Cardinal Cathal Daly, who just last week published a book on the Eucharist, has expressed his delight at the news that the next Eucharistic Congress will happen in Dublin in 2012. He spoke of his surprise and delight at the news. “I had no previous idea, but it is all the more welcome because of that. It is nicely timed too as the anniversary of the Eucharistic Congress of 1932.”
He was a fifteen year old boy at the time, and it had made a deep impact on him. “I cherished it all my life.”
Cardinal Daly said he saw the congress as a great means for developing the faith of the laity.
“The congress can be the focus for many activities by the laity, particularly with the leadership and help of the clergy,” he said.
The Eucharist, said the retired cardinal, was the source of all the Church’s energy and power, and the summit towards which the Church is always climbing.
He felt the focus that will now come on the Eucharist would encourage both laity and clergy to live more authenticly Christian lives.
Asked if he felt the level of understanding of the Eucharistic was poor among ordinary Catholics, Cardinal Daly said that the signs were that this was true “for some". But he pointed to the remarkable faith of many Catholics which sees them attending Mass each day.
“I am impressed by the fidelity and the fervour of so many people, of whom one never reads in the newspapers, who come to Sunday Mass, and who come to weekday Masses.
He said that many people were not content with a “casual contact” with the Eucharist, but wanted a day by day contact. To illustrate this he recalled a woman he spoke to at the height of the troubles who said she “couldn’t live without daily visits to the Blessed Sacrament. “Her visit in the morning, got her through her morning’s work, and after her visit at lunchtime,” she was able to do her work in the afternoon,” said the Cardinal.
Last Friday, Cardinal Daly formally launched his new book The Breaking of Bread: Biblical Reflections at the Linen Hall in Belfast.
“God, the inspirer and author of both testaments, wisely arranged that the New Testament be hidden in the Old and the Old be made manifest in the New,” he said, quoting The Vatican Council’s Constitution on Divine Revelation.
“In its Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy,” the Cardinal said at the launch, “the Council expressed the hope that, through reform of the Liturgy, Christ’s faithful ‘should be instructed by God’s word and be refreshed at the table of the Lord’s body and be drawn day by day into closer union with God and with each other, so that finally God may be all in all’”
The Council’s documents made reference to two tables for our spiritual nourishment - the first, the table of God’s word and the second the table of the Body of Christ.
Through a wider selection of readings the bible is made better known – and aided to its understanding, the homily is to be esteemed.
“Becoming familiar with Jesus through the gospels and the writings of his apostles, the Cardinal said, “ is essential if we are to know him and through him to know God, his Father. It is essential if we are to know who it is whom we receive in Holy Communion.
“To know Jesus we need also to know the scriptures of the Old Testament, for they too speak of Jesus, though in a more veiled and indirect way, as we find in the books of the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms, passages from which are now read in every Mass.”
He continued, “The book we are launching today tries to be a help towards achieving the aims of the Second Vatican Council, namely the ‘full, conscious and active participation’ of the faithful in the liturgy, which is ‘their right and their duty by reason of their baptism’. The Eucharist is, as the Council declares: ‘The summit towards which the activity of the Church is directed (and also) the fountain from which all our power flows’."
He then made reference to two documents of Pope John Paul II –his encyclical Ecclesia de Eucharistia and the Apostolic Letter, Mane Nobiscum Domine.
In the first “the most holy Eucharist contains the Church’s entire spiritual wealth - truly a glimpse of heaven appearing on earth”.
In the second – ‘every commitment to holiness, every activity aimed at carrying out the Church’s mission, every work of pastoral planning, must draw the strength it needs from the eucharistic mystery and in turn be directed to that mystery as its culmination.’
“These two papal documents and the proclamation of the Eucharistic Year were among the challenges which motivated me to begin writing this book. I started it at the beginning of 2005, while the Year of the Eucharist was still being celebrated, “ the Cardinal stated.
“The research and the effort of writing the book certainly enriched my own eucharistic devotion,“ he said.
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