The Dynamism Of Eucharistic Adoration
Dylan James
A Eucharistic revival
One of the features of modern Catholic youth movements is a strong focus on Eucharistic Adoration. It can be witnessed at gatherings across the world, and also within the various Ecclesial Movements which are such a sign of hope in the modern Church. The Faith Movement is no exception to this somewhat surprising fact. Many older 'progressives' who had their formative years in the 1960s can find this phenomenon hard to understand, some even despair of what they consider a bizarre attachment to old-fashioned devotions. And yet it is an observable fact: in Catholic youth movements where there is solid faith in the Real Presence there is also an automatic attraction to those Eucharistic devotions that were previously discarded as unsuitable to our time. What is the reason for this? Is it just some bizarre hangover from the past, something that has slipped in again for no real reason? It may be that sometimes it is just a pious devotion with no deep theological background. But even so it must be viewed as one of the signs of our times especially as it can be seen in all the young growing parts of the Church. However, in the Faith Movement this practice is not just valued, and it is not just seen as part of orthodox belief and practice. The Eucharist, and the adoration that follows, is very much at the heart of the vision of the plan of creation that our founder Fr. Holloway expounded in this magazine for so long.
The Eucharist in the FAITH Vision
The Synthesis of the truths of Catholicism that Faith proposes sees the gift of the Eucharist as part of what God had always planned to give us. Just as we do not view the Incarnation as simply being a response to the disaster of the Fall, we also view the Eucharist as an intrinsic part of the design of creation. What distinguishes the creation we see around us from God is the fact that it is material not spiritual. This is true of the minerals, the plants, the animals, in short, it is true of everything in the universe except us. The plan of God's creation through evolution reached its peak in its evolution towards man. When the material process of evolution could go no higher, he gave us a spiritual soul, marking us out from the rest of creation. Whereas all of the rest of creation finds its fulfilment in the physical environment that surrounds it, we do not. We are not just physical and so must seek our fulfilment in God - he is our environment. It follows that the Incarnation, when God became man and so united man to God, was not just a response to the tragedy of sin, it was part of God's original plan in creation. The Incarnation completed the plan of creation, but it needed to have lasting consequences if it was to achieve its aim. Thus the need for the whole sacramental economy, that what was visible in the life of our Saviour could pass over into his sacraments. Nowhere is this truer than in the Eucharist. There was no point in Christ becoming physically present in the Incarnation unless he also planned to remain physically present, and present in a manner that would enable him to be extend his presence all across the world and all through time.The primary purpose of the Eucharist is, therefore, to feed us. Creatures eat, and if we are to be fulfilled by God then a feeding of some sort is necessary for our nature. We are both physical and spiritual and it is only to be expected that we should be fed in a manner that satisfies both of these aspects of our nature. The only physical body Christ has is the one he has assumed in the Incarnation, as God's Master Key puts it, "Part of the work of the Incarnation is the feeding of men by God, and in this His Body must have a part". "To give us His Body He must use the material, and the material he chose was bread and wine". At the Last Supper Christ instituted the Eucharist, establishing the way in which he would physically make himself present to be the food for our souls.
Adoration is part of God’s plan for the Eucharist
Such a plan for the Eucharist to be given as food for our souls must naturally include a plan for us to adore him in the Eucharist. If the Eucharist is truly Jesus Christ physically present, present in his totality, with his body and blood, soul and divinity, then we can hardly fail to worship him in the Eucharist. Just to receive him without worshipping him would be an abject failure to appreciate the greatness of the gift we have been given. God would hardly have planned for us to fail to appreciate this gift, so his plan for the Eucharist included a plan for Eucharistic adoration. If the Eucharist is part of the plan of creation, so is the adoration of it. To see this Eucharistic plan as part of the fabric of creation corresponds with some of the deepest longings of the human heart. We all have a desire to have God close to us, to have him among us. We can even see an echo of this in the many pagan myths that speak of gods disguising themselves as humans and moving among us. We have a basic human need to worship a God who is truly present among us. We have this desire because God wrote it on our hearts. This is the type of beings we are, and he always planned to satisfy this desire. By giving us the Eucharist, the Word became flesh and tabernacled himself among us (Jn 1: 14). He now dwells in our churches and we can truly worship God there, in spirit, in truth, and in physical reality.
A static activity?
