Christian Saints

"We must work for this. Our God is the God of life and life is his gift. In no way can we be among those who work for death, on the contrary we must work for life. The Congress was a call to all men and women to remember we are loved by God and we must love him in return."

"John Peckham,"

"They used to say of Abba Isaac that he used to eat ashes from the thurible used at the Eucharist with his bread."

"Following the example of Mary, Eucharistic spirituality has to be lived also through daily offering, through commitment to peace and to unity, through solidarity towards all, particularly towards people who suffer and are alone."

"So we need to keep growing in our relationship with the one who calls us. So to be with him more, the Lord Jesus, where he is, is the Eucharist, the Word proclaimed, with one another. This is the time for all of us to be one body. Is the time for the laity to take the lead with us clergy to serve the Church and God in our neighbors, to go out of our doors, to widen our tents."

"Invisibly our Eucharistic celebrations gather a still absent people, one of those who are searching for God in the righteousness of their hearts. For a particular Church, the way of living the Eucharist cannot be separated from its concrete history with the people she was given to by the Lord."

"We have to start at the seminary: give the Eucharist the place of honor in the formation of our future priests. Make them aware, at an early age, that they are the ordinary ministers of the Eucharist and the Eucharist should be the centre of their personal lives. Priests should be reminded often that they are the ordinary minister of the Eucharist who delegate this important ministry of distributing Holy Communion to well prepared lay faithful."

"Historical reflection is always present, or at least should be, in every community. The truth about what happened here, behind the wires of the German Nazi concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau built on the outskirts of Oświęcim, should not divide us in any way. The sacrifice of the lives of these people, preceded by cruel martyrdom, should become a unifying force for contemporary society, not only those living on the Vistula."

"These are days of profound joy, fruit of the presence of the Holy Spirit expressed in praise, proclamation of the Word through preachers, tools of God calling to conversion. The days include intense adoration of the Jesus present in the Eucharist. He walks among us today touching and healing hearts to grant health of body and spirit."

"There is no evil to be faced that Christ does not face with us. There is no enemy that Christ has not already conquered. There is no cross to bear that Christ has not already borne for us, and does not now bear with us. And on the far side of every cross we find the newness of life in the Holy Spirit, that new life which will reach its fulfillment in the resurrection. This is our faith. This is our witness before the world."

"With Eucharistic faith, upheld by ecclesial tradition and based on the words of the Lord, we have access to real, though imperfect, certainties. Finally, in the face of the solitude and desperation that undermine mankind today, the Eucharist offers us... profound companionship and a promise of eternal life that fills us with definitive hope."

"The Latin osculum is neither very old nor frequent. It is one of three words that can be translated by the English, "kiss." In comparison with the affectionate basium and the lascivious suavium, osculum was a latecomer into classical Latin, and was used in only one circumstance as a ritual gesture: In the second century, it became the sign given by a departing soldier to a woman, thereby recognizing her expected child as his offspring. In the Christian liturgy of the first century, the osculum assumed a new function. It became one of two high points in the celebration of the Eucharist. Conspiratio, the mount-to-mouth kiss, became the solemn liturgical gesture by which participants in the cult-action shared their breath or spirit with one another. It came to signify their union in one Holy Spirit, the community that takes shape in God's breath. The ecclesia came to be through a public ritual action, the liturgy, and the soul of this liturgy was the conspiratio. Explicitly, corporeally, the central Christian celebration was understood as a co-breathing, a con-spiracy, the bringing about of a common atmosphere, a divine milieu."

"My proposal is that, given the close theological, spiritual and pastoral relationship between the Eucharist and the Sacrament of Penance, and taking into account the shadows in the latter sacrament's field, a year be dedicated to the Sacrament of Penance."

"I know I would not be able to work one week if it were not for that continual force coming from Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament (during my Holy Hour of Adoration)."

"Holy Communion is the shortest and safest way to Heaven. There are others: innocence, but that is for little children; penance, but we are afraid of it; generous endurance of trials of life, but when they come we weep and ask to be delivered. The surest, easiest, shortest way is the Eucharist."

"Many of the faithful believe Holy Communion leads to personal sanctification and transformation of attitudes and engenders responsiveness to the needs of others... for many others there is a disparity between what they believe and how they live."

