Dominican Sisters of Saint Cecilia Vocation Office Newsletter, June 2022

laudare, benedicere, praedicare TO PRAISE, TO BLESS, TO PREACH

June 2022

Eucharistic Revival June 10th 2022July 21st 2024

What is the National Eucharistic Revival?

The Eucharistic Revival is a grassroots movement of Catholics in America, each responding to the gift of the Eucharist in their own way.

Throughout the country, dioceses will be participating in a nationwide re-evangelization and re-vitalization of the gift, the call, the mystery, and the mission we receive in the reality of Jesus Present in the Most Holy Eucharist. The Eucharistic Revival will begin Corpus Christi 2022 and will last until Corpus Christi 2024 with a focus on developing and forming dioceses, parishes, and families to fall more deeply in love with Him who is the Source and Summit of our Faith.

The Mystery of Eucharist excerpt taken from Eucharisticrevival.org/learn

From the very beginning, the Church has believed and celebrated according to the teaching of Jesus himself: "Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life and I will raise him on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him" (Jn 6:54-56). It is not “ordinary bread and ordinary drink” that we receive in the Eucharist, but the flesh and blood of Christ, who came to nourish and transform us, to restore our relationship to God and to one another.

In the Eucharist, with the eyes of faith we see before us Jesus Christ, who, in the Incarnation became flesh (Jn 1:14) and who in the Paschal Mystery gave himself for us (Ti 2:14), accepting even death on a cross (Phil 2:8). St. John Chrysostom preached that when you see the Body of Christ “set before you [on the altar], say to yourself:

"Because of this Body I am no longer earth and ashes, no longer a prisoner, but free: because of this I hope for heaven, and to receive the good things therein, immortal life, the portion of angels, [and closeness] with Christ.” can Jesus Christ be truly present in what still appears to be bread and wine? In the liturgical act known as the epiclesis, the bishop or priest, speaking in the person of Jesus Christ, calls upon the Father to send down his Holy Spirit to change the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ, and this change occurs through the institution narrative, by the power of the words of Christ pronounced by the celebrant.

The reality that, in the Eucharist, bread and wine become the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Christ without ceasing to appear as bread and wine to our five senses is one of the central mysteries of the Catholic faith. This faith is a doorway through which we, like the saints and mystics before us, may enter into a deeper perception of the mercy and love manifested in and through Christ’s sacramental presence in our midst. While one thing is seen with our bodily eyes, another reality is perceived through the eyes of faith. The real, true, and substantial presence of Christ in the Eucharist is the most profound reality of the sacrament.

“This mysterious change is very appropriately called by the Church transubstantiation.”

Though Christ is present to us in many ways in the liturgy, including in the assembly gathered, the presiding minister, and the word proclaimed, the Church also clearly affirms that “the mode of Christ’s presence under the Eucharistic species is unique.” As St. Paul VI wrote, “This presence is called ‘real’ not to exclude the idea that the others are ‘real’ too, but rather to indicate presence par excellence, because it is substantial and through it Christ becomes present whole and entire, God and man." In the sacramental re-presentation of his sacrifice, Christ holds back nothing, offering himself, whole and entire. The use of the word “substantial” to mark the unique presence of Christ in the Eucharist is intended to convey the totality of the gift he offers to us.

When the Eucharist is distributed and the minister says, “the Body of Christ,” we are to look not simply at what is visible before our eyes, but at what it has become by the words of Christ and the gift of the Holy Spirit—

the Body of Christ. The communicant’s response of “Amen” is a profession of faith in the Real Presence of Christ and reflects the intimate personal encounter with him, with his gift of self, that comes through reception of Holy Communion.

The Church’s firm belief in the Real Presence of Christ is reflected in the worship that we offer to the Blessed Sacrament in various ways, including Eucharistic Exposition, Adoration, and Benediction; Eucharistic Processions; and Forty Hours Devotions. In addition, the practices of reverently genuflecting before the Blessed Sacrament reserved in the tabernacle, bowing one’s head prior to the reception of Holy Communion, and refraining from food and drink for at least one hour before receiving Communion are clear manifestations of the Church’s Eucharistic faith. read more at eucharisticrevival.org/learn

i s r t h i N C s u o p v r ena o C Day One: Creation Genesis 1:29 Jesus, Lord of Creation, grant us the grace to offer ourselves, our works, and all creation in union with you to the Father. Amen.

Day Five: Institution of the Eucharist

Day Two: Passover Exodus 12:3 Jesus, Lamb of God, grant us the grace to cast out the old yeast of malice and wickedness, and to live in sincerity and truth. Amen.

Day Six: Sacrifice of the Cross John 19:33-34

Day Three: Manna Exodus 16:4 Jesus, Holy Manna, grant us the grace to set our minds on things above rather than on things of earth. Amen.

Day Four: The Nativity Luke 2:7 Jesus, Bread of Life, grant that we, nourished by the Eucharist, may hasten to you in the poor, the suffering, and the persecuted.

