Detroit man thought he was a priest. He wasn’t even a baptized Catholic

Vatican City, Mar 21, 2018 / 04:58 am (CNA/EWTN News).- At Wednesday’s general audience, Pope Francis said our participation in the Holy Eucharist at Mass is not a merely spiritual communion, but a sacramental one, uniting us to Christ and his Church.

“The celebration of the Mass… is ordered to sacramental Communion. It is not a spiritual communion. No, [it is] a sacramental communion,” he said March 21.

“While it unites us to Christ, tearing us from our selfishness, Communion opens and unites us to all those who are one in Him. Here is the wonder of Communion: we become what we receive!”

Pope Francis continued his catechesis on the Mass by outlining and explaining the second part of the Communion Rite in light of the passage from the Gospel of John where Jesus says: “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him.”

When we receive Holy Communion, we must let ourselves be changed, he said, because as St. Augustine said, “every time we approach the Eucharist, we are transformed into Jesus.”

“As bread and wine are converted into the Body and Blood of the Lord, so those who receive them with faith are transformed into a living Eucharist,” Francis continued, explaining the parts of the Mass.

After the Sign of Peace, the priest holds up the consecrated host and says: “Blessed are the guests at the Lord’s Supper: here is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.”

These words are inspired by a passage from the Book of Revelation: “Blessed are those who have been called to the wedding feast of the Lamb,” he said.

“This invitation calls us to experience the intimate union with Christ, source of joy and holiness. It is an invitation that rejoices and at the same time leads to an examination of conscience illuminated by faith.”

“If on the one hand, in fact, we see the distance that separates us from the holiness of Christ, on the other we believe that his Blood is ‘shed for the remission of sins.’”

As an aside, Francis reminded Christians that they have already been pardoned through the grace bestowed at their baptism and are forgiven again every time they approach the Sacrament of Penance, because “Jesus forgives us always,” he said.

Repeating a favorite phrase, he emphasized that “Jesus does not tire of forgiving us, it is we who tire of asking for forgiveness.”

The Pope also quoted St. Ambrose, who, thinking of the salvific power of the blood of Christ, said: “I who always sin, must always have the remedy.”

With the same faith, Francis said, we also turn our gaze to the Lamb of God, praying to him with the words: “O Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed.”

This is the point in the Mass where we go up to receive the Eucharist, which is “a meeting with Jesus,” he said.  

He also explained that though the entirety of Christ is present under each of the two species of the Eucharist, both Body and Blood, the Church believes that the “Eucharistic banquet is expressed with greater fullness if Holy Communion is made under the two species.”

He also noted Church teaching that the faithful may receive communion either “standing up with devotion, or kneeling,” as determined by the local bishops’ conference, and that the faithful receive “the sacrament in the mouth or, where it is allowed, on the hand, as preferred.”

After receiving the Eucharist, to help acknowledge the gift, the Pope recommended spending time in silent prayer, or the singing of a psalm or hymn of praise.

The Eucharistic Liturgy concludes with the prayer after communion, where the priest “turns to God to thank him for making us his guests and to ask that what has been received transforms our life.”

He noted the significance of the final prayer for the Mass of the day, Wednesday of the fifth week of Lent: “We ask the Lord that ‘participation in his sacrament should be for us the medicine of salvation, heal us from evil and confirm us in his friendship.’”

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Vatican City, Jan 2, 2019 / 03:52 am (CNA/EWTN News).- When praying, remember the words of Jesus when he taught the ‘Our Father,’ Pope Francis said Wednesday, meeting God as his beloved child and speaking from the heart.

Some think that to… […]

Vatican City, Dec 24, 2017 / 02:43 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Pope Francis said the birth of Jesus is an invitation for all Christians to imitate him in reaching out to embrace the vulnerable and all those who are suffering, during his celebration of Christmas Mass.