"It is the Eucharist that invites us to be part of the mission of Christ. We need life in the Sydney Church to flourish."

"“The Eucharist has always carried the memory of Jesus’ meals with tax collectors and sinners.”"

"Ivan Illich, "The Cultivation of Conspiracy" (1998)"

"The things, good Lord, that I pray for, give me thy grace to labour for. Amen."

"There is no Church without the Eucharist. The fact that it is not available makes us become a Protestant Catholic Church, because we lack the Eucharist and the other sacraments."

"If any man be well grown in grace, he must needs come [to receive the Eucharist], because he is excellently disposed to so holy a feast: but he that is but in the infancy of piety had need to come, that so he may grow in grace. The strong must come lest they become weak; and the weak that they may become strong. The sick must come to be cured; the healthful to be preserved."

"The more Eucharist we receive, the more we will become like Jesus, so that on this earth we will have a foretaste of Heaven."

"What will convert America and save the world? My answer is prayer. What we need is for every parish to come before Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament in Holy Hours of prayer."

"Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament is the best time you will spend on earth."

"Faith in the Eucharist is not an easy faith. One cannot use the criterion of knowledge through contact or the experience of the Presence. It is pure faith. This is why I said that the Eucharist is "the testing ground of faith," of our faith. If there is no faith in the Eucharist it is because an approach is lacking to the mystery of the faith."

"The greatest of all the reformers of the depraved religion of his own country, was Jesus of Nazareth. Abstracting what is really his from the rubbish in which it is buried, easily distinguished by its lustre from the dross of his biographers, and as separable from that as the diamond from the dunghill. ... The establishment of the innocent and genuine character of this benevolent moralist, and the rescuing it from the imputation of imposture, which has resulted from artificial systems, [footnote: e.g. The immaculate conception of Jesus, his deification, the creation of the world by him, his miraculous powers, his resurrection and visible ascension, his corporeal presence in the Eucharist, the Trinity; original sin, atonement, regeneration, election, orders of Hierarchy, etc. —T.J.] invented by ultra-Christian sects, unauthorized by a single word ever uttered by him, is a most desirable object, and one to which Priestley has successfully devoted his labors and learning. It would in time, it is to be hoped, effect a quiet euthanasia of the heresies of bigotry and fanaticism which have so long triumphed over human reason, and so generally and deeply afflicted mankind; but this work is to be begun by winnowing the grain from the chaff of the historians of his life."

"by virtue of this sacrament a certain transformation of man into Christ takes place through charity: and this is the proper effect of this sacrament."

"I'm so blessed by the Lord, the way He has revealed Himself to me through His Eucharist, and by the priests who have supported me all these years, and the people."

"Christ's presence among men takes place primarily through the Eucharist."

"We are united not only by the vast waters of the Pacific Ocean but also by faith in Jesus Christ. This faith which we share as brothers and sisters is what brings us here today to proclaim our profound faith in our Saviour Jesus Christ...We see the end of missionary efforts and we too have become missionaries to take part in the new evangelisation united with the Holy Father."

"We need to free ourselves from a practice of faith that is objectively individualistic, that does not take into consideration the fact that we are a community ("Communio") founded upon Baptism and the Eucharist. We have to free ourselves from a practice of faith that is objectively apolitical, that does not realize the Spirit of God will renew the face of the earth including the social, economic and political structures."

"And Christians take even the Eucharist as a type of the glory at which they aim."

"In one case as in the other, the question which gives away the sacrificial mentality underlying group belonging is the same: are you for us, or are you one of them? It is the question which reveals the impossibility of a cracking of heart, and thus the impossibility of Eucharist."

"The church is still alive. There may be institutional decline, but it is not a decline in the Gospel or in the Eucharist or the Lord himself, right? That is all well and good and alive, and will be as long as there are people who will surrender themselves and trust in his grace."

"If the Church would have her face shine, she must go up into the mount, and be alone with God. If she would have her courts of worship resound with eucharistic praises, she must open her eyes, and see humanity lying lame at the temple gates, and heal it in the miraculous name of Jesus."

"On the national level, the Eucharist becomes for us the way to true unity: as was asserted by the Fathers of the Special Synod for Africa, we try to make clear how much the Blood of Christ by itself can realize the unity of the nation that has more than 50 ethnic peoples, ready to oppose each other and enter battle especially when they are manipulated by politicians for electoral reasons."

