Digital Continent Digital Continent Easter 2017 | Page 46

me.’ For as often as you eat this bread and drink the chalice, you proclaim the
Lord’s death until he comes. (RSV, 1 Cor 11:23-26)
In the sacrament, the Eucharist “the heart of the mystery of the Church” (EE, n.1), the
accidents of bread and wine become His body, His blood at the time of consecration (Ia IIIa, q.75
a.2). Bread and wine transubstantiated on the altar of sacrifice by a “priest who has been properly
ordained according to the church’s keys, which Jesus Christ himself gave to the apostles and
their successors” for the purpose of uniting God’s people intimately with Him, “we receive from
God what he received from us.” 120 Even though the perfected broke and blessed bread, it was by
no means to be thought of as the Body and Blood of Christ. From this bread, the Church “draws
her life. From this ‘living bread’ she draws her nourishment”
(EE, n. 7). The perfected believed Christ to be an angel, not
the Son of God, consequently, they were unable to
distinguish the “sacred table from profane tables, this
celestial bread from common bread.” 121 The Church teaches
in “taking part in the Eucharistic sacrifice, which is the
source and summit of the whole Christian life, they offer the divine victim to God, and offer
themselves along with it” (EE, n.13). He is the “one mediator between God and men, the man
Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all” (RSV, 1 Tim 2:5). This understanding of
Christ giving His life, the ultimate sacrifice, the mediator between Creator and the created for the
purpose of unity is not a teaching that the perfected would have subscribed to or would have
shared with their people. They believed and professed that there was no ultimate sacrifice, no
120
Fourth Lateran Council, http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Councils/ecum12-2.htm, accessed, February 5, 2016,
n.1.
121
St.Pius V, The Catechism of the Council of Trent, Trans., John A. McHugh, OP, Charles J. Callan, OP, (IL: Tan Books
and Publishers, Inc., 1982), 247.