. We are going to be actors and a great drama. We are standing as it were on the pattern that the priest is offering. We are in that chalice. We are participants. We are co-affirors to Christ through him to the heavenly Father. If ever we understand the offer tree, we realize now that we have offered ourselves. That brings us to the question what happens to us? The answer to that is given in the consecration. The priest that will be recalled is only the instrument of Christ himself at the offer. The Christ is the priest, Christ is the victim. When therefore the priest pronounces the words of consecration, he is only giving longing to our blessed Lord, his voice and his hands. At the moment of consecration, the priest says over the bread, this is my body. And over the chalice of wine, this is my blood. At that moment, there takes place what is known as the mystery of cranes substantiation. Cranes means a cross. Substantiation refers to substance. This mystery means that the whole substance of the bread becomes the whole substance of the body of Christ. The whole substance of the wine becomes the whole substance of the blood of Christ. Notice we use the word substance. Now just as the subject has predicate, just as your personality wears clothes which are purely accidental to your personality because you can change clothes. So too red and wine have what are known as accidents or appearances or predicates or species. Now after the moment of consecration, the bread looks the same as it did before. The wine looks the same. As to say, the sensible appearances do not change, but the substance of the bread changes, the substance of the wine changes into the body and blood of Christ. How do we know they change? Because our Lord said so. Is there any better reason in the world? Our best adorned Lord said, this is my body. This is my blood. We believe. The next question is very well, we have offered ourselves with Christ. And the consecration is a bringing up to date, localizing, a representation of the death of Christ. How is the death of Christ when he presented in the consecration? On notice that the priest does not consecrate the bread and wine together. He does not say, this is the body and blood of Christ. First he consecrates the bread, then he separately consecrates the wine. First this is my body, then this is my blood. Now notice that that separate consecration is a kind of cleavage, a carrying a sander, a kind of a mystical sower. That divides the blood from the body of Christ and that is how he died on Calvary. That is why the mess is called the unbloody sacrifice of Calvary. While Calvary itself was a real separation of blood from body. Not that this is any less real, that that it is not as sensibly presented as it was on the cross. But this is not the whole story of the consecration. Remember we offered ourselves under bread and wine, see what has happened to the bread and wine, just the body and blood of Christ. The Christ is not allowed in the mass, we are with him, what therefore happened to us. We died with Christ. The word of consecration thereof rock have a secondary meaning. The primary meaning is very clear, that we have given. This is the body and blood of Christ. Mystically divided by that separate consecration of the bread and wine, our Lord we rules the sacrifice of Calvary. The vine sacrificed himself on the cross, the vine and branches which we are now sacrifice themselves in the mass. So the secondary meaning of the words of consecration is about the branches united to the vine. So we say to our Lord, really this is my body. This is my blood. All that I am. My body, my blood, my intellect, my will, all of my desires, intentions and motivations, all that I am substantially. I know that I am, I die with thee, to realize them, friends substantiate them, change them so that I am no longer mine but time. All the species of my life, the mere accidents, what I do in life, my peculiar duties, let them remain, they are only the appearances, but what I am in my essential relationships to thee, that may divide. I die with thee, O Christ, on Calvary. That is the consecration. Now we come to the communion. Remember that in the offertory we were like lambs that were being led on to Jerusalem and in the consecration we are those lambs who were offered in sacrifice. Now in communion we find that actually we did not lose anything at all. We did not die. We recovered life. We died to the lower part of ourselves in the consecration of the mass and we get back ourselves and we were able to enrich. We began to be free and we grew up. We find that our death was no more permanent than the consecration than was the death of Christ on Calvary. In Holy communion, we surrender our humanity, we give up his divinity, we give up time, he gives us his eternity, we give up our sin, we die to it, he gives us his grace, we surrender our self will and we see the divine will, we give up petty loves, he gives us the very flame of love itself. That is communion. Now because communion is very important, we want to dwell on sweet particular aspects of Holy communion. First, Holy communion incorporates us to the life of Christ. Two, Holy communion incorporates us to the death of Christ. Three, Holy communion incorporates us to the members of the mystical body and their joys and souls. First, in communion, we have unity with the life of Christ, the whole Christ, Christ born in Bethlehem, the Christ who lived in Galilee, who taught, who suffered, died, rose from the dead, is at the right hand of the Father and is infusing his life into his mystical body. When you receive that divine life in communion, our Blessed Lord said, he is the eatest me, the same shall live by me. Actually, we do not so much receive him, as strictly speaking, he receives us, he becomes incorporated to him. There is a kind of a transfusion, just in the physical order that there is transfusion of blood or life, so to hear, there is a tremendous transfusion of divine life into our souls and communion. That is why at communion we always have such a deep sense of unworthyness. And the communion prayer is, dominate none some sickness. O Lord, I am not worthy. Is it not true that in human love, the beloved is always on the pedestal, the lover always on his knees? And so in divine love, we protest our unworthiness as we go to the communion rail to receive the divine life because we die to our lower life in the consecration. The divine lover invites us to his banquet. We poor destitute creatures. He holds us in his embrace. Really of our faith was strong. We would crawl on our hands and knees to the communion rail. That report that life, our Lord said, he who eats my flesh and breaks my blood lives continually in me and I live continually in him. Secondly, the community is not only in cooperation to the life of Christ, but also in the death of Christ. Here is something that we very seldom think of. We always think of communion as a relationship of life, but as a relationship of death. St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, it is the Lord's death you are heralding whenever you eat of this bread and drink of this cup. Why is there a death involved? It's simply because we've not yet passed into glory. We have our own Adam with us. All of our sins, all of our concurcences, our prides and covetousness and ours. And we have to die to all of these. As the consecration itself suggested when a farmer plows corn, he is very interested in life, but he's uprooting weed to see not. In other words, the condition of having the life of the corn is to bring death to the weeds and the condition of having life of Christ is to bring death to the old Adam. It does not regard when he nourishes the flower and carries for it battle against insects. In order to protect this divine life, we too have to bring some kind of penance and self-denial to that which is lower. Further than our Lord died for us, then we have to die to ourselves. And you know, instead after the resurrection, it was the relics of his passion and his death that he showed in. Knowing Maggie wanted to achieve that glory of the resurrection, then our Lord said, do not touch me, but He said to Thomas, touch my hands. Put thy finger into my hand. Put thy hand into my sight. In other words, Thomas, you may commune with my death to see that I am the risen man. I believe that is the reason why the church ordains fasting before communion. In order to be sure that at least we will be incorporated in some tiny little way to the death of Christ before we receive this life. The third point concerning communion is that communion is not only in cooperation to the life of Christ, in cooperation to his death, but it is also communion with all the other members of the mystical body of Christ. This is what we forget. The way we receive communion, we are being united with every other member of the church throughout the world. Your body, for example, is made up of millions and millions of cells. These cells are nourished by blood plasma or lymph. It causes through all the gates and alleys of your body to nourish and repair. It knocks at the door of each individual cell. It offers its credit. Now what that blood plasma does to your human body is a faint far off echo of our Lord does for his mystical body. The mystical body is made up of persons, not cells. Instead of human nourishment, there is the divine life of the Eucharist. And this Eucharist is the divine length, as it were, of all the cells or persons of the mystical body of Christ. And the Saint Paul says, the one bread mixes one body, though we be many a number. The same bread is shared by all. The length makes the body one, the Eucharist makes the church one. The communion rail is therefore the most democratic institution in the face of all history. We are communing therefore at the rail not only with every member of the church, but with the joys of the church wherever they are in any part of the world, and also with the sorrows of the church. The trials and persecutions, for example, in mission lands. Therefore every communion will make us more and more conscious of helping the society of the propagation of the faith in order that this body of Christ may grow. And in order that we may be more conscious of our communion, run with another in the body of Christ. That is the mass. And thanks to it, we have the real presence. Our Lord is on the offer. Think about our churches, would be if we did not have that Medtahapernacle lamp telling us that our blessed Lord was there in the Eucharistic presence. We would just be meeting houses, prayer halls, that's all. We would almost feel that we were standing alongside of the empty tomb of Easter Morn and an angel were there saying, he is not here. But thanks to the real presence of our Lord in our churches, the Eucharist is the window between heaven and earth. Thanks to the real presence, we look out to heaven and heaven looks down to us. That is why we can pray better there. We are praying before our Lord. Our Lord is just as really and truly present in the blessed sacrament. As I am present before this microphone, as I speak to you, although the manner of presence is different, but it is the crisis. Our Savior, our Redeemer, our love. This has been Life's Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Sheen. For more information about this series, contact St. Joseph Communications at 1-800-526-2151. Outside the US, call 818-3313-3549. And please join us again next time for Life's Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Sheen on EWTN Global Catholic Radio.