Memory, Identity, and Eucharist

Memory is the faculty which models the identity of human beings at both a personal and collective level. In fact it is through memory that our sense of identity forms and defines itself in the personal psyche.... Christ was acquainted with this law of memory and he invoked it at the key moment of his mission. When he was instituting the Eucharist at the Last Supper, he said: "Do this in memory of me" (Hoc facite in mean commemorationem: Luke 22:19). Memory evokes recollections. The Church is, in a certain sense, the "living memory" of Christ: of the mystery of Christ, of his Passion, death, and resurrection, of his Body and Blood. This "memory' is accomplished through the Eucharist. It follows that Christians, as they celebrate the Eucharist in memory of their Master, continually discover their own identity. The Eucharist highlights something more profound and at the same time more universal - it highlights the divinization of man and the new creation in Christ...It allows man to understand himself deeply, within the definitive perspective of his humanity...it allows him to understand the history of language and culture, the history of all that is true, good and beautiful".

Memory and Identity, Pope John Paul II, pp. 144, 145

John Paul II: priest, poet, philosopher and *prophet*

How may ways can you see the following prophetic statements by John Paul II coming true in the USA, never mind globally? The first part is from an address made in 1976 at the Eucharistic Congress in Philadelphia. The second part was said in answer to a question about the Third Secret of Fatima in Fulda Germany in 1980.

1.We are now standing in the face of the greatest historical confrontation humanity has ever experienced. I do not think the wide circle of American Society, nor the wide circle of the Christian Community realize this fully. We are now facing the final confrontation between the Church and the anti-church, between the Gospel and the anti-Gospel, between Christ and the antichrist. This confrontation lies within the the plans of Divine Providence. It is, therefore, in God's Plan, and it must be a trial which the Church must take up and face courageously....

2.We must prepare ourselves to suffer great trials before long, such as will demand of us a disposition to give up even life, and a total dedication to Christ and for Christ. With your prayers and my prayers, it is possible to mitigate the coming tribulation, but it is no longer possible to avert it, because only thus can the Church be effectually renewed. How many times has the Church sprung from the shedding of blood? This time too, it will not be otherwise....

Blessed John Paul  II, Magnificat Magazine,  pp 308, 9

Liberal State (professed) neutrality on Religion ends up as State-imposed Secularism.

.....At the core of Dignitatis Humanae, translated as "The Dignity of Man", is the crucial observation that "the right to religious freedom has its foundation in the very dignity of the human person" (DH 2). In other words, man's ultimate search for meaning belongs to his very nature. Religious freedom is not a right that is given, or one right among many, but one that is essential to his humanity. Fr. Antonio Lopez...defined culture as "embodied religion". Fr. Lopez explained that  "the horizon of meaning that gives form to social life is rooted in that search for the ultimate, unifying meaning of existence whose full expression we call religion." Referring to Fr. Luigi Giussani, Fr. Lopez emphasized that religion, or man's innnate "religiosity", is not simply "one activity among many, [but] a permanent dimension through which man full expresses his own nature."

     For the Christian, the constitutive experience of religiosity is even more radical because "the event of Christ incarnates the ultimate truth that man's religiosity constantly seeks, Fr. Lopez continued, and demands a free relationship with Christ who is the answer to his ultimate meeting. The Christian belongs to Christ, and understands himself only in relation to Him. Without Christ, the Christian loses himself. To be free, for the Christian, is to be in relationship with Christ. ......As pointed out by Cardinal Scola...through a pre- recorded video, this is the very dimension of man which the modern democratic liberal State is now determined to suppress, even in America.  

TRACES Magazine pp 42, 43 Free to be Ourselves

The Christ Witness of the Priest

......What is the first condition for bringing Christ to others? Bringing a real man or a real woman. Bringing Christ to others implies bearing witness to them that, in my experience, he responds to my humanity: Christ is the response to the needs of our humanity.

