CHRIST SPEAKS
OF
THE EUCHARIST
†
– From the Mystical
Revelations Given To Maria Valtorta –
— INTRODUCTORY NOTE —
Reams have been written by theologians and spiritual
writers on the Holy Eucharist, or Sacrifice of the Mass. Along
with the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation, the Eucharist is
one of the central mysteries of the Christian Faith. Indeed,
the Eucharist is itself a daily re-Incarnation of the living
Christ in the virginal hands of His priest, as was His first
Incarnation in the virginal womb of the Blessed Virgin. This
is and has always been the ancient perennial faith of
Catholic Christians. And many of those reams of paper have
been written precisely to defend this ancient faith against
heresies down the ages that undermined or denied that the
Eucharist is the real Presence of the risen, living
Christ—Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity. Indeed, at the very
moment when Christ told His disciples of His future gift of
the Eucharist, and the need to eat His Body and drink His
Blood, St. John tells us:
"...many of His disciples drew
back and no longer went about with Him"
[Jn 6:60,
66].
And so, too, in our own day: a recent Gallup poll
tells us that nearly 70 % of those who call themselves
"Catholic" have drawn back and
no longer go about with Him. They no longer believe
that the Eucharist is indeed the Body, Blood, Soul and
Divinity of the living , risen Christ, present under the
appearances of bread and wine. Much of this loss of faith
today is attributed to the irreverent, often illicit, and
even invalid celebration of the Eucharist by dissident priests
and laity in this post-Vatican II era. This sad situation has
understandably stirred up a longing among the faithful for
the reverence and ritual fidelity of the former Latin
Tridentine Mass.
In the brief article presented here and specially translated
for this web site from Valtorta's recently published [2006]
Quadernetti collection
of Christ's Dictations and Revelations, we have the Master's
own view of His Eucharist as He instituted It at the Last
Supper the night before He died. If this presentation in any
way helps to restore some of our reverence for and
understanding of what the Eucharist is and was meant to be in
the mind of Jesus, it will have served its purpose...
—Trans.
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ON THE EUCHARIST
JESUS :
Listen well, Maria, this is a great lesson:
The most proper name of the Mass or Sacrifice of the Altar, as you all
now call it, is the
"Breaking of the Bread." First, because the Mass originated on
the evening of Holy Thursday. And secondly, because the Mass is the
perpetual remembrance of My love which extends beyond that hour and that
moment.
My Passion, Crucifixion and Death were the
historical hour and
moment of My love, but the Eucharist is the
always of My
love for all of you.The Mass is the immolation of the
Christ—contemplated not just in relation to the
material
consummation of My sacrifice,
with My sufferings, wounds, beatings, crucifixion and death:
caused by men and
willingly suffered by Me in obedience to My Father's Will for the
salvation of the world. The Mass is also the loving and willing
immolation of a God: of the Word Who breaks Himself in order to give
Himself as Bread, as Food for men, humiliating Himself even more
than by His death on a Cross.
Nor is "humiliating" an improper word. Think, Maria, of those who
sometimes receive Me, those into whom I descend:
I, God, the Pure, the Holy. I began at the table of the Last Supper to
fuse Myself with the sacrilegious, with sinners,
rebels against the Ten Commandments of Sinai and My Two Commandments of
love. I began these fusions of Myself with sinners by descending into
Judas. Since then, I:
the Saint of saints, the Pure of the pure, the Most Perfect, have been
"welcomed" by impure lips still warm with lust, by lips blaspheming My
Father, by homicidal hearts, by fevers of concupiscence:
by beings in whom there is denial, heresy, commerce with Hell, all the
rottenness of fallen man, all the duplicity of false sentiments, all the
calculating exhibition of a
false faith, which
in them is not true faith. Only God, and those with Him in
Heaven, know the horrors that are consummated at the altar. And these
horrors are much greater, immensely greater than the sacrilegious waves
of Good Friday...
Yes, Maria. The Mass is the Breaking of the Bread, the Eucharistic
sacrifice, which recalls the Sacrifice of Calvary. Because at the table
of the Last Supper, already contemplating My immolated Body and My Blood
shed for men, I had said: "This
is My Body and this is My Blood, the Blood of the new eternal Testament
which will be shed
for you and for many for the remission of sins." But the Mass is
above all the
sacrifice of My love, the remembrance and perpetuation of My divinely,
and therefore infinitely, insane love for men.