The joy that we are called to celebrate, share, and proclaim at Christmas is “the joy with which God, in his infinite mercy, has embraced us pagans, sinners and foreigners, and demands that we do the same,” the Pope said the evening of Dec. 24 during his homily at St. Peter’s Basilica.

The faith Christians proclaim at Christmas, as they adore the infant who came to offer salvation to sinners, is one that enables us to see God “in all those situations where we think he is absent,” he said.

“He is present in the unwelcomed visitor, often unrecognizable, who walks through our cities and our neighborhoods, who travels on our buses and knocks on our doors,” Francis said, explaining that this faith is also an invitation to develop “a new social imagination, and not to be afraid of experiencing new forms of relationship, in which none have to feel that there is no room for them on this earth.”

Christmas, then, “is a time for turning the power of fear into the power of charity, into power for a new imagination of charity,” he said.

And the type of charity we are invited to live during Christmas is one “that does not grow accustomed to injustice, as if it were something natural, but that has the courage, amid tensions and conflicts, to make itself a ‘house of bread,’ a land of hospitality.”

In choosing to be born into the world as a tiny infant, Christ offers himself to us in a way that we are able to hold him, lift him up, and embrace him, Francis said. In the same way, we are also called “to take into our arms, raise up and embrace the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, the imprisoned.”

“In this Child, God invites us to be messengers of hope,” he said. “He invites us to become sentinels for all those bowed down by the despair born of encountering so many closed doors. In this child, God makes us agents of his hospitality.”

He noted how difficult it was for Mary and Joseph to be forced from their homeland and make a long, uncomfortable journey while expecting a child. The situation was exacerbated when they finally arrived to Bethlehem only to discover there was no room for them in the city.

And yet it was here, “amid the gloom of a city that had no room or place for the stranger from afar, amid the darkness of a bustling city which in this case seemed to want to build itself up by turning its back on others” that the “revolutionary spark” of God’s love was lit, he said.

“In Bethlehem, a small chink opens up for those who have lost their land, their country, their dreams; even for those overcome by the asphyxia produced by a life of isolation.”

Francis noted that there are many others whose footsteps are hidden in those of Mary and Joseph, including the millions of people “who do not choose to go away but, driven from their land, leave behind their dear ones.”

“In many cases this departure is filled with hope, hope for the future; yet for many others this departure can only have one name: survival,” he said, noting that there are many who must survive “the Herods of today, who, to impose their power and increase their wealth, see no problem in shedding innocent blood.”

Mary and Joseph, who are the first to embrace “the one who comes to give all of us our document of citizenship,” are faced with a similar situation, finding themselves fleeing to a new land where they have no home or roof over their head.

However, in the “poverty and humility” of his birth, Christ both proclaims and shows that “true power and authentic freedom are shown in honoring and assisting the weak and the frail,” Francis said.

Among the weakest and most frail members society at the time were the shepherds, he said, noting that because of their work, they were often forced to live on the margins. Because their state in life prevented them from participating in the traditional religious purification rituals, the shepherds were considered “unclean.”

“Everything about them generated mistrust. They were men and women to be kept at a distance, to be feared,” Pope Francis said, noting how they were widely considered “pagans among the believers, sinners among the just, foreigners among the citizens.”

However, these are the ones to whom the angel first appears with the announcement that the savior had been born, he said, adding that “this is the joy that we tonight are called to share, to celebrate and to proclaim” at Christmas.

Like Christ, who in his mercy bent down and embraced us as sinners, pagans, and foreigners, we must also learn to develop a new gaze that looks at others with charity and hospitality, he said, and urged Christians to imitate Jesus in lifting up and embracing the weak and marginalized.

He closed his homily by praying that the gift of the “little Child of Bethlehem” would move us, so that “your crying may shake us from our indifference and open our eyes to those who are suffering.”

“May your tenderness awaken our sensitivity and recognize our call to see you in all those who arrive in our cities, in our histories, in our lives,” he said, and prayed that the “revolutionary tenderness” of the Christ Child would “persuade us to feel our call to be agents of the hope and tenderness of our people.”

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