Two main objections to Eucharistic adoration have circulated in recent decades. One is the question of relevance, which hinges on the assertion that old practices are not relevant today. This is already proving false by the enthusiastic practices of numerous youth movements. But a more curious allegation is that Eucharistic adoration is somehow "static" and that what we need today is a more "dynamic" concept of the Eucharist.To someone who has little or no faith in the complete and Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist it must seem very easy to view adoration as something static. What could be more static than a piece of bread? However, if the Eucharist is the complete presence of a dynamic and personal God, then it is only right that we should give the Eucharist the worship due to God alone, and such worship is as dynamic as the personal God being worshipped. If we truly believe that the Eucharist we adore in the monstrance is the same personal God that we receive as food for our souls in the Mass, then such adoration has a dynamism based on the very source of the Real Presence in the Mass. Adoration leads to us having a deeper appreciation of the fullness of his presence when we receive him in Holy Communion at Mass. It leads us to a fuller participation in the act of worship that is the Mass.
A dynamic offering
The Eucharist as an act of worship, a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, is a part of the very plan of creation. The union with Christ that we achieve by receiving the Eucharist as food is part of the same work of communion with God that is part of Christ's priestly ministry. "In the perfect sacrifice, men inhere unto God". Because of the Fall this sacrifice must take account of sin, but a sacrifice would have been part of the Eucharistic action even without the Fall. This is not just a static worship of bread. Worshipping Christ in the Eucharist, receiving him in the Eucharist, and being united to him in the Eucharistic sacrifice are, therefore, all part of the same dynamic action. The accusation that adoration is static only holds if we forget who it is that we are adoring in the Eucharist. If we remember that the primary purpose of the Eucharist is to feed us; if we remember that this is intrinsically linked with Christ's priestly action of uniting God and man, mediating for us by offering the perfect sacrifice; if we remember that union with Christ as food is part of union with Christ as priest, then this is not static. On the contrary, it is union with something very dynamic. It is union with the eternal self-sacrifice that Christ offers to the Father. Sadly, I suspect that those who think Eucharistic adoration is static are the very ones who have forgotten who the Eucharist truly is, and what the Eucharist is truly about. Even when looked at on a human level I find it hard to view Eucharistic adoration as static. The processions, the heaps of flowers and candles, the abundance of emotionally moving hymns. How many other parts of the Church's devotional life witness to such dynamism? Eucharistic devotion in the past was not static, and when viewed with the eyes of faith, it is not static today.
Relevance?
The question of relevance is more difficult to directly counter because it usually rests on the false presupposition that relevance means doing what the society around us does, being modern. But true relevance does not lie in following the spirit of the age, but in responding to problems of the age so that we might cure its ills. As a number of modern commentators have noted, the history of the Church witnesses to the fact that it is precisely when the Church's practice has been most at odds with the prevailing beliefs of society that the Church has been most relevant. The feast of Corpus Christi is an example of this. The feast of Corpus Christi was instituted by Pope Urban IV in 1264. Before becoming Pope he had known a nun who saw a vision calling for this feast. While he was pondering whether to institute the feast, the Eucharistic miracle of Bolsena occurred, which is said to have further encouraged him. But the principle background to the feast was the heresy of Berengarius who denied there was a real change at the consecration. The promotion of the feast was a way of promoting sound faith in the Real Presence. Far from seeking to follow the tends of his day Urban IV directly moved to support that which contradicted them.
Miracles challenge intellectual pride
To the academic elites of our day, visions and miracles are hardly en vogue as reasons for introducing feasts and devotions (which is, I suspect, one of the reasons why the Pope's recent declaration of Divine Mercy Sunday has received a rather muted response). But the history of Eucharistic devotion records not only the miracle of Bolsena, but a number of such miracles. These can be seen as direct divine interventions making the same point as the institution of the feast of Corpus Christi: when heretics deny a truth the Church must propound it even more. The typical pattern of such miracles can be seen in the miracle of Lanciano in the 8th Century. A priest was suffering from doubts about the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Then, during Mass one day the host was transformed into a disk of human flesh, and the consecrated wine into blood. Similarly, in Cascia in 1330, a priest who doubted the Real Presence was called to take Holy Communion to someone who was sick. Lacking faith, he carelessly tossed the host inside the pages of his breviary. When he got to the sick person the host had changed into blood and soaked into the breviary pages. These are just two examples of many, all with the same pattern: a doubt is responded to by a miracle that signifies the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.The Church adopted the same approach in the Counter-Reformation period in response to the denials of the Protestants. The direct and clear teaching of the Council of Trent, the reforms of Church law, and the increasingly decorative tabernacles, altars and reredos, all show this, emphasising the very truths that were denied.