And it was the Breaking of the Bread (or "the Mass" if you prefer) that
you saw, Maria, in the vision of the supplemental Pasch, when
I Myself,
taught the Bishop of the Church of Christ, and the Bishop of Jerusalem:
Peter, and James of Alpheus, to celebrate it.2
After the supper of the brothers,
came the consumming of My Body and My Blood:
left by infinite love in the Food and Drink of salvation.
By the grace of the Lord, My priests can summon that Body and Blood from
Heaven; nor do the Body and Blood
refuse that priestly summons. They can summon It in order to
transubstantiate3
the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ—therefore
into Jesus Christ: alive, true,
complete, present in the consecrated Species, now transubstantiated3
into the Holy Body and Blood, the Soul of Jesus, and the Divinity of the
Word of God, One with the Father and with Love.
After the fraternal agape,4
came union of their Divine Brother with His brothers of Earth, with the
holy brothers, among holy
brothers whom love made equal, though greater ones were there:
the priests; and with the little
ones: the faithful—union with Him
Who knows only how to love, and Who asks love and union with his loved
ones.
The need for instruction: one
must keep present the fact that the Apostles, deacons and priests of the
first centuries of the Christian era, were in the situation of
instructing pagans, that is, those who were truly illiterate in the Holy
Religion. This need for instruction caused additions to the Breaking of
the Bread—Itself so simple and brief. These additions instructed those
who aspired to Christianity how to enter into the Sheepfold of Christ:
by knowing the Shepherd and Wisdom, by knowing the ancient and eternal
Law, and the Words of the Master. Hence the reading of the apostolic
epistles and the Gospel were introduced. In the first times, just at the
beginning, instead of those readings there was direct preaching:
that is, the recounting of ancient times, or the verbal counsels of the
apostles, or else the verbal instruction of the sapiential books.
And so also there was the verbal narration of My works in the
three years of My public life, and of My Birth, Death and Resurrection.
Later, as the Church was growing, there was an insufficient number of
true
eyewitnesses—i.e., Apostles and
disciples—for the growing number of churches.
Moreover, though the disciples were full of good will in
repeating the episodes of My works and life, they were still subject to
man's shortcomings: to
involuntary variations of these episodes, and to arbitrary
interpretations of them. Though this was done with a right purpose,
yet, it was done...humanly. Hence, the Heads of the Priesthood wanted
fixed texts to be read in the Meetings, and then to be explained to the
catechumens in that part of the Meeting which preceded the Breaking of
the Bread and the praying of the
Our Father:
just as I intoned this Prayer at the First Breaking of the Bread,
and also at the second supplemental Pasch2
—in the presence of
the faithful, and
after
consuming the Species.
Truly, I had then made the Communion
precede the
Our Father.
For centuries now the opposite has been done, and you believe, O men,
that you do well. To do this is not a sin, but reflect:
What is the Our
Father? The prayer of Jesus to the Father. The divine prayer
which I taught to men. The
perfect
prayer. If there were only that prayer, and
nothing else but
that were said well, you would have all, O men, for your spirit
and for your flesh. And you would give to God that which pleases Him,
if you lived the
Our Father.
I had said: "Our Father". With
every right I could say to the First Person:
"Father". But you,...although God is your Father—you can say it with
much less right. Because too infrequently do you reflect in yourselves
and in your works the divine likeness to your Father. Sins and
inclinations disfigure the Father's image in you, sometimes even
canceling it out.
But see: I transfuse Myself into
you. I come into you. I assimilate Myself to you. I deify you at My
contact. I come in the Species,
and I am in you. And you—voice of man fused with the voice of the Son of
God, and your mind on fire from the love that I bring with Me, you are a
sanctified altar (I speak of one who eats the Bread of Heaven without
sacrilege) which sings and is fragrant from the Holocaust that radiates
upon it: the Body of the Lamb of
God—you can say "Father" to the Father, with every right. For you have
in you the Son of the Father and your Brother.
You can pray, knowing what you say.
You can offer and ask with perfect power:
I give you My
Power living in you.
A holy prayer,
the Our
Father: because said at
the moment that Grace—the
Christ—makes of His Body and Blood your food, just as He has
transubstantiated3
the species of bread and wine into His Body and Blood, Soul and
Divinity. Thus the Eucharistic Species are transformed into you:
into your blood, into your flesh. You live from Me, even in your mortal
flesh... This is why Viaticum for the dying
is always Life,
even if sometimes it is not additional life added to one's finished
life. This is why the Eucharist is the life in you that keeps you alive,
Maria, soul of Mine.5
I am your oil that pours itself into the lamp of your exhausted body and
keeps you alive. I am your Physician. I am your Donor of blood. I am
your Lord Who wants you to be:
My lamp, My echo, in this spent, cold, dark world, mute of blessed
voices.