     For the priest, a lived belonging to Christ as the one Sent by the Father (John 20:21) is the exhaustive definition of his own personality (Galatians 2:20). "[The priest's ] life and ministry" - I said in a communique of the 1995 international symposium of the Congregation for the Clergy in Rome - "are thus a response to a real, historical, and existential Event: he is consumed  by the love of Christ, crucified and risen (2 Cor 5:41 ff.)." This consuming love makes us participate in the mission for which he came, died and rose again: that everyone who lives no longer lives for himself, but for him who died and was raised for them. This urgency of Christ's love, that ensures the memory of God's love for human persons, is the goal toward which all our desire and all our activity tend. 

   quoted from the "Afterword", by Luigi Giussani, in Together on the Road, by Massimo Camisasca,  pp. 118,9

Odd Man Out!

A personal note to the reader: I reproduce this text as originally written, including the British way of spelling. After reading the text several times, I can scarcely believe it was written in 1969, by an author whose name most people under fifty have never heard of. How can a statement so prophetic, and so proven by time to be absolutely true today, have been intuited so precisely and accurately over forty years ago by a man no longer read by anyone?  Voila:

"It is the illusion of our time that the non-conformist is in the ascendant, that the heretic is the hero and the revolutionary is the new redeemer.  

     In fact, the odd man out has never been so much at risk or so completely menaced by that conspiracy of power which we are pleased to call government.

     The mechanics of social control are more sophisticated than they have ever been in history, more sophisticated in those countries where the legal and judicial odds seem loaded in favor of the individual. 

     The Marxist position is at least clear: deviate and you are dammed - to expulsion from the Party, to breadline subsistence, to the limbo of non-persons, to brutal confinement, to death without honour. The democratic method is more subtle, but hardly less effective. The taxing authority may invade your most private transactions, and what it cannot [prove it may presume, in default of contrary evidence. An employer may solicit, file and transmit details of your private life - and your refusal to communicate them may provide a presumption of hidden delinquencies. The social spy, the wiretapper, the pedlar of devices to violate privacy have become stock personages in our society. The growth of large monopolies in communication has forced the protestor into the streets and the parks, where his protest may easily be construed or manipulated into a public disorder. A whole industry has been built around the art of affirmation, but the dignity of dissent is daily denigrated, the doubter is in disgrace because he demands time to reflect before he commits himself to an act of faith, and the liberty most laborious to maintain is the liberty to be mistaken.

 But the threat to the odd man out is not merely an external one. It is internal as well. So much diverse information, so many divergent opinions, are poured into his eyes and ears that the effort to rationalise them all threatens, at times his very sanity..."

I can think of current examples that witness to the truth of each sentence and paragraph, both here in the USA, and abroad as well. Where did such prescience come from? Any idea as to the writer?  (Morris L. West.)Or what he is writing? (It is the preface to a three act play, The Heretic,  about Giordano Bruno during  1592 -1600,  the time of his trial by the Inquisition in Venice and Rome.) I haven't read the play yet. Don't know that I ever will.  I keep pondering the message of the  Preface. 

Silence

"......Manage to go a few days, a couple of weeks, talking as little as possible. Work silently at the bank, study in silence, an economize on words as much as possible. You will see the effects. Almost immediately you will feel a greater serenity. You will find that you pay attention and see things much more clearly. Words distract a great deal, you can't imagine. You come across men who, to hear them talk, you would say were enemies. And basically they are in agreement without knowing it. Others, on the contrary, talk, thinking they understand one another, and basically they continue poles apart."

The Cypresses Believe in God, p. 416, Jose Maria Gironella

....

Massimo Camisasca

On Clericalism:

 "All of the major crises in the history of the Church were essentially bound up with the decadence of the clergy, which no longer experienced their relationship to the Sacred as something thrilling and dangerous, as a searing nearness to the all-holy One, but as an easy way to make a living."  

The Challenge of Fatherhood,  p. 37