Without the Eucharist, Christianity would be an ideology. Now, by means of the Eucharist, Christ remains on earth in person. We do not live in His Church to preserve His thinking or His memory, but so that He may really receive our praises and the honours due to Him, from this moment on. These praises and honours testify to the love which we, mere creatures, have for Him, the King of kings. By means of the Eucharist, the Incarnation is prolonged from the crib at Bethlehem to reach us.

The Church, made up of the baptized, offers Him her homage through her liturgy. And from apostolic times onward, Europe has seen the development of a liturgical practice which we call the traditional rite. For the Latin Catholics of the West, that rite is the most accomplished form of this realism with regard to the Real Presence in the Eucharist. Let us explain.

Because the consecrated Host (after the transsubstantiation) is God, we may no longer say, do or see all that we might: God is there, and nothing may be preferred to Him. So, to take just one example, once the priest has pronounced the words of consecration over the host and over the wine in the chalice, multiple genuflexions and signs of the cross follow. These gestures translate an attitude of realism with regard to the Presence of God.

The traditional Mass encapsulates the truth of being itself, the truth of what the consecrated Host and wine really are.

BELIEVE: the first step to happiness
“Happiness consists above all in the operation which is that of contemplation” wrote St Thomas Aquinas in 1269, in his commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.

But if we are to find happiness in the truth which we contemplate, the truth must first be accessible to our intellect. Now, since the Eucharist presents our reason with a mystery, the truth must be believed before it can be understood. The act of faith opens the door to this mystery.

In the first place, we must believe: believe that God is there, present in all His divine substance, under the appearance of bread. In the order of creation, what condescension! In the order of reason, how impossible fully to grasp!

Faith has the edge over reason, yet reason is not thereby eliminated. On the contrary: without faith, reason alone could never have discovered this truth which, in human terms, defies explanation: that God is there under the appearance of bread, the Host which the priest has consecrated.

UNDERSTAND that the Eucharist is a person
Si quis vult venire post me, abneget semetipsum et tollat crucem suam et sequatur me.
“If anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” (Mt 16:24)

Before reason can be made to savour the truth, it must first accept it by the act of faith. Therein lies its cross, which will lead it to Christ if it is willing to let itself be guided. Blessed Pierre-Julien Eymard, founder of the Congregation of the Blessed Sacrament in the nineteenth century, affirmed that

Faith in the Most Blessed Sacrament is the act of faith which gives most glory to Jesus Christ, obtains the most merit for a Christian and gives the most consolation to his heart.

Now that we believe that the substance of God has the appearance of bread (colour, taste, consistency), we must remain logical and realistic. We are in front of a Person. God presents himself before us. His presence is real, even though our senses are deficient and reason threatens to rebel. Here is the heart of the mystery: the appearance of bread remains, while God is there in person. God is Eucharist.

CONTEMPLATE so that the truth may triumph
Non tu me mutabis in te, sed tu mutaberis in me: “You will not change Me into yourself; rather, you will be changed into Me” (the just expression of St Augustine).

Whether we contemplate or receive Communion, the Eucharist splendidly illuminates our souls, which silently enter into contact with God. Our whole being – body and soul – receives God. We are divinized.

This supreme mystical experience is accessible to anyone who is baptized. Blessed Elisabeth of the Trinity describes it clearly in a prayer which she composed after an eight-day retreat at her Carmelite monastery in Dijon, towards the end of the year 1904, a   century ago:

[...] help me to forget myself entirely so as to take up my dwelling in You: still and at peace as if my soul were already in eternity [...] make it into Your heaven [...] I ask You to “clothe me with yourself ” [...] so that my life may be nothing other than a ray of Your life. [...] “Be present in me”: let it be as if the Incarnation of the Word were taking place in my soul, let me be another humanity for Him, in which He renews His whole Mystery.

These moments spent in the intimacy of the Eucharist are so many meetings of our own substance with the substance of God.

CONFORMING OURSELVES to Jesus as Victim (Hostia)
While we are distracted from God, our life sometimes has no sense apart from the anguish which racks us. Now the time has come for us to enter a church, to come before God himself. Better still: by means of the sacrament of Communion, or by our contemplation, God comes to take up residence in our souls, as soon as we open the door of our intelligence to Him by the act of faith. God then rests in us, and we in Him. We “present [our] bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is spiritual worship” (Rom 12:1).

There is a change in the way we are, and we look at ourselves and at others in a new light. Grace is poured into our souls. God reigns in our being. We act under the influence of grace. We are saints. With a purer and more simple vision, we look at everything in the perspective of eternity. Our life takes on its true worth. Our suffering and our labours can be understood, and borne, only because they show God that nothing will separate us from Him.

CONCLUSION: life is a lesson learned in front of the tabernacle
In contemplating the Eucharist, we are at the source of life. God, who is supreme existence, unites himself with us, His creatures. The Eucharist which we receive or contemplate is the visible support by which God communicates himself to us and remains in us. In His presence we become aware of the purpose of our existence, the reason for our lives: to be with God, and for God to be with us.

The school of mysticism is open to all. The best pupils receive the palm of martyrdom or the haloes of eternal glory. Saints are formed in this school, which is only a few steps away from us: it is the Church. Her Master is present there in the tabernacle. With Him, we learn to love Him and our neighbour, to the point of giving all: our time, our efforts and our life itself.

The Eucharist is a sacrifice
13. By virtue of its close relationship to the sacrifice of Golgotha, the Eucharist is a sacrifice in the strict sense, and not only in a general way, as if it were simply a matter of Christ's offering himself to the faithful as their spiritual food. The gift of his love and obedience to the point of giving his life (cf. Jn 10:17-18) is in the first place a gift to his Father. Certainly it is a gift given for our sake, and indeed that of all humanity (cf. Mt 26:28; Mk 14:24; Lk 22:20; Jn 10:15), yet it is first and foremost a gift to the Father: “asacrifice that the Father accepted, giving, in return for this total self-giving by his Son, who 'became obedient unto death' (Phil 2:8), his own paternal gift, that is to say the grant of new immortal life in the resurrection”.
In giving his sacrifice to the Church, Christ has also made his own the spiritual sacrifice of the Church, which is called to offer herself in union with the sacrifice of Christ. This is the teaching of the Second Vatican Council concerning all the faithful: “Taking part in the Eucharistic Sacrifice, which is the source and summit of the whole Christian life, they offer the divine victim to God, and offer themselves along with it”.

The Lord's body and blood are received in communion
16. The saving efficacy of the sacrifice is fully realized when the Lord's body and blood are received in communion. The Eucharistic Sacrifice is intrinsically directed to the inward union of the faithful with Christ through communion; we receive the very One who offered himself for us, we receive his body which he gave up for us on the Cross and his blood which he “poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Mt 26:28). We are reminded of his words: “As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me” (Jn 6:57). Jesus himself reassures us that this union, which he compares to that of the life of the Trinity, is truly realized. The Eucharist is a true banquet, in which Christ offers himself as our nourishment. When for the first time Jesus spoke of this food, his listeners were astonished and bewildered, which forced the Master to emphasize the objective truth of his words: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life within you” (Jn 6:53). This is no metaphorical food: “My flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed” (Jn 6:55).

Mary and the Eucharist
56. Mary, throughout her life at Christ's side 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” (Lk 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. Lk 2:34-35). The tragedy of her Son's crucifixion was thus foretold, and in some sense Mary's Stabat Mater 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 oblation, 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” (Lk 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.