• Full and Active Participation
  • In the first of the series, we highlighted the phrase, “Source and Summit,” one of the most oft-quoted ways to refer to the Mass. For a Catholic, everything begins with and then brings us back to the Eucharist.
  • Another very common phrase from Vatican II is “full, conscious and active participation,” referring to the role of all those who attend Mass.
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The last major dogma of our faith to be promulgated by the Church’s Magisterium or Teaching Authority is today’s celebration of the Assumption of Mary.  The Church’s unwavering belief that Mary was assumed, body and soul into heaven, had been held by all the faithful since the early Church, but was only formally defined in 1950. 

Mary is in heaven, body and soul, sharing the presence of her Son, who is also there in His Resurrected Body.  When we receive the Holy Eucharist, we join Mary in this full communion with her son, the Resurrected Jesus Christ.

• The celebration of the Eucharist is a confluence of three events:
  • the Eucharist is a sacrifice of thanksgiving to the Father, a blessing by which the Church expresses her gratitude to God for all his blessings to us. The very word, Eucharist, is Greek for “thanksgiving.”
  • It is a memorial of the Lord’s Supper, the night He instituted the priesthood and the Eucharist.
  • It is a communion with Jesus, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. We consume His Body and Blood, and He becomes part of us. It also makes us one with the whole Church.
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• A home builder would never start with the roof or windows.  He always begins with the foundation—level ground and a cement foundation.  He then proceeds to build the walls, the joists and all of the structure needed to build a sturdy house that will not collapse
• God, the Divine Builder and Architect, has done the same: before sending His Son Jesus to redeem us by his Cross and resurrection, he prepared the way for over 2000 years.
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According to a recent poll, 1/3 of Catholics who go to Mass weekly don’t believe in the real presence of the Eucharist.

We can ask what was the wording of the questions on the survey? When a Catholic responded that the Eucharist was a “symbol,” did he or she understand the theological distinction? In other words, the respondent may have answered symbol, but meant the real presence even if they couldn’t express it precisely.

But allowing for all of that, the report is very distressing.

Today’s Gospel (Mark 6:7-13) tells us that, being sent out by Jesus, the apostles preached repentance, which led to driving out many demons and curing the sick. Their power and authority to do so came directly from Jesus, the Son of God who uses clay vessels like us, to show His love and His mercy for all mankind.

I want to focus on the driving out of demons. Many today think that the Devil is simply a medieval holdover that is either a mythological creation or (as I’ve read some critics of the Church say), is a ruse that the Church uses to maintain a hold on people.