By Judie Brown
Jesus says to each of us, “Come to Me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for yourselves. For My yoke is easy, and My burden light.”
The Lord is beckoning us to walk with Him, to trust in Him, but most of all to receive Him in the Eucharist, welcoming Him into our hearts. Bishop James Conley writes, “The Catholic faith is centered on the liturgy, which takes us out of the mundane and into the courts of heaven, into the splendor of the eternal! Every Mass is an encounter through God’s invitation into heavenly worship, through communion with Christ, and through our being sent forth into the world as missionary disciples to help others encounter God as we have.”
Father Mike Schmitz describes the Eucharist as “both a noun and a verb,” explaining that the verb is “the offering of the sacrifice.” If we consider both the bishop’s words and Father Mike’s, we have a very good idea of why pro-life Catholics need to be in constant communion with the one who died for us.
When we are actually in the presence of the Eucharistic Christ, we are in union with the Father who loves each of us as well as our preborn brothers and sisters. To my mind, that is what makes our mission to affirm life so glorious and inspiring, even as the world ignores this wonder and denies it every time it approves any act that ends the life of a vulnerable human being. It is a world that drives people away from truth and toward the many eternally fatal practices that are glamorized in our secular culture.
But whether it is contraception, homosexuality, euthanasia, or abortion, the Church stands as a beacon of truth and light. And in His mercy, Christ continues to extend His hand to every person, each of whom is created in His image and likeness.
But we are living in challenging times. There are those who to this very day bring pressure on Catholic leaders to end Catholic objections to contraception and so forth. Reflecting on how supporters of these social ills continue to harass the Church, Father Jerry Pokorsky writes:
The Holy Spirit guarantees the Church’s fidelity to the deposit of faith; the principle of noncontradiction explains why a genuine doctrinal reversal would constitute a contradiction. After the Second Vatican Council, dissent from authentic Church teaching exploded. Pope Paul VI’s teaching on human life in Humanae Vitae was mostly ignored. The widespread acceptance of contraception undermined the meaning and ends of matrimony, with consequences that metastasized throughout society. Today, the LGBTQ ideology has reached the highest levels of society and has seeped into the hierarchy of the Church. . . .
As ordained ministers of the Gospel, for no merit of their own, they take simple bread and wine and repeat the words of consecration, and Christ becomes present on our altars. Through the laying on of hands, their ordination can be traced back through Peter and the Apostles. The triumph cannot be reduced to the beautiful tapestry of faith we find in the Bible and the Catechism. The Church’s victory will forever be the Presence of Jesus in history under the appearance of bread and wine in the celebration of the Mass.
The realization of this miraculous event that occurs each time the consecration takes place brings us in direct contact with Christ, as He asks us to come to Him.
But we must never forget that Satan detests this. As Thomas à Kempis explained in Imitation of Christ:
Satan’s most violent assaults often come upon people whenever they make their preparation for Holy Communion. As it is written in job, that wicked spirit comes among the children of God (Job 1:7) to trouble them with his accustomed malice, or to make them fearful and uncertain. In this way he seeks to lessen their love for God, or to destroy their faith, that they may perhaps entirely abandon Communion, or come to it with little devotion. But pay no regard to his snares and cunning illusions, however vile and horrible, and hurl back these fantasies on his own head. Treat the Evil One with the contempt and mockery that he deserves, and never abandon Holy Communion on account of his insults and disturbances.
Lord, we will never abandon You, Your real presence in the Eucharist, or Your love for each of us. We love You, Lord Jesus.
Amen!