Mass at the Holy Hour

Celebrated By Archbishop Denis Hart
at Saint Patrick's Cathedral, Melbourne
on Thursday, 20th July, 2006, at 6.30pm

Homily

My dear young Friends,

Two years from today many of us will be gathered in Sydney with the Holy Father for the great celebration of the Eucharist, which will conclude the World Youth Day of Sydney.

The fundamental purpose of World Youth Day every time it occurs, and about pilgrimage for the next two years, is to deepen our contact with Jesus and to make us walk a journey, which keeps him at the centre of our lives, as someone who is our God, who walks with us and who will never desert us at any moment.

Writing of his own First Communion Day in March 1936, Pope Benedict told young children in Saint Peter’s Square on 15th October last year something, which is very profound and real.

He spoke about the group of thirty boys and girls from a small village of about five hundred inhabitants and he said, “At the heart of my joyful and beautiful memories is this one thought: that I understood that Jesus had entered my heart, he had actually visited me, and with Jesus God himself was with me. And I realised that this is a gift of love that is truly worth more than all the other things that life can give. I was really filled with great joy because Jesus came to me and I realised that now a new stage in my life was beginning. I was nine years old and now it is important to stay faithful to this encounter to the Communion. I promised the Lord as best I could: ‘I always want to stay with you’, and I prayed to him ‘But above all, stay with me’. So I went on living my life like that. Thanks be to God the Lord has always taken me by the hand and guided me even in difficult situations.”

The joy of my First Communion was the beginning of a journey made together with Jesus and it is my wish for you that you would have the same experience, beginning at your first Communion, a lifelong friendship with Jesus, because in walking with him we do well and life becomes good. While we cannot see Jesus in the Eucharist, we know through faith that it exists. Just as we cannot see our soul, or we cannot see electric current, or we cannot see happiness, but we know that they are there. So it is also with the Risen Lord. We do not see him with our eyes, but we see that wherever Jesus is people change and improve. So we do not see the Lord himself, but we see the effects of the Lord, so we can understand that Jesus is present. It is precisely the invisible things that are most important.

In the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s we re-discovered the importance of the Eucharistic celebration in