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