Our Lady, Woman of the Eucharist

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

“Do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19).

“If we want to rediscover, in all its richness, the profound relationship between the Church and the Eucharist, we cannot neglect Mary, Mother, and model of the Church (John Paul II, Encyclical, Ecclesia de Eucharistia, April 17, 2003).

St. John Paul II pointed out that the Blessed Virgin Mary is our teacher in “contemplating the face of Christ,” and among the Mysteries of Light, he included the institution of the Eucharist.

“Our Lady can guide us towards this Most Holy Sacrament because she had a profound relationship with it. At first glance, the Gospel is silent on the subject. The account of the institution of the Eucharist on the night of Holy Thursday makes no mention of Mary.

“Yet we know from the Acts of the Apostles that Mary was present among the Apostles who prayed ‘with one accord’ (Acts 1:14) in the first community which gathered after the Ascension in the expectation of Pentecost.”

Our Lady “must have been present at the Eucharistic celebrations of the first generations of Christians” who were, as we were told in the Acts, devoted to the “breaking of bread” (Acts 2:42).

But also, “in addition to her sharing of the Eucharistic banquet, an indirect picture of Our Lady's relationship with the Eucharist can be had, beginning with her interior disposition.”

Pope John Paul II had liked to call Our Lady the “‘woman of the Eucharist’ in her whole life. The Church, which looks to Mary as a model, is also called to imitate her in her relationship with this most holy mystery.”

“If the Eucharist is a mystery of faith which so greatly transcends our understanding as to call for sheer abandonment to the word of God, then there can be no one like Our Lady to act as our support and guide in acquiring this disposition.

“In repeating what Christ did at the Last Supper in obedience to his command: ‘Do this in memory of me!’, we also accept Our Lady's invitation to obey him without hesitation: ‘Do whatever he tells you’ (John 2:5).

“With the same maternal concern which she showed at the wedding feast of Cana, Our Lady seems to say to us, ‘Do not waver; trust in the words of my Son. If he was able to change water into wine, he can also turn bread and wine into his body and blood, and through this mystery bestow on believers the living memorial of his Passover, in this way becoming the bread of life.’

“In a certain sense, Our Lady lived her Eucharistic faith even before the institution of the Eucharist, by the very fact that she offered her virginal womb for the incarnation of God's Word. The Eucharist, while commemorating the passion and resurrection, is also in continuity with the incarnation.

“At the Annunciation, Mary conceived the Son of God in the physical reality of his body and blood, thus anticipating within herself what to some degree happens sacramentally in every believer who receives, under the signs of bread and wine, the Lord's body and blood.

“As a result, there is a profound analogy between the Fiat (the ‘Let it be done unto me’) which Mary said in reply to the angel, and the Amen which every believer says when receiving the body of the Lord.

“Mary was asked to believe that the One whom she conceived ‘through the Holy Spirit’ was ‘the Son of God’ (Luke 1:30-35).

“In continuity with Our Lady's faith, in the Eucharistic mystery we are asked to believe that the same Jesus Christ, Son of God and Son of Mary, becomes present in his full humanity and divinity under the signs of bread and wine.

“Mary also anticipated, in the mystery of the incarnation, the Church's Eucharistic faith. When, at the Visitation, she bore in her womb the Word made flesh, she became in some way a ‘tabernacle’—the first ‘tabernacle’ in history—in which the Son of God, still invisible to our human gaze, allowed himself to be adored by Elizabeth, radiating His light, as it were, through the eyes and the voice of Mary.”

“And is not the enraptured gaze of Mary,” says St. John Paul II, “when she contemplated the face of the newborn Christ and cradled him in her arms, that unparalleled model of love which should inspire us every time we receive Holy Communion?”

We could say that “Mary, throughout her life at the side of Christ, and not only on Calvary, made her own the sacrificial dimension of the Eucharist. When she brought the child Jesus to the Temple in Jerusalem ‘to present him to the Lord’ (Luke 2:22), she heard the aged Simeon announce that the child would be a ‘sign of contradiction’ and that a sword would also pierce her own heart (cf. Luke 2:34-35).

“The tragedy of her son's crucifixion was thus foretold, and in some sense, Mary's Stabat Mater when she stood at the foot of the Cross was foreshadowed.

“In her daily preparation for Calvary, Mary experienced a kind of ‘anticipated Eucharist’—one might say a ‘spiritual communion’—of desire and of offering, which would culminate in her union with her Son in his passion, and then find expression after Easter by her partaking in the Eucharist which the apostles celebrated as the memorial of that passion.

“What must Mary have felt as she heard from the mouth of Peter, John, James, and the other apostles the words spoken at the Last Supper: ‘This is my body which is given for you’ (Luke 22:19)? The body given up for us and made present under sacramental signs was the same body which she had conceived in her womb!

