"The Blessed Sacrament"
By Rene de Cramer
From the Roman Missal
The Feast of Corpus Christi (The Most Holy Body and Blood of Jesus Christ.)
Today we celebrate in a special way the Sacrament that is source and summit of all Christian religion. The Eucharist.
On the night before His crucifixion, Christ, the archetypal high priest, offered his body and blood, which would be shed for the sins of many, as a new Pachal sacrifice under the appearance of bread and wine. The first Catholic Mass. It is this act that in fact makes Christ's ordinary and humiliating death on a cross into a true Paschal Sacrifice.
What Christ says is true becomes true. Therefore, if the bread and wine He offered that night was not His True Blood and True Flesh as He professed it to be, neither was His Crucifixion a True Liturgical Sacrifice.
Since the sacrifice of the Passover must be eaten, Christ instructed His apostles, the first bishops, to continue offering this Sacrifice in his name. And so, today, the bishops, the successors of the apostles, and the priests, by the permission and charism of the bishops, continue to offer the one sacrifice of the Cross on the altars of the world every day and on Sunday in particular, the day of the resurrection, when the whole Church gathers to participate in the new Paschal Sacrifice and to eat the flesh of the New Lamb. For His "flesh is true food and His blood is true drink." Without the Sacrament which we celebrate in a special way today and indeed celebrate at the center of our lives every day, the crucifixion would never have gained the meaning that it has.
