9781644135945

The Time After Pentecost
our lives a joyful and uninterrupted holocaust for the love of God, we have not yet learned
to celebrate Mass fruitfully.
For Christ the Eucharist is a sacrament which offers Him an opportunity for perfect self-immolation
and self-sacrifice. Can it be anything less for us? Should not the Eucharistic Lord be
the very soul of my existence also? Should not I become unreservedly His, filled with His spirit
of sacrifice, an integral part of His offering to the Father? An Eucharistic soul is of necessity a
soul consumed with the desire of sacrificing itself for the love of God and of Christ.
Prayer
O God, who in this wonderful sacrament has left us a memorial of Thy passion, grant us, we
beseech Thee, so to reverence the sacred mysteries of Thy body and blood that we may ever perceive
within us the fruit of Thy redemption. Who livest and reignest world without end. Amen.
Saturday after Corpus Christi
“The priests of the Lord offer incense and loaves to God, and therefore they shall be holy to their
God and shall not defile His name, alleluia” (Offertory). The Holy Eucharist is the sacrifice of
the New Testament, the Holy Sacrifice of the Church.
The essence of Christianity and all Christian piety lies in the fulfillment of the prayer, “Hallowed
be Thy name.” The first duty of the Christian is to sanctify the name of God, to worship Him,
to acknowledge His dominion, and serve Him perfectly, as is His due. But who is capable of
honoring Him and serving Him in a manner that is truly worthy of Him? There is only one who
is capable of this: the Son of God made man, Jesus Christ, our Lord. He is one in essence with
the Father. He is at the same time one of us. Since He is both God and man, He can offer to the
Father an adoration and homage which is of infinite value and worthy of Him. This same homage,
the divinity of Christ, we can and must pay to the Father. Christ’s divinity is the reflection of
the glory of the Father; it is an eternal and perfect hymn of praise to the Father; it is the means
by which God has honored Himself from all eternity. Only through Christ and in Christ can
we sanctify the name of God and pay Him an homage that is truly worthy of Him. The very
essence of our religion, then, consists in our offering of Christ to the Blessed Trinity. To this
offering we must add the offering of ourselves, with every fiber of our being. The essence of our
piety consists in our offering of Christ to the Father, and with Him our very being, in order that
we may be able to “offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ” (1 Pt 2:5).
In the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass we offer up Christ. What we do by our own strength alone,
is valueless in the sight of God, and can never rise above the level of our own insignificance. And
yet we have the duty of offering to God an eternal homage. In view of our nothingness, how can
we offer such a homage? “Through Him [Christ], and with Him, and in Him is to Thee, God
the Father Almighty, in the unity of the Holy Ghost, all honor and glory.” Through the Holy
Sacrifice of the Mass it becomes possible for us to offer Christ to His Father—the acme of the
eternal and perfect worship of the divinity. God gave us His Son through the mystery of the
Incarnation, not that we should retain Him for ourselves, but that we should give Him back to
the Father in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass as an expression of our filial love. In the Mass we
offer Christ as our gift to the Father. His heart, His body, His soul, His most precious blood,
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