"We are looking to be more numerous, to gather more faithful for the Eucharist, to manifest more strongly the Catholic presence in our secularized societies. However, we cannot be satisfied by these quantitative perspectives. We are also called upon to a task of internal renewal of our Christian life."

"We go to the Holy Land in a spirit of communion with the Christians who live and suffer there, praying and celebrating the Eucharist with them, which is very much appreciated and mutually reinforcing. The spirit is that of pilgrims who learn from the Holy Places and let ourselves be filled by the grace of the pilgrimage"

"For millions of men and women, the church has been the hospital for the soul, the school for the mind and the safe depository for moral ideas."

"We will be humble and trusting pilgrims in a place that is of highest importance in the faith, bringing our hopes and anxieties, and in the celebration of the Eucharist, in our encounter with the Risen Lord, we will pray for ourselves and our Church, that we may receive the gift of a joyful and courageous faith, so as to produce hope and dialogue with those who will ask us about the meaning of life. We owe it to Rome, to offer this city a renewed proclamation of the Gospel, capable of transforming the daily lives of families, youth, the sick, and the poor."

"Vatican II spoke so strongly about full, conscious, active participation. That was the primary purpose of liturgical renewal. I think we are really missing out on that. Many people come to the Eucharist without much of an idea what it is about. Nor do they have an awareness of their own call, in virtue of their baptism, to participate in the Eucharist. There are probably four places in the documents of the Vatican Council that talk about the baptized offering the Divine Victim to the Father in the Eucharist. I think that 90% of the baptized people don’t really see themselves, in virtue of their baptismal priesthood, as able to offer the Divine Victim to the Father."

"Dear young people, today as we look up at the sky, we see that the rain we wanted all summer long is falling. I am also looking at you and believe that you are the saving rain that soaks the earth and makes it fertile."

"Ante agnus offerebatur, offerebatur et vitulus, nunc Christus offertur...et offert se ipse quasi sacerdos, ut peccata nostra dimittat. Hic in imagine, ibi in veritate, ubi apud Patrem pro nobis quasi advocatus intervenit."

"It wasn't just in Southern evangelical churches or Baptist churches. ... Even when [the Methodists] admitted African American churches into the larger Methodist denomination, they segregated them into one jurisdiction. It was essentially a version of religious gerrymandering so that they would get one bishop instead of possibly competing for power in other jurisdictions; they were all locked into one jurisdiction, so their voice inside the denomination will be smaller. And even among white Catholics, the Catholic Church had long had a practice of African Americans sitting in the back. [They] couldn't come and take part of the Eucharist until all the white members had done so. New York, for example, did the same thing, and actually segregated the African American Catholics into a single parish and also made only one Catholic school available to African Americans and made it a segregated school. And these practices continued in the middle of the 20th century, even even among Catholics in the North."

": Dogma datur Christiánis,"

"A martyr to the cause of man, His blood is freedom's eucharist, And in the world's great hero list His name shall lead the van."

"Inevitably, this period of lockdown will have repercussions on the lives and the faith of our Christians, both positive and negative. There will be a before and an after. For some, being unable to take part in the Eucharistic celebration will deepen their desire and thirst for God and for union and communion with him and with their community. For lukewarm Christians, however, this could be the end."

"(About Saint Thomas Christians) They had only three sacraments, baptism, eucharist, and the orders; and would not admit transubstantiation in the manner the Roman Catholics do."

"The communion of saints does not concern only those brothers and sisters who are beside me at this historic moment, or who live in this historic moment, but also those who have concluded their journey, the earthly pilgrimage and crossed the threshold of death. They too are in communion with us. Let us consider, dear brothers and sisters, that in Christ no one can ever truly separate us from those we love because the bond is an existential bond, a strong bond that is in our very nature; only the manner of being together with one another them changes, but nothing and no one can break this bond. “Father, let’s think about those who have denied the faith, who are apostates, who are the persecutors of the Church, who have denied their baptism: Are these also at home?” Yes, these too. All of them. The blasphemers, all of them. We are brothers. This is the communion of saints. The communion of saints holds together the community of believers on earth and in heaven, and on earth the saints, the sinners, all."