As it was read from the Gospel according to St. John this Sunday:
Jesus said to them, "Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Unlike your ancestors who ate and still died, whoever eats this bread will live forever." ( John 6:53-58)To summarize and distill Jesus' words here and, as it were, also the call to all Christians in its very essence: "In brief, the Eucharist is the sum and summary of our faith: 'Our way of thinking is attuned to the Eucharist, and the Eucharist in turn confirms our way of thinking.'" (CCC 1327). These words, "Our way of thinking is attuned to the Eucharist, and the Eucharist in turn confirms our way of thinking," come to us from St. Irenaeus in the Second Century A.D.—before the Schism of East and West, before the Protestant Reformation. The question we must ask now is, why aren't we fully living it in every aspect of our lives? The Church is not stating in her teaching that it is merely our religious thinking or our political thinking. Her teaching states clearly our thinking ought to be attuned to the Eucharist, to His Sacrifice—where time and space are spanned.
This is the Catholic Ethos: the Eucharist.
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