Roots of the Faith (eBook)

From the Church Fathers to You

Mike Aquilina (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
160 Seiten
Servant (Verlag)
978-1-63582-471-1 (ISBN)

Infos

This highly readable introduction to the roots of many Catholic beliefs and practices provides a sense of connection to our brothers and sisters who have gone before us and who helped shape the faith. Mike Aquilina makes it clear that as far as the essentials are concerned, a time-travel trip back to the beginning of the Church would reveal a Church familiar to Catholics today. Just as an acorn grows into a tree and yet remains the same plant, so the Catholic Church is a living organism that has grown from the faith of the earliest Christians into the Body of Christ we know today.

Textauszug

CHAPTER ONE

The Mass: The Universal Sign

St. Peter’s Basilica is the most colossal Catholic building on earth, holding up to sixty thousand people. A Mass there is a spectacle for all the senses: The art treasures of the ages look down on the celebration, glorious music fills the nave, the smell of incense drifts through the assembly, and colorful vestments light up the celebrants.

The scene is repeated on a smaller scale across the world. On every continent Masses are celebrated every day, in great cathedrals and tiny chapels, to congregations of thousands or where two or three are gathered in Jesus’ name. The celebrations come in every language. The music may be the serenity of a plainsong chant, the majestic polyphony of Palestrina, or the well-worn hymns from our parish’s well-worn hymnals.

But wherever we are, the basic parts of the Mass are the same. The same Mass can be dressed up in thousands of different vestments. And that simple observation tells us something profoundly important about the Mass.

The many local colors of the Mass show that traditions have been diverging for a long time. Christian populations, some of which have existed for centuries in near isolation from the rest of the Church, have developed their own distinctive traditions around the Mass. But the differences are superficial: The fundamental identity of the Mass is the same everywhere.

And that tells us that the Mass must go back to the very earliest days of Christianity. Indeed, Luke tells us that after the Holy Spirit descended upon the apostles at Pentecost, “those who received [Peter’s] word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls. And they held steadfastly to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of the bread and to the prayers” (Acts 2:41–42). This is as close to the very earliest days of Christianity as we can get.

“In Remembrance of Me”

From the very beginning, when the Christian Church began to be active in the world, its most important ceremony was the one Jesus had taught his disciples to do “in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19). In fact, it would be tempting to see an outline of the Mass in Luke’s description—“the apostles’ teaching and fellowship” being the Liturgy of the Word, and “the breaking of bread” being the Eucharist. That might be reading too much into what Luke wrote, but we do certainly know that “the breaking of bread” was the distinctive Christian celebration from the very beginning of the Church.

We know that the Church was celebrating the Eucharist regularly by St. Paul’s time. In his First Letter to the Corinthians, he recommends a back-to-basics approach. The Corinthians, he said, had been turning their celebrations into gluttonous feasts, where the rich stuffed themselves and the poor went hungry. “Don’t you have houses for that?” Paul demands. “Let’s not forget what the celebration really means.”

For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, “This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way also the chalice, after supper, saying, “This chalice is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” For as often as you eat this bread and drink the chalice, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. (1 Corinthians 11:23–26)

This isn’t just a commemoration, something the followers of Jesus do to think about him in an especially vivid way—the way we might raise a glass to a departed friend. It’s something so powerful that it’s a matter of life and death.

Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a man examine himself, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For any one who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment upon himself. That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died. (1 Corinthians 11:27–30)

Misunderstanding the Eucharist can kill you: That’s what Paul tells us. But for those who approach it in the right spirit, the Mass is heaven itself. The book of Revelation, in fact, paints heaven as a place where the liturgy goes on forever.

Then I heard what seemed to be the voice of a great multitude, like the sound of many waters and like the sound of mighty thunderpeals, crying,

“Hallelujah! For the Lord our God the Almighty reigns.

Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory,

for the marriage of the Lamb has come,

and his Bride has made herself ready;

it was granted her to be clothed with fine linen, bright and

pure”—

for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints.

And the angel said to me, “Write this: Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.” And he said to me, “These are true words of God.” (Revelation 19:6–9)

In heaven and earth the Eucharist is the center of the worship of the true God. St. Ignatius of Antioch, who wrote around the year 100, tells us that even the angels are condemned if they do not believe in the blood of Christ. The very mark of a heretic is disbelief in the Eucharist as truly the flesh of Christ.

Don’t deceive yourselves. Both the heavenly beings and the glorious angels, and rulers both visible and invisible, will be condemned if they do not believe in the blood of Christ….

But think of those who hold different beliefs about the grace of Christ that has come to us—think how opposed they are to the will of God! They have no regard for love; they do not care for the widow, the orphan, or the oppressed; for the slave or for the free; for the hungry or for the thirsty…. They keep away from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they do not believe that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ, who suffered for our sins, and whom the Father, out of his goodness, raised up again.

The people who speak against this gift of God bring death on themselves by their arguments. It would be better if they would treat it with respect, so that they also might rise again.1

The Liturgy of the Eucharist was the part of the Mass that was open to the baptized only. Others were dismissed, and Christians were supposed to keep mum about the specifics of their ritual and doctrine. Naturally, strange rumors circulated among the pagans—terrible stories of human sacrifice, in which the Christians “ate flesh” and “drank blood.” Pliny the Younger, who was a provincial governor around the time of St. Ignatius of Antioch, reported to the emperor Trajan that he had found these tales to be false.

But they affirmed that their only guilt or error was that they usually met on a certain set day, before it was light, and sang a hymn to Christ in alternate verses, as they would to a god, and swore a solemn oath—not for any evil purpose, but never to commit any fraud, theft, or adultery, never to bear false witness, nor to deny a trust when they should be called on to hand it back. Afterward, they would disperse, and then come back together to eat—but to eat food of an ordinary and innocent sort.2

It’s hard to interpret what Pliny is telling us, mostly because Pliny himself was completely ignorant of Christian belief and had no interest in learning about it, other than to answer the simple question of who was supposed to be killed for it. Some readers see Pliny’s description as an indication that the Christians celebrated the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Eucharist separately; on the other hand, Pliny could be describing a morning prayer in addition to the regular Mass. The way Pliny emphasizes the “ordinary and innocent” nature of the Christians’ meal suggests that he was relieved to discover that the Christians consumed only a small amount of bread and wine and not the humans that the rumors reported.

Nevertheless, Pliny reinforces from a pagan point of view what we’ve already heard from Christian writers: that the Eucharist was the central ceremony of the Christian religion.

A Pure Sacrifice

To the Christians, of course—as we saw in St. Paul—the Eucharist was far more than a ceremony. It was the sacrifice the people of God offered in place of the old temple sacrifices. St. Irenaeus explains that this was the very thing the prophet Malachi had foretold: The temple priesthood would stop offering sacrifices, but a “pure” sacrifice to God would be offered “in every place.”

So when he gave his disciples directions to offer to God the first fruits of his own creation—not that he had need of them, but so that they themselves would be neither unfruitful nor ungrateful —he took bread, a created thing, and gave thanks, and said, “This is my body.” And the cup as well, which is also part of that creation to which we belong, he proclaimed his blood. Thus he taught us the new offering of the covenant. The apostles passed it down to the Church, and the Church offers it to God throughout all...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 23.1.2023
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie ► Christentum
• ISBN-10: 1-63582-471-0 / 1635824710
• ISBN-13: 978-1-63582-471-1 / 9781635824711