In Part I of this essay, Dr. Pauley introduced what the Church teaches about Eucharistic Communion with Christ and the effects of this communion. This essay was originally published in the July 2024 issue of Catechetical Review, Vol. 10, no. 3.
This is a significant assertion being made here. If you doubt this, here are a few points of evidence.
When people in the New Testament encountered Jesus, many chose to leave him and were unchanged. Yet, there are many examples of women and men who experienced a profound conversion, sometimes very gradual and at other times seemingly immediate.
One such person is Zacchaeus the tax collector. Zacchaeus climbed a tree to see Jesus as he passed by. Jesus instead approached Zacchaeus and invited himself to dinner at Zacchaeus’s house. The tax collector was astonished that Jesus would come to his house. We read: “Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, ‘Behold, half of my possessions, Lord, I shall give to the poor, and if I have extorted anything from anyone I shall repay it four times over.’ And Jesus said to him, ‘Today salvation has come to this house because this man too is a descendant of Abraham. For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save what was lost’” (Lk 19:8–10). This account demonstrates the logic of encountering Jesus. When we receive divine love, we come to see that the turning in on self that causes sin no longer has a place in us. The love of God and the darkness of sin cannot coexist for long before the need for repentance arises.
To help us understand these great realities, Jesus tells the story of the servant who owes a great debt to his master (Mt 18:21–35). Begging for more time to pay back this debt, the master instead, astoundingly, forgives the debt entirely. Can you imagine such an act of generous mercy? But then, we know what happens:
When that servant had left, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a much smaller amount. He seized him and started to choke him, demanding, “Pay back what you owe.” Falling to his knees, his fellow servant begged him, “Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.” But he refused. Instead, he had him put in prison until he paid back the debt. Now when his fellow servants saw what had happened, they were deeply disturbed, and went to their master and reported the whole affair. (Mt 18:28–31)
Why is it that the servants were so deeply disturbed? Clearly, their fellow servant’s actions were violently inconsistent with the extraordinary gift he had just been given. Whereas the master’s super-generous gift should have changed his heart, this man’s treatment of others was unaffected by such mercy. To receive such mercy obligated him to extend mercy also to the servant who owed him money. We do not frequently apply this Scripture to our sacramental life, but we should. With mercy, grace, and the love of God comes a corresponding obligation to treat others with mercy, grace, and generous love.
A third point of evidence is the one that is closest to us. When we pray the Our Father, we lift words up to the Father that are, if we think about them, terrifying. Anyone reading this, of course, knows the words to which I refer. “Forgive us our trespasses [debts] as we forgive those who trespass against us [our debtors].” Praying this prayer places serious demands upon us. We are asking God the Father to measure out to us the same amount of mercy that we give to those who have sinned against us. This petition we frequently pray should give us pause.
And, finally, when we pray the traditional Act of Contrition in the confessional, we pray these words: “I firmly resolve, with the help of your grace, to sin no more and to avoid the near occasion of sin.” Such a resolution is of course impossible to achieve on our own power and apart from divine grace. And even with grace, most of us sin again. Yet, forming this resolve in our hearts is a necessary aspect of receiving God’s forgiveness and being restored to relationship with him, helping us to take small steps toward love and holiness. We must intend, though, to align ourselves more deeply with the mercy we have been given. In our human relationships, we will note that this movement is also required if friendship and love are to be restored when asking for forgiveness.
For each of the sacraments, there are supernatural effects, divine empowerment, that come in encountering God. And there are specific ways that our lives must become, by the power of grace and our freely chosen cooperation, aligned with divine love. In the same way that people who encountered Jesus two thousand years ago were challenged to a conversion of life, so too are we who enter communion with him today.
When it comes to living our lives in communion with Jesus, the saints show us the way. St. Teresa of Calcutta began each day with Mass and Eucharistic adoration, and then she and her sisters were empowered to serve the poorest of the poor—made capable of recognizing and serving Christ in his “most distressing disguise.”
St. Thomas More, after being unjustly condemned to death, forgave those who had brought about his ruin, composing an extraordinary prayer in the last days of his life:
Almighty God, have mercy... on all that bear me evil will and would harm me. And by such easy, tender, and merciful means as your infinite wisdom can best devise, grant that their faults and mine may both be amended and redressed; and make us saved souls in heaven together, where we may ever live and love together with you and your blessed saints.1
This great English saint, in his own final passion and death, was, by the grace of Christ, conformed more closely to Christ, who forgave his own enemies from the Cross. Thomas’ final words in this prayer are striking: “The things, good Lord that I pray for, give me the grace to labor for.”2 In his final hours, then, rather than being focused on the manifold injustices visited upon him and his family, rather than giving in to anger and self-pity, there he was in his prison cell laboring to forgive his enemies. This kind of virtue does not arise automatically. All his life he lived a sacramental life and sought to cooperate with grace and grow in virtue. His is an extraordinary example of an ordinary human being working to align himself increasingly to the grace of Christ that had been lavished upon him.3
The saints mentioned here may feel out of reach to those of us engaged in our own interior battles. I wish to leave you with the beautiful, practical wisdom of Ven. Madeleine Delbrêl, who was a 20th-century Parisian woman who experienced a profound conversion and grew very gradually, by the grace of God, to become more like Jesus. This saintly woman offers this tangible way to take little steps in our cooperation with grace and in our love for others. She writes:
Consider this. Let us take a very small piece of our life and set free the charity of Christ in it to see everything it can do, everything it wants to do, and to let it do it. You change trains, you wait in the waiting room in the middle of the night. The charity of the Lord is in you in the midst of this waiting room. What is it going to do? What will that very polite lady, this very proper gentleman, say when you share coffee from your thermos with the neighbor to your right, your bread and your cheese with the neighbor to your left, if you wrap that child in your coat... But what will Christ say if you do not do it? The holy Church expects saints, and saints are those who love.4
The Eucharist gives us everything we need to take little steps forward in love. This is, indeed, the essential dynamic of the sacramental life. Eucharistic communion requires spiritual fruitfulness, but it also empowers such a life. During this time of Eucharistic Revival, our Church and our world will benefit from many living witnesses to this kind of sacramental fruitfulness.
Dr. James Pauley is Professor of Theology and Catechetics at Franciscan University of Steubenville and Editor of the Catechetical Review. He was appointed to the USCCB’s executive team for the Eucharistic Revival and is the author of several books, one of which is focused on the renewal of liturgical and sacramental catechesis. He enjoys offering days of reflection and formation for catechists as well as parish missions.
