(Part 2 of 5 Series on Our Eucharistic Faith and Pro-Life Commitment)
“When I am lifted up from the earth,” the Lord said, “I will draw all people to myself” (Jn.12:32). He fulfills this promise in the Eucharist, which builds up the Church. The Church is the sign and cause of the unity of the human family.
Imagine all the people, in every part of the world, who are receiving Communion today. Are they all receiving their own personalized, customized Christ? Are they not rather each receiving the one and only Christ?
Through this sacrament, Christ the Lord, gloriously enthroned in heaven, is drawing all people to Himself. If He is drawing us to Himself, then He is drawing us to one another. St. Paul comments on this, “We, many though we are, are one body, since we all partake of the one loaf” (1 Cor. 10:17).
When we call each other “brothers and sisters,” we are not merely using a metaphor that dimly reflects the unity between children of the same parents. The unity we have in Christ is even stronger than the unity of blood brothers and sisters, because we do have common blood: the blood of Christ! The result of the Eucharist is that we become one, and this obliges us to be as concerned for each other as we are for our own bodies.
Imagine a person who receives Communion, accepts the Host when the priest says, “The Body of Christ,” says “Amen,” and then breaks off a piece, hands it back, and says, “Except this piece, Father!”
This is what the person who rejects other people may as well do. In receiving Christ, we are to receive the whole Christ, in all his members, our brothers and sisters, whether convenient or inconvenient, wanted or unwanted.
As St. John remarks, Christ was to die “to gather into one all the scattered children of God.” Sin scatters. Christ unites. The word “diabolical” means “to split asunder.” Christ came “to destroy the works of the devil” (1Jn.3:8).
The Eucharist builds up the human family in Christ who says, “Come to me, feed on My Body, become My Body.” Abortion, in a reverse dynamic, says, “Go away! We have no room for you, no time for you, no desire for you, no responsibility for you. Get out of our way!”
Abortion attacks the unity of the human family by splitting asunder the most fundamental relationship between any two persons: mother and child. The Eucharist, as a Sacrament of Unity, reverses the dynamic of abortion.
Peace and Blessings,
Fr. Ken