The other parts of the Mass are adaptations, sometimes necessary,
resulting from heresies that emerged down the ages and had to be fought.
Anxious adaptations—oh! all good—these adaptations made by My servants.
But through man's own tendency to amplify, tangle, and make things
heavy, My servants added, amplified, made heavy, and even
entangled—especially for little souls—the so beautiful,
simple,
initial Breaking of the Bread, and the catacomb Meetings so
divinely inspired.
But they did it wanting to honor Me, to love Me and make Me loved. And
therefore they did a
good work, though one not necessary or useful for the Eucharistic
Rite.
These adaptations are the superstructures from times of religious peace.
Do you think that you Christians today are not in times of religious
peace? just because you are calumniated and scorned? and because some
priests fall under the fury of a son of Satan? Oh! You do not know!
When the times prophesied have come, those who are believers at that
time and know of the present times, will be able to say:
"For them there was peace; for us
there is an atrocious war." And those superstructures will no longer be
possible. They will not withstand the catapults of Satan. Nor will the
faithful have time to redo them when they have fallen away.
But the essential,
the unchangeable will remain: the Breaking of the Bread, the Meeting
together of the faithful. Because those come from Me, and from the Holy
Spirit Who inspired the Apostles. And that which comes from Us is
eternal.
This is the lesson, Maria.
You will give these pages to the new Isaac,6
just as they have been written under My Dictation, reserving for
yourself to copy them
afterward
into the directions.7
You will tell him [Isaac] to copy them with the typewriter and to send
you the copy for Rome, so that you may transcribe it or join it to the
directions.7
Thus he will see that I love him, and that when I dictate to you and
give you the strength to follow Me—sometimes I do not give it to you
fully for My own inscrutable reasons—you do not err in one word.
And now rest in your double warmth:
of love for Me, and fever for yourself.5
Stay in peace, soul of Mine.
Home
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— NOTES —
1.
Maria Valtorta,
Quadernetti (Edizioni
Pisani / Centro Editoriale Valtortiano srl, Via Po 95, 03036 Isola del
Liri (FR), Italia, 2006): 65-69.
2. This "supplemental Pasch" was a truncated form of the Paschal Meal of
Holy Thursday. Jesus celebrated this supplemental and abbreviated form
of the Pasch—after
His resurrection—for the disciples who were not present for the Holy
Thursday Pasch. See Maria Valtorta's vision of it as described in
The
Poem of the Man-God, Trans., David G. Murray, (Edizioni
Pisani / Centro Editoriale Valtortiano srl, Via Po 95, 03036 Isola del
Liri (FR), Italia, 1990), Vol. 5, No. 632, pp. 857-862.
3. "transubstantiate" —Here Christ uses, and thus endorses, the
traditional term of Catholic theology to describe the "change of the
substance" of
the bread and wine into His Body and Blood, while the "accidents",
i.e., the appearance, taste, etc., of these elements remain unchanged to
human senses.
4. "agape": a frequent Greek word
in the New Testament meaning "love feast". It often included an
accompanying celebration of the Eucharist in the early Church.
5. In The
Notebooks 1945-1950,
Ed., Emilio Pisani, Trans., David G. Murray, Centro Editoriale
Valtortiano (Isola del Liri, 1985, 2002), p.271, Christ lists seven of
the grave maladies which for 26 years afflicted the physical "wreck"
[Christ's term] which was Maria Valtorta. And yet, she was kept alive
for those 26 years by His miracle of power, enabling her to record over
15,000 hand-written pages of the many Revelations and Dictations He
gave to her for the Church of today.
6. "Isaac"—in
this work of The
Poem of the Man-God—is one of the 12 shepherds who adored the
Christ-child at His Birth in Bethlehem, and who later became a disciple.
Christ here gives this name of the "new Isaac" to Fr. Conrad Berti, OSM,
theologian and annotator of Valtorta's Revelations. In the same way
Christ also called Valtorta's spiritual director, Fr. Romuald
Migliorini, OSM, the new brother "Lazarus" of Maria [= "Mary"]
Valtorta and her live-in friend, "Martha" Diciotti, who cared for her
during her 26 years as a paraplegic invalid. Hence Christ saw these
three as the new "Martha, Mary, and Lazarus" of the Gospels.
7. There is no in indication in the Italian text as to what these
"directions" refer to. Perhaps they are earlier instructions given by
Christ to Valtorta concerning the disposition of her work.
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