Amen.

Luke 22:19-20 Jesus, Mediator of the New Covenant, grant us the grace to cherish the worship you established at the Last Supper. Amen.

Jesus, Eternal High Priest, grant us the grace to offer our lives as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to you.

Amen.

Day Seven: The Resurrection Luke 24:30-31

Jesus, Source of New Life, set our hearts on fire with the gift of your Spirit, and grant us the grace to proclaim your risen life. Amen.

Day Eight: The Eucharist in the life of the Church Acts 2:42 Jesus, Lord of the Church, grant that by partaking of your Body and Blood we may become one body and one spirit in you. Amen.

Day Nine: The Wedding Feast of the Lamb Luke22:29-30 Jesus, Holy Banquet, be our food for the journey, that we may join the Blessed Virgin Mary and all the angels and saints in your kingdom. Amen.

Concluding Prayer: O God, who in this wonderful Sacrament have left us a memorial of your Passion, grant us, we pray, so to revere the sacred mysteries of your Body and Blood that we may always experience in ourselves the fruits of your redemption. Who live and reign with God the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever. Amen.

There is nothing that strikes longing and yearning in the human heart quite like the word “freedom.”

The desire to be free is ingrained in us, built into the very fiber of our being.

And yet, there is nothing quite so paradoxical as being free by living in the grace of the Holy Spirit.

With this grace we seek to be wholly available to his will at every moment, able to respond and submit perfectly to what he wants, at the slightest touch of his inspiration. Our true freedom consists in a more perfect participation in the happiness and goodness which is God. In choosing him more and more completely, and by submitting every wish and desire to his plan for our life, we will be perfectly fulfilled.

Each of us desires this, whether we realize it or not. God alone can satisfy the human heart.

But how do I open myself to this kind of transformative action, open to every movement of the Spirit in my life?

by Sr. Anna Sophia OP How can I be more available to his work, and live in the radical freedom that he offers to me?

Josef Pieper would say that we do this by the cultivation of leisure, “an attitude of the mind and a condition of the soul-a form of silence, of that silence which is the prerequisite of the apprehension of reality” (Leisure, the Basis of Culture, 52). Man becomes “capable of seeing life as a whole and the world as a whole; that he should fulfill himself, and come to full possession of his faculties, face to face with being as a whole” (ibid.

57).

Leisure presupposes that, although man is an acting being, capable of great and high deeds, noble in the highest respects, his dignity lies in the capacity to live happily in the affirmation of his own being, as a gift: to be still and know that God is God, and who he is in God. More than anything, leisure is a way of being disposed to the life that happens all around us, within and without us,

a way of being more fully attentive to the whats and whys and hows of our life, our actions, and of how we are acted upon. It is not free of obligations, rules, or regulations, but roams freely within their bounds, fulfilling in justice what is good for both you and for me. It is an attitude open and vulnerable. I can be surprised, or hurt, or filled with a piercing joy, struck by the beauty and hidden splendor of created things. I can see things for what they really are…I am at leisure, no matter where I am or what I am doing. I can be who I am. Nothing prevents me from this: no fear, no vanity, no false estimation of my abilities. No storm can disturb it.

"Leisure creates within our souls the ability to be calm and still, steeped in the mystery of God’s plan."

Leisure creates within our souls the ability to be calm and still, steeped in the mystery of God’s plan. There, and only there, God alone suffices. It is in this wonderful state, Pieper says, that I can act most prudently – confident in the Father’s plan at work in my life, “content to let things take their course” (ibid.

52).

It is in this state that the Holy Spirit can, as at the very moment of creation, work best in us. In his book on the “Veni, Creator Spiritus,” Raniero Cantalamessa says that, “To invoke the Creator Spirit upon oneself is to carry oneself back, in faith, to that moment when God still retained power over you, when you were only ‘a thought in God’s heart,’

and God could have made of you whatever God willed, without infringing on any liberty of yours. To invoke the Creator Spirit is to give back to God that total freedom in your regard.

"It is to cast yourself, by a free and spontaneous decision, like clay into the hands of the potter. To invoke the Creator Spirit upon us is, therefore, to abandon ourselves to the sovereign action of God, with complete confidence; it is determinedly to take on what is called the “creaturely” attitude before God, and that is the very basis of all authentic religious belief and practice. It is to remove all reservations, all conditions, to be open to anything and everything! It is to give God, carte blanche, TOTAL FREEDOM to do as God wills, as Mary did” (Come, Creator Spirit: Meditations on the Veni Creator, 33). The Spirit frees us to act within the wide panorama of his providence, to see and to enjoy what is given as gift. “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Cor. 3:17).

Announcing

Catechesis on the Eucharist

a video series with the Sisters coming soon available at youtube.com/c/nashvilledominicans and facebook.com/dominicansistersofsaintcecilia

"The Eucharist is the Sacrament of Love; It signifies Love, It produces love.

The Eucharist is the consummation of the whole spiritual life."

-St. Thomas Aquinas