The heresy of our own time
But what of our time? What are the defining truths that are denied today? While it is true that there are still many Eucharistic heresies and denials today, these don't characterise our age. What does define our time is atheism. Either in the outright rational denial of the existence of God, or in the passive and implicit atheism of those agnostics who live and behave as if God either does not exist or is not active in the universe.To counter this the Church must promote something that not only focuses on the existence of God, but on the fact that he is really and truly present in our world. Eucharistic adoration does precisely this. While in the past Eucharistic adoration was a suitable response to those who denied the exact manner in which God was present, today we can see it as a remedy for those who deny that he is present at all. Of course, adoration alone is not going to convert an atheist. But it is a way of focussing the devotion of the Church on the very thing that our society has forgotten. In this way we can become better able to cure the ills of our times, we can become more truly relevant. God is real, he does care about us, he is active and he has given himself to us in every tabernacle in every Catholic church across the world. For those who are lost in the anonymity of our technological society, the belief that God is personally and physically present among them in the Eucharist is a powerful antidote to what ails them. There are many aspects of the Church's life that are so fundamental that they do not change over time, they are always relevant. If Eucharistic adoration is part of the plan of creation then such adoration is one of those things that is always relevant. Quite simply, Eucharistic adoration is, in itself, something we should be doing. But there is an added value in it today. Bringing ourselves before our Eucharistic Lord and adoring him there helps to renew within us the faith in God's presence that we find so many people around us denying. I think that many people have instinctively sensed this, and that this is part of the reason that devotion to the Eucharist is flourishing in our youth movements today.
The Faith vision adds something still more. It tells us that the Eucharist is not just a great gift of God. It is a gift that unfolds from his eternal plan. It is a witness to the fact that regardless of what our atheistic contemporaries say, the hand of God is at work in the history of creation and in our own history today. When we gaze at Our Lord in the Eucharist we gaze at a God who is physically present, and he is physically present because he is very definitely active in the physical universe we live in, and always planned that he would be. If our faith and adoration of the Eucharist can remind us of this in an unbelieving age then we have every reason to see it not as a static devotion of the past, but as a valuable treasure to carry with us to the future.
Dylan James
A Eucharistic revival
One of the features of modern Catholic youth movements is a strong focus on Eucharistic Adoration. It can be witnessed at gatherings across the world, and also within the various Ecclesial Movements which are such a sign of hope in the modern Church. The Faith Movement is no exception to this somewhat surprising fact. Many older 'progressives' who had their formative years in the 1960s can find this phenomenon hard to understand, some even despair of what they consider a bizarre attachment to old-fashioned devotions. And yet it is an observable fact: in Catholic youth movements where there is solid faith in the Real Presence there is also an automatic attraction to those Eucharistic devotions that were previously discarded as unsuitable to our time. What is the reason for this? Is it just some bizarre hangover from the past, something that has slipped in again for no real reason? It may be that sometimes it is just a pious devotion with no deep theological background. But even so it must be viewed as one of the signs of our times especially as it can be seen in all the young growing parts of the Church. However, in the Faith Movement this practice is not just valued, and it is not just seen as part of orthodox belief and practice. The Eucharist, and the adoration that follows, is very much at the heart of the vision of the plan of creation that our founder Fr. Holloway expounded in this magazine for so long.
The Eucharist in the FAITH Vision
The Synthesis of the truths of Catholicism that Faith proposes sees the gift of the Eucharist as part of what God had always planned to give us. Just as we do not view the Incarnation as simply being a response to the disaster of the Fall, we also view the Eucharist as an intrinsic part of the design of creation. What distinguishes the creation we see around us from God is the fact that it is material not spiritual. This is true of the minerals, the plants, the animals, in short, it is true of everything in the universe except us. The plan of God's creation through evolution reached its peak in its evolution towards man. When the material process of evolution could go no higher, he gave us a spiritual soul, marking us out from the rest of creation. Whereas all of the rest of creation finds its fulfilment in the physical environment that surrounds it, we do not. We are not just physical and so must seek our fulfilment in God - he is our environment. It follows that the Incarnation, when God became man and so united man to God, was not just a response to the tragedy of sin, it was part of God's original plan in creation. The Incarnation completed the plan of creation, but it needed to have lasting consequences if it was to achieve its aim. Thus the need for the whole sacramental economy, that what was visible in the life of our Saviour could pass over into his sacraments. Nowhere is this truer than in the Eucharist. There was no point in Christ becoming physically present in the Incarnation unless he also planned to remain physically present, and present in a manner that would enable him to be extend his presence all across the world and all through time.The primary purpose of the Eucharist is, therefore, to feed us. Creatures eat, and if we are to be fulfilled by God then a feeding of some sort is necessary for our nature. We are both physical and spiritual and it is only to be expected that we should be fed in a manner that satisfies both of these aspects of our nature. The only physical body Christ has is the one he has assumed in the Incarnation, as God's Master Key puts it, "Part of the work of the Incarnation is the feeding of men by God, and in this His Body must have a part". "To give us His Body He must use the material, and the material he chose was bread and wine". At the Last Supper Christ instituted the Eucharist, establishing the way in which he would physically make himself present to be the food for our souls.
