The following are highlights from Pope Benedict's recent remarks concerning the Holy Eucharist & the liturgy...
* The Eucharist constitutes "the centre and permanent source of the Petrine ministry, the heart of the Christian life, source and summit of the Church's mission of evangelization. You can thus understand the concern of the Successor of Peter for all that can obfuscate this most essential point of the Catholic faith: that today, Jesus Christ continues alive and truly present in the consecrated host and the chalice."
* "Paying less attention at times to the rite of the Most Holy Sacrament constitutes a sign and a cause of the darkening of the Christian sense of mystery, such as when Jesus is not the centre of the Mass, but rather a community preoccupied with other things instead of being taken up and drawn to the only one necessary: their Lord."
* Catholics' "primary attitude" during Mass "is not doing, but listening, opening up, receiving.."
* "[I]f the figure of Christ does not emerge from the liturgy...it is not a Christian liturgy"
"The mystery of the most Holy Eucharist which Christ, the High Priest instituted, and which He commands to be continually renewed in the Church by His ministers, is the culmination and center, as it were, of the Christian religion." (Pope Pius XII, "Mediator Dei", 1947 A.D.)
Related: The Holy Eucharist / Mass | Holy Eucharist / Mass Reflections | Latin Mass & Catholic Tradition
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