The Church=Eucharistic Communio

An elegiac post on the Eucharist, the heart of the Christian life, from the Why I'm Catholic blog:

...More grievous than the destruction of Christian art, it is almost overwhelming for me to reflect on the millions of Christians throughout history who have willingly separated themselves from the Real Presence of Our Lord. 

As I strolled through the Nasher Art Museum, I was at once saddened and reassured to see pieces of the abbey and other medieval Catholic churches displayed on the wall  in fragments - part of a statue here, an altar piece there.  How distressing to reflect on how the Church has been  broken - both spiritually and physically - by so-called reformers and by the relentless secularization of Western culture. Taking another view, however, I meditated that people had seen it important to preserve these fragments. This made me consider that Christ's body is everywhere. No matter what physically happens or happened to our churches, the Body of Christ and His Real Presence cannot be destroyed.

Father John A. Hardon, S.J. says it better than I can. "We are to believe that the Eucharist is Jesus Christ - simply, without qualification. It is God become man in the fullness of His divine nature, in the fullness of His human nature, in the fullness of His body and soul, in the fullness of everything that makes Jesus Jesus. He is in the Eucharist with His human mind and will united with the Divinity, with His hands and feet, His face and features, with His eyes and lips and ears and nostrils, with His affections and emotions and, with emphasis, with His living, pulsating, physical Sacred Heart. That is what our Catholic Faith demands of us that we believe. If we believe this, we are Catholic. If we do not, we are not, no matter what people may think we are..."

The Pope agrees, and has agreed throughout his teaching career, focusing on Eucharistic communio as the most comprehensive understanding of the Church and speaking of the Eucharist as the source of Christian solidarity.