Adoration is part of God’s plan for the Eucharist
Such a plan for the Eucharist to be given as food for our souls must naturally include a plan for us to adore him in the Eucharist. If the Eucharist is truly Jesus Christ physically present, present in his totality, with his body and blood, soul and divinity, then we can hardly fail to worship him in the Eucharist. Just to receive him without worshipping him would be an abject failure to appreciate the greatness of the gift we have been given. God would hardly have planned for us to fail to appreciate this gift, so his plan for the Eucharist included a plan for Eucharistic adoration. If the Eucharist is part of the plan of creation, so is the adoration of it. To see this Eucharistic plan as part of the fabric of creation corresponds with some of the deepest longings of the human heart. We all have a desire to have God close to us, to have him among us. We can even see an echo of this in the many pagan myths that speak of gods disguising themselves as humans and moving among us. We have a basic human need to worship a God who is truly present among us. We have this desire because God wrote it on our hearts. This is the type of beings we are, and he always planned to satisfy this desire. By giving us the Eucharist, the Word became flesh and tabernacled himself among us (Jn 1: 14). He now dwells in our churches and we can truly worship God there, in spirit, in truth, and in physical reality.
A static activity?
Two main objections to Eucharistic adoration have circulated in recent decades. One is the question of relevance, which hinges on the assertion that old practices are not relevant today. This is already proving false by the enthusiastic practices of numerous youth movements. But a more curious allegation is that Eucharistic adoration is somehow "static" and that what we need today is a more "dynamic" concept of the Eucharist.To someone who has little or no faith in the complete and Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist it must seem very easy to view adoration as something static. What could be more static than a piece of bread? However, if the Eucharist is the complete presence of a dynamic and personal God, then it is only right that we should give the Eucharist the worship due to God alone, and such worship is as dynamic as the personal God being worshipped. If we truly believe that the Eucharist we adore in the monstrance is the same personal God that we receive as food for our souls in the Mass, then such adoration has a dynamism based on the very source of the Real Presence in the Mass. Adoration leads to us having a deeper appreciation of the fullness of his presence when we receive him in Holy Communion at Mass. It leads us to a fuller participation in the act of worship that is the Mass.
A dynamic offering
The Eucharist as an act of worship, a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, is a part of the very plan of creation. The union with Christ that we achieve by receiving the Eucharist as food is part of the same work of communion with God that is part of Christ's priestly ministry. "In the perfect sacrifice, men inhere unto God". Because of the Fall this sacrifice must take account of sin, but a sacrifice would have been part of the Eucharistic action even without the Fall. This is not just a static worship of bread. Worshipping Christ in the Eucharist, receiving him in the Eucharist, and being united to him in the Eucharistic sacrifice are, therefore, all part of the same dynamic action. The accusation that adoration is static only holds if we forget who it is that we are adoring in the Eucharist. If we remember that the primary purpose of the Eucharist is to feed us; if we remember that this is intrinsically linked with Christ's priestly action of uniting God and man, mediating for us by offering the perfect sacrifice; if we remember that union with Christ as food is part of union with Christ as priest, then this is not static. On the contrary, it is union with something very dynamic. It is union with the eternal self-sacrifice that Christ offers to the Father. Sadly, I suspect that those who think Eucharistic adoration is static are the very ones who have forgotten who the Eucharist truly is, and what the Eucharist is truly about. Even when looked at on a human level I find it hard to view Eucharistic adoration as static. The processions, the heaps of flowers and candles, the abundance of emotionally moving hymns. How many other parts of the Church's devotional life witness to such dynamism? Eucharistic devotion in the past was not static, and when viewed with the eyes of faith, it is not static today.
