A Lenten journey through death into life →

During Lent, in the Eastern Church (both Catholic and Orthodox), priests consecrate the Eucharist only on Sundays and feast days. Throughout the year, daily liturgies are less common in the Eastern Church than they are in the Western Church, but in Lent, any daily liturgies (again, outside of feast days) take the form of the Liturgy of the Presanctified.

“Presanctified” refers to the previously consecrated bread, reserved from the Sunday liturgy. The faithful gather for a liturgy that is similar to a standard one, but without a consecration, and when the time comes for the distribution of holy Communion, the reserved body of Christ is distributed to the faithful.

In the distant past, the Roman rite practiced something similar during Lent, but today, the last remaining vestige of this practice in the Western Church is the Good Friday liturgy.

As we approach the manger, remember God is with us →

Thirty-three years ago, on the night before the First Sunday in Advent 1986, I came home to the Catholic Church. Technically, that makes me a “revert,” but describing myself as one seems overly dramatic, since I had been physically absent from the Church for only four weeks. There are more than a few able-bodied Catholics who consider themselves practicing if they make it to Mass once a month.

But for me, those four weeks toward the end of my first term at Michigan State had been rough. I was lost, and I knew it.

At Mass, do we recognize the greatest of all mysteries? →

In the wake of the Pew study on the belief (or lack thereof) of Catholics in the Eucharist, most proposals to address this problem have focused on education. But the problem is more than an intellectual one. At the root, it’s about experience. We can drill the Church’s teaching on transubstantiation and the Real Presence into children studying for their first Communion and confirmation, and priests can (and should) use every opportunity throughout the liturgical year to remind those of us in the pews that Christ is truly present under the forms of bread and wine.

But if we say those words and then act as if that reality means nothing, why are we surprised when that teaching becomes an abstraction and then gets tossed aside?