9781644135945

The Light of the World
especially the salutary offering with which our Lord and Savior consummated His sacrifice
on the cross. It embraces His perfect obedience to the Father, His thirst for humiliations, His
acceptance of suffering and death, His love for the Father and for sinners, whom He seeks
to redeem and reconcile with the Father. All these were the price at which the Eucharist
was bought, the price He paid in order to remain near us in the Eucharist and to offer on
the altar the Holy Sacrifice to the Triune God. With the eyes of faith we should see all these
sufferings of Christ in the Eucharist.
The Holy Eucharist commemorates the suffering and death of Christ. In the Holy
Sacrifice of the Mass, the death of Christ on the cross is commemorated and renewed
through the separation of the bread and wine, the visible species under which He offers
Himself up to the Father. After His resurrection Christ could no longer suffer or die. As the
risen and glorified Christ on the altar, He is entirely incapable of suffering or of death. But
through the celebration of the Mass, He renews before our eyes in an unbloody manner
His death on the cross. He appears personally among us, the same divine being who offered
Himself up for us on the cross. He appears with the sacrificial intention and with the same
inward disposition which made His offering on the cross a perfect sacrifice, and which
makes perfect also the sacrifice which He now makes upon the altar. Just as He expressed
His complete submission to the Father through His death, that is, through the separation
of His body and blood on the cross; so now He renews daily that perfect disposition of soul
in a visible manner through the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Just as His blood was separated
from His body on the cross, so now the visible elements of His sacrifice, the bread and wine,
are separately consecrated upon the altar. Thus the celebration of the Holy Sacrifice of the
Mass becomes a visible representation and a commemoration of the suffering and death of
Christ. We should recall daily through this Holy Sacrifice the precious price which Christ
has paid for our salvation. We should recall how complete was His dedication to the work
of our redemption, how unceasingly He thought of our salvation. “The Son of God . . . loved
me and delivered Himself for me” (Gal 2:20).
The Eucharist is not a mere empty symbol that simply reminds us of the suffering of the
Lord. It is a symbol which embraces the entire reality of the passion: Christ, His true body and
blood, His soul, His sacrificial purpose, His internal and constant will to sacrifice. It is both a
representation and a type given to us that, by considering it in remembrance of the suffering
and death of our Lord, we also may learn to become a daily and perfect sacrifice to the Father.
Daily we should unite ourselves to Christ our head, and offer ourselves up in union with the
sacrificial action of Christ.
The celebration of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass with Christ is the center of all true
Christian piety. This sacrifice points to the bloody sacrifice of Christ on the cross. The
devout participation in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass necessarily produces in us a deeper
understanding of the sacrificial life of Christ and makes us conscious of our Christian duty
of participating in that sacrificial life. Here in the Sacrifice of the Mass we shall learn that
sacrifice is the root of all that is great, the heart of all that is noble, and the crown of all
that is worth while in the life of a Christian. Here we obtain the knowledge, the courage,
and the strength to make a complete offering of ourselves to God. Unless we gain from
our celebration of Mass the strength, courage, and spirit of sacrifice necessary to make
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