Relevance?
The question of relevance is more difficult to directly counter because it usually rests on the false presupposition that relevance means doing what the society around us does, being modern. But true relevance does not lie in following the spirit of the age, but in responding to problems of the age so that we might cure its ills. As a number of modern commentators have noted, the history of the Church witnesses to the fact that it is precisely when the Church's practice has been most at odds with the prevailing beliefs of society that the Church has been most relevant. The feast of Corpus Christi is an example of this. The feast of Corpus Christi was instituted by Pope Urban IV in 1264. Before becoming Pope he had known a nun who saw a vision calling for this feast. While he was pondering whether to institute the feast, the Eucharistic miracle of Bolsena occurred, which is said to have further encouraged him. But the principle background to the feast was the heresy of Berengarius who denied there was a real change at the consecration. The promotion of the feast was a way of promoting sound faith in the Real Presence. Far from seeking to follow the tends of his day Urban IV directly moved to support that which contradicted them.
Miracles challenge intellectual pride
To the academic elites of our day, visions and miracles are hardly en vogue as reasons for introducing feasts and devotions (which is, I suspect, one of the reasons why the Pope's recent declaration of Divine Mercy Sunday has received a rather muted response). But the history of Eucharistic devotion records not only the miracle of Bolsena, but a number of such miracles. These can be seen as direct divine interventions making the same point as the institution of the feast of Corpus Christi: when heretics deny a truth the Church must propound it even more. The typical pattern of such miracles can be seen in the miracle of Lanciano in the 8th Century. A priest was suffering from doubts about the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Then, during Mass one day the host was transformed into a disk of human flesh, and the consecrated wine into blood. Similarly, in Cascia in 1330, a priest who doubted the Real Presence was called to take Holy Communion to someone who was sick. Lacking faith, he carelessly tossed the host inside the pages of his breviary. When he got to the sick person the host had changed into blood and soaked into the breviary pages. These are just two examples of many, all with the same pattern: a doubt is responded to by a miracle that signifies the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.The Church adopted the same approach in the Counter-Reformation period in response to the denials of the Protestants. The direct and clear teaching of the Council of Trent, the reforms of Church law, and the increasingly decorative tabernacles, altars and reredos, all show this, emphasising the very truths that were denied.
The heresy of our own time
But what of our time? What are the defining truths that are denied today? While it is true that there are still many Eucharistic heresies and denials today, these don't characterise our age. What does define our time is atheism. Either in the outright rational denial of the existence of God, or in the passive and implicit atheism of those agnostics who live and behave as if God either does not exist or is not active in the universe.To counter this the Church must promote something that not only focuses on the existence of God, but on the fact that he is really and truly present in our world. Eucharistic adoration does precisely this. While in the past Eucharistic adoration was a suitable response to those who denied the exact manner in which God was present, today we can see it as a remedy for those who deny that he is present at all. Of course, adoration alone is not going to convert an atheist. But it is a way of focussing the devotion of the Church on the very thing that our society has forgotten. In this way we can become better able to cure the ills of our times, we can become more truly relevant. God is real, he does care about us, he is active and he has given himself to us in every tabernacle in every Catholic church across the world. For those who are lost in the anonymity of our technological society, the belief that God is personally and physically present among them in the Eucharist is a powerful antidote to what ails them. There are many aspects of the Church's life that are so fundamental that they do not change over time, they are always relevant. If Eucharistic adoration is part of the plan of creation then such adoration is one of those things that is always relevant. Quite simply, Eucharistic adoration is, in itself, something we should be doing. But there is an added value in it today. Bringing ourselves before our Eucharistic Lord and adoring him there helps to renew within us the faith in God's presence that we find so many people around us denying. I think that many people have instinctively sensed this, and that this is part of the reason that devotion to the Eucharist is flourishing in our youth movements today.
The Faith vision adds something still more. It tells us that the Eucharist is not just a great gift of God. It is a gift that unfolds from his eternal plan. It is a witness to the fact that regardless of what our atheistic contemporaries say, the hand of God is at work in the history of creation and in our own history today. When we gaze at Our Lord in the Eucharist we gaze at a God who is physically present, and he is physically present because he is very definitely active in the physical universe we live in, and always planned that he would be. If our faith and adoration of the Eucharist can remind us of this in an unbelieving age then we have every reason to see it not as a static devotion of the past, but as a valuable treasure to carry with us to the future.