(Part 1 of 5 Series on Our Eucharistic Faith and Pro-Life Commitment)
Our commitment to defend our pre-born brothers and sisters is shaped by our faith in the Eucharist as a sacrament of faith, unity, life, worship, and love. In the next few weeks, we will have a series of articles that will speak about our pro-life commitment being Eucharistic.
The Eucharist is a sacrament of faith.
The Consecrated Host looks no different after the consecration than before. It looks, smells, feels, and tastes like bread. Only one of the five senses gets to the truth. As St. Thomas Aquinas’ Adoro Te Devote expresses, “Seeing, touching, tasting are in Thee deceived. What says trusty hearing that shall be believed?” The ears hear His words, “This is My Body; this is My Blood,” and faith takes us beyond the veil of appearances.
Christians are used to looking beyond appearances. The baby in the manger does not look like God; nor for that matter does the man on the cross. Yet by faith we know He is no mere man. The Bible does not have a particular glow setting it off from other books, nor does it levitate above the shelf.
Yet by faith we know it is uniquely the Word of God. The Eucharist seems to be bread and wine, and yet by faith we say, “My Lord and My God!” as we kneel in adoration.
The same dynamic of faith that enables us to see beyond appearances in these mysteries enables us to see beyond appearances in our neighbor. We can look at the persons around us, at the annoying person or the ugly person or the person who is unconscious in a hospital bed, and we can say, “Christ is there as well. There is my brother, my sister, made in the very image of God!”
By the same dynamic we can look at the pre-born child and say, “There, too, is my brother, my sister, equal in dignity and just as worthy of protection as anyone else!” Some people will say the child in the womb, especially in the earliest stages, is too small to be the subject of Constitutional rights.
Is the Sacred Host too small to be God, too unlike Him in appearance to be worshipped? The slightest particle of the Host is fully Christ. Eucharistic Faith is a powerful antidote to the dangerous notion that value depends on size.
Peace and Blessings,
Fr. Ken