The Eucharist – Summit of our Faith

In the year 304, forty-nine Christians in the Roman colony of Tunisia in North Africa were killed for doing exactly what we freely do each week in our churches. The Emperor Diocletian had forbidden Christians, on pain of death, from possessing the Scriptures, from building any places for worship, and from gathering on Sundays to celebrate the Eucharist. One Sunday morning, as these ancestors of ours in the same Catholic Faith were praying the Mass, the house was raided by Roman soldiers who arrested them. They were interrogated by the proconsul in Carthage, who asked them why on earth they had disobeyed the Emperor’s clear and strict orders for such a pointless reason. One of them, named Emeritus, replied: “Sine dominico non possumus” – that is, “We cannot live without Sunday.”

He was saying that believers cannot persevere in their Baptismal calling as members of the Body of Christ without joining together for the Eucharist, that they would lack the strength to face the daily challenges and problems, temptations and distractions, and thus succumb to the loss of faith, hope, and love. All 49 of these Christians were tortured and then killed. As Pope Benedict put it in recounting this story: “They died, but they were victorious; the Church remembers them in the glory of the Risen Christ.”

“We cannot live without Sunday” – that is, without the Eucharist and without the communion of the Church. Yes, we can exist, and so we are easily misled into thinking that Mass is an optional activity for the pious. But in fact, without the Eucharist received and lived in the midst of the Church, we simply do not have the fullness of life; and long human experience demonstrates that without this heavenly Food, we will grow weak in what truly matters. The martyr Emeritus was just putting into other words the same truth that St. Paul speaks amid his own many trials for the Faith: “I can do all things in Him Who strengthens me.” And Paul’s words are in turn an echo of the promise of Jesus: “I am the Vine, you are the branches. Apart from Me, you can do nothing. But if you remain in Me, you will bear much fruit.”

When a reporter once asked Mother Teresa if she would not have more time and be able to do more for the poor if she did not spend 2 or 3 hours a day in prayer, she told him, “If I did not spend that time with Christ, I could do nothing for the poor. I would not have the strength.”

It is not easy for us to live as Christians, either, even if our worship is not prohibited under penalty of death. A world marked by consumerism, religious indifference, and doubt or even mockery of anything sacred, can seem like the “vast and terrible desert” through which the Israelites wandered after being set free from slavery. But just as God fed them with manna in the desert, so now He feeds us, His people, with the Body and Blood of His Son so that we can draw strength from His love and His victory, and replenish our energy to follow Christ in the communion of the Church. Coming to the

Eucharist, coming to the Wedding Feast of the Lamb and the Banquet of Life, is not something we “must” do as a burden imposed from outside. Rather, it is our great strength and hope, constantly renewed and refreshed amid the other burdens that we carry on our pilgrimage. My prayer for all of us is that we will be able to say, truly, from our hearts, those words Emeritus spoke 1700 years ago – “We cannot live without Sunday.”