 It has been a long while since a Church Document study has been featured on our blog.
Throughout the Church here in America much attention has recently been redirected to Pope St. John Paul II’s last encyclical: Ecclesia de Eucharistia. Let us reflect on some of the highlights from this magnificent encyclical.  Andreas Pavias (1440-1504/1512) - Public Domain Most Precious Blood of Jesus, save us! Throughout the month of July, we often end our prayers with this short invocation to Our Lord.
 "It is not to remain in a golden ciborium that He comes down each day from Heaven, but to find another Heaven, the Heaven of our soul in which He takes delight."
- St. Therese of Lisieux  Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, I place my trust in Thee! "It is altogether impossible to enumerate the heavenly gifts which devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus has poured out on the souls of the faithful, purifying them, offering them heavenly strength, rousing them to the attainment of all virtues. Therefore, recalling those wise words of the Apostle St. James, "Every best gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of Lights,"(2) We are perfectly justified in seeing in this same devotion, which flourishes with increasing fervor throughout the world, a gift without price which our divine Savior the Incarnate Word, as the one Mediator of grace and truth between the heavenly Father and the human race imparted to the Church, His mystical Spouse, in recent centuries when she had to endure such trials and surmount so many difficulties.
 "Can we love someone we do not even know? Can we love deeply someone we know only vaguely? Why is Jesus, the adorable, eternal and incarnate Wisdom loved so little if not because he is either too little known or not known at all? Hardly anyone studies the supreme science of Jesus, as did St. Paul (Eph. 3:19). And yet this is the most noble, the most consoling, the most useful and the most vital of all sciences and subjects in heaven and on earth.
"First, it is the most noble of all sciences because its subject is the most noble and the most sublime: Wisdom uncreated and incarnate. He possesses in himself the fullness of divinity and humanity alike and all that is great in heaven and on earth, namely, all creatures visible and invisible, spiritual and corporal. St. John Chrysostom says that our Lord is the summary of all God's works, the epitome of all the perfections to be found in God and in his creatures (cf. Col. 1:16; 2:9). "Jesus Christ is everything that you can and should wish for. Long for him, seek for him, because he is that unique and precious pearl for which you should be ready to sell everything you possess" …  Unlimited is the effectiveness of the God-Man’s Blood — just as unlimited as the love that impelled him to pour it out for us, first at his circumcision eight days after birth, and more profusely later on in his agony in the garden,[12] in his scourging and crowning with thorns, in his climb to Calvary and crucifixion, and finally from out that great wide wound in his side which symbolizes the divine Blood cascading down into all the Church’s sacraments. Such sur passing love suggests, nay demands, that everyone reborn in the torrents of that Blood adore it with grateful love." - Pope St. John XXIII on Promoting Devotion to the Most Precious Blood
 In the cycle of the liturgical year, the Sacred Triduum stands out in a class all its own: Holy Thursday as a day of unparalleled liturgical catharsis, Good Friday as one in which contrition cannot but pour out as tears; all of which reaches its pinnacle on Easter, the Solemnity of Solemnities. Holy Week catches us up into the drama of our redemption and God’s infinite love for Man—and it is this very theme which is the inescapable motif of the entire affair: love.
 Vere, tu es Deus Absconditus
And like the deer for running streams How my eyes thirst to see You! At Christmas I beheld You By angel choirs adored, but now Their “Glorias” are gone and with them…my Lord? To the ‘tonus peregrinus’ does my soul sigh, forlorn; Has the Sanhedrin taken Him? Where has my Beloved gone? For even on the Cross, I see Him Shrouded from my gaze; His royal purples hide Him Unto the end of these forty days. I hunger for You, Adonai, And will you hide from me? Come back to me, Beloved, Whose Face I long to see… A Marian Sister of Santa Rosa  "The Church draws her life from the Eucharist.
This truth does not simply express a daily experience of faith, but recapitulates the heart of the mystery of the Church. In a variety of ways She joyfully experiences the constant fulfilment of the promise: 'Lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age' (Mt 28:20), but in the Holy Eucharist, through the changing of bread and wine into the body and blood of the Lord, she rejoices in this presence with unique intensity." - Pope St. John Paul II: Ecclesia de Eucharistia |
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