Today the Church celebrates the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ, the principal sacrament of the Church. What do we mean by the word “sacrament”? The Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 1131, says that “the sacraments are efficacious signs of grace, instituted by Christ and entrusted to the Church, by which divine grace is dispensed to us”. Through the sacraments we give to God the worship due and receive from God the salvation we need. Just as Christ, during his mortal life, cured the sick, forgave sins, fed multitudes, raised the dead, gave sight to the blind, and thus communicated temporal salvation and relief as a sign that he was the savior of humanity; so now, the risen Christ, present in the Church which is his Body, performs signs by which the salvific events of his passion, death and resurrection are actualized, and the eternal salvation we desire is communicated to us.
The sacraments of the Church are seven: baptism, confirmation and eucharist are the sacraments that give us the identity of disciples of Jesus in the Church and for this reason we call them sacraments of initiation. In the sacrament of penance, the purifying action of baptism is prolonged for the forgiveness of sins. In the sacrament of the anointing of the sick, God acts with healing action to ensure the health, especially eternal health of our sick body. The sacrament of marriage consecrates human love and gives a foundation of holiness to families. Finally, the sacrament of Holy Orders gives structure and authenticity to the Church; the Church exists fully where there are validly ordained ministers. Through this sacrament God prolongs in the Church the mission he originally gave to the apostles. The ministry of bishops and priests is the institutional guarantee given by God to ensure that through the preaching of the Gospel and the celebration of the sacraments in the Church salvation is transmitted to mankind.
In the Eucharist Christ’s sacrifice on the cross is actualized and the banquet of the kingdom of heaven is anticipated, not in a figurative way, but in a real and true way. By virtue of what would this be possible if not by the power of the Holy Spirit at work in the Church? And what guarantee, what assurance do we have that the Holy Spirit is at work in the Church, if not because the Church preserves its authenticity by maintaining institutional continuity with its origins through the succession of bishops by means of the sacrament of Holy Orders? For this reason, only a man who has received the sacrament of Holy Orders in the degree of priest or bishop can celebrate the Holy Eucharist with the guarantee that there, and not only as a representation, the sacrifice of Christ is actualized and the banquet of heaven is anticipated. Because the action of the bishop or priest is the institutional guarantee that we have from Jesus Christ that the Holy Spirit is at work there, the only one who can make true and real what the sacrament means. Therefore, where there is no true priest there is no true Eucharist. There will be a symbolic representation of the Lord’s Supper, but there will be no actualization of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross and resurrection. This should be a warning to reject people who pretend to be priests without being priests. That false priest will only be able to make a false mass.
The Church expresses the realism of the sacrament of the Eucharist with the teaching that the Body and Blood of Christ are really, substantially and truly present in the species of bread and wine. Great care must be taken here. We say that the Son of God became incarnate in the womb of the Virgin Mary and became man. Jesus Christ is true God and true man in the one person of the Son of God. By becoming incarnate he did not cease to be God and his humanity was not apparent but real. We say something similar of Sacred Scripture: the only sacred text is both fully human word and fully the word of God. This doctrine does not apply to the Eucharist. There is a Latin chant that says “Verbum caro factum est; Verbum panis factum est”. That is to say: “the Word became flesh, the Word became bread”. False statements can also be made in Latin. When the priest pronounces over the bread and wine the words that Christ pronounced over the bread and wine at the Last Supper, a portent occurs, through the work of the Holy Spirit and the words of the priest. The bread ceases to be bread and the wine ceases to be wine and both become the Body and Blood of Christ, although the appearance of bread and wine remains. Jesus Christ does not become bread; bread becomes Jesus Christ. The bread ceases to be bread to become the Body of Christ and the wine ceases to be wine to become the Blood of Christ. In theology it is said that the substance of the bread and wine became the substance of the Body and Blood of Christ. However, in common usage, the word “substance” means the chemical composition of something and certainly, from a chemical point of view consecrated bread and wine are still bread and wine. The chemical composition is one of the “accidents” of bread and wine that remain. But when the Church speaks of substance, she speaks of that which gives identity to things in themselves, and which is grasped in the concept that identifies them in our mind and is expressed in the words with which we name them. If the priest has said with the power of the Holy Spirit that this is the Body of Christ and this is the shed Blood of Christ, those words transform the substance that gives identity to the bread and wine into what the priest’s words signify: the risen Jesus Christ. That is why we bow the knee before the consecrated host, for there is no longer bread there, but Jesus Christ himself, dead and risen for us. The words of the priest, with the power of the Holy Spirit, do not tell lies, but the truth and bring it about.
Therefore, by eating the Body of Christ and drinking his Blood we become so united to Him that we begin to be part of Himself. Unlike ordinary food which by digestion is transformed into bone, muscle and fat of our body; the sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ transforms us into what they are and we become the mystical Body of Christ, and we are the Church of Christ. We die and rise with Him sacramentally, truly and really. This Sacrament is the most sacred and principal of all, for what it signifies and accomplishes is the origin of our salvation.