“For Mary, receiving the Eucharist must have somehow meant welcoming once more into her womb that heart which had beat in unison with hers and reliving what she had experienced at the foot of the Cross.

“In the ‘memorial’ of Calvary, all that Christ accomplished by his passion and his death is present. Consequently, all that Christ did with regard to his Mother for our sake is also present.

“To her he gave the beloved disciple and, in him, each of us: ‘Behold, your Son!’ To each of us, he also says: ‘Behold your mother!’ (John 19:26-27).

“Experiencing the memorial of Christ's death in the Eucharist also means continually receiving this gift. It means accepting—like John—the one who is given to us anew as Our Mother.

“It also means taking on a commitment to be conformed to Christ, putting ourselves at the school of his Mother, and allowing her to accompany us.

“Mary is present, with the Church and as the Mother of the Church, at each of our celebrations of the Eucharist. If the Church and the Eucharist are inseparably united, the same ought to be said of Mary and the Eucharist.

“This is one reason why, since ancient times, the commemoration of Our Lady has always been part of the Eucharistic celebrations of the Churches of the East and of the West.”

In the first Eucharistic prayer, we say, “In union with the whole Church we honor Mary, the ever-Virgin Mother of Our Lord and God.”

“In the Eucharist the Church is completely united to Christ and his sacrifice, and makes her own the spirit of Mary. This truth can be understood more deeply by re-reading the Magnificat in a Eucharistic key.

“The Eucharist, like the Canticle of Mary, is first and foremost praise and thanksgiving. When Mary exclaims, ‘My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior’, she already bears Jesus in her womb.

“She praises God ‘through’ Jesus, but she also praises him ‘in’ Jesus and ‘with’ Jesus. This is itself the true ‘Eucharistic attitude.’

“At the same time, Our Lady recalls the wonders worked by God in salvation history in fulfillment of the promise once made to the fathers (cf. Luke 1:55), and proclaims the wonder that surpasses them all, the redemptive incarnation.

“The Magnificat reflects also the eschatological tension of the Eucharist. Every time the Son of God comes again to us in the ‘poverty’ of the sacramental signs of bread and wine, the seeds of that new history wherein the mighty are ‘put down from their thrones’ and ‘those of low degree are exalted’ (cf. Luke 1:52) take root in the world.

“Our Lady sings of the ‘new heavens’ and the ‘new earth’ which find in the Eucharist their anticipation and in some sense their programme and plan.

“The Magnificat expresses Mary's spirituality, and there is nothing greater than this spirituality for helping us to experience the mystery of the Eucharist.

“The Eucharist has been given to us so that our life, like that of Mary, may become completely a Magnificat!”

St. John Paul II says in that same Encyclical, “Several years ago I celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of my priesthood. Today I have the grace of offering the Church this Encyclical on the Eucharist on the Holy Thursday which falls during the twenty-fifth year of my Petrine ministry.

“As I do so, my heart is filled with gratitude. For over half a century, every day, beginning on 2 November 1946, when I celebrated my first Mass in the Crypt of St. Leonard in Wawel Cathedral in Krakow, my eyes have gazed in recollection upon the host and the chalice, where time and space in some way ‘merge’ and the drama of Golgotha is re-presented in a living way, thus revealing its mysterious ‘contemporaneity.’

“Each day,” he said, “my faith has been able to recognize in the consecrated bread and wine the divine Wayfarer who joined the two disciples on the road to Emmaus and opened their eyes to the light and their hearts to new hope (cf. Luke 24:13-35).

“Allow me, dear brothers and sisters, to share with deep emotion, as a means of accompanying and strengthening your faith, my own testimony of faith in the Most Blessed Eucharist.

“Ave verum corpus natum de Maria Virgine, vere passum, immolatum, in cruce pro homine! Here is the Church's treasure, the heart of the world, the pledge of the fulfillment for which each man and woman, even unconsciously, yearns. A great and transcendent mystery, and one that taxes our mind's ability to pass beyond appearances.

“Our senses fail us: visus, tactus, gustus in te fallitur, in the words of the hymn Adoro Te Devote.” Sight, touch, and taste in thee are each deceived.

“Yet faith alone, rooted in the word of Christ handed down to us by the apostles, is sufficient for us.

“Allow me, like Peter at the end of the Eucharistic discourse in St. John's Gospel, to say once more to Christ, in the name of the whole Church and in the name of each of you, ‘Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life’ (John 6:68).

In promising the Eucharist, Jesus said, “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed” (John 6:53-55).

As the hymn that we've just mentioned, Ave verum corpus, reminds us, the flesh offered to the Last Supper and immolated on the Cross was the same flesh Jesus received from His Mother Mary.

The word “flesh” suggests the living being in its entirety. To eat the flesh of Christ is to eat Christ Himself because the gift of His Body involves the gift of His person.

Christ's person becomes food, and this implies, on His part, the gift of His entire self.

One time at a get-together with St. Josemaría, a lady stood up and said that each day when she was going off to Mass, she would say to her young daughter, three or four years of age, “I'm going to receive Jesus.”

She said, “One day when I told this to my daughter, the daughter replied with a question, ‘Will you receive Mary also?’”

The mother said, “I was a bit stumped.”

She asked St. Josemaría, “What should I tell my daughter?”

St. Josemaría thought for a moment. It wasn't one of the usual sorts of questions that he was asked. Then he said, “In a certain sense, yes, because the blood of Christ before was the blood of Mary.”

A rather beautiful idea. You won't find that in a theology textbook, but it's a rather beautiful spiritual consideration.

The statement, “I am the bread of life” stresses that Jesus not only gives the bread of eternal life but that this bread is His very self.

The real presence of the Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist, clearly enunciated in our Lord's words, has been received in the tradition of the Church as a truth of faith.

It has been repeatedly asserted and commented on by the Fathers. This doctrine developed as a result of certain controversies, the definitive voice being that of the Council of Trent.

The Council affirmed not only the real presence of Christ's Body and Blood but declared that the entire person of Christ—body, blood, soul, and divinity—is present from the moment of the consecration.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church says, “The Eucharistic presence of Christ begins at the moment of the consecration and lasts as long as the Eucharistic species subsist. Christ is present whole and entire in each of the species and whole and entire in each of their parts, in such a way that the breaking of the bread does not divide Christ” (Catechism, Point 1377).

Wherever Our Lord is, we know His Mother is also. And so, Our Lady must be present at every Mass, at every consecration.

Christ is uniquely present in the Eucharistic species. The Council of Trent said openly and sincerely, “We profess that within the Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist, after the consecration of the bread and wine, Our Lord Jesus Christ, true God and true man, is really, truly and substantially contained under these outward appearances.”

He's present, independent of the faith of the congregation. It's not our faith that makes Him present. He's truly present.

The Council of Trent used this word against a heretic called Huldrych Zwingli, who taught that Christ was only present symbolically.

He is substantially present. Not merely is the power of Christ present, which Calvin taught, but Christ Himself is present, God and man, after the consecration.

This way, Our Lord in His humanity is present “not only at the right hand of the Father, according to his natural mode of existence, but also in the sacrament of the Eucharist, by a mode of existence which we cannot express in words, but which, with the mind instructed by faith, we can conceive” (Council of Trent, The Eucharistic Dogma).

This means that Christ's presence in the sacrament will always remain a mystery.

The fact of the real presence of the Eucharist leads us logically to a consideration of the mystery of transubstantiation, through which the real presence is brought about.

Whenever a priest in the name of Christ pronounces the words of consecration, with the intention of doing what the Church does, “the bread and wine are changed into the substance of Christ's body and the substance of Christ's blood” (Catechism, Point 1376).

Christ's Body and Blood are produced by an act of divine power through the agency of the priest, as done by Christ Himself at the Last Supper.

The Council of Trent says, “Since Christ our Redeemer declared that it was truly his own body which he offered under the form of bread, it has, therefore, always been a firm belief in the Church of God, and this holy council now declares it anew, that by the consecration of the bread and wine, a change is brought about of the whole substance of bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord, and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of His blood. This change in the holy Catholic Church is properly and appropriately calls transubstantiation.”

In other words, it's only by such a total conversion of the substance of bread and wine into the substance of the Lord's Body and Blood that His words “This is my body, this is my blood” really mean what they say.

“The seeming bread,” said St. Cyril of Jerusalem, “is not bread, though sensible to the taste, but the Body of Christ; and the seeming wine is not wine, though the taste will have it so, but the Blood of Christ” (Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lecture 22).

At the moment of consecration, the body of Christ is not combined with natural bread, nor is it enclosed in the bread as in a container, but it replaces the substance of the bread, while the accidents, the color, the taste, the weight and so forth, remain in existence and untouched.

The accidents of bread and wine continue to exist, even after the substances of bread and wine have been changed. It's part of the miracle of transubstantiation.

As the Body and Blood of Christ are one and are not isolated from one another, so too in the sacrament of the Eucharist they're found together by what's called concomitants.

When the priest says, “This is my body,” Christ's body is made present, but His blood, soul, and divinity are also present.

Similarly, with the consecration of the wine, the blood of Christ is made present, but so also are His body, soul, and divinity.

Through concomitants then, the whole glorious Christ is in the Eucharist.

The Council of Trent says, “The natural connection…through which the parts of the Lord Jesus, who has risen already from the dead and dies no more, are linked together.”

The body is never without the blood, and the blood is never without the body.

We can ask the Woman of the Eucharist that she might lead us to a greater understanding and appreciation and love and faith in the real presence of her Son in the sacrament of the Altar.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

MVF