Continuing my special series during this second year of the National Eucharistic Revival, I would like us to pause and consider the breadth of our personal communion with Christ in the Eucharist. We also name the Eucharist “Holy Communion, because by this sacrament we unite ourselves to Christ, who makes us sharers in his Body and Blood to form a single body” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1331).
That single body is Christ’s, and we know that his body is precisely the Church (1 Corinthians 12:27). Thus, in receiving the Eucharist, we are in communion with Christ and in communion with his Church. It would be impossible to be in communion with the head alone without also being in communion with the body.
To achieve this communion among the Church, the priest, praying to the Father in persona Christi, performs a second epiclesis in the Eucharistic Prayer: “Humbly we pray that, partaking of the Body and Blood of Christ, we may be gathered into one by the Holy Spirit” (Eucharistic Prayer II). With the first epiclesis, he invoked the Holy Spirit to transform the bread and wine into the body and blood of the Lord.
To be in communion with Christ is to be in communion with his Church, and this means to remain united with one another, just as our Lord implored his Father in his priestly prayer at the Last Supper, “that they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you … that they may be one, as we are one” (John 17:21a, 22b).
This communion between us, willed and prayed for by Christ, is expressed liturgically in the Communion Rite, when we pray, all united, to “our Father” and then fraternally give each other a sign of peace to sacramentally show by touching each other with that handshake and wishing each other peace, that we are in communion with one another.
To be in communion with Christ, then, is to be in communion with the Church. And to be in communion with the Church is to be in communion with our pastors: the pope and the bishops.
We cannot receive the Eucharist with reverence and at the same time attack the pope. We cannot receive Communion with devotion and motivate others to disobey our bishops. By confronting our pastors, we provoke just the opposite of that unity, for we achieve only divisions among our Church, making Jesus’ lament a reality: “I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock will be dispersed” (Matthew 26:31c). Nonetheless, we see attitudes like these every day on social media.
As a Church, we live in times when we need to strengthen our unity if we truly want to do Christ’s will. Thus, every time the priest, in persona Christi, performs the second epiclesis at every Holy Mass, may the same petition resound in our hearts, so that united with Christ, we may implore the Father that the Holy Spirit will gather us in unity. And then let us do our part, on a personal level, to make this unity among us, willed by Christ himself, a reality.
Be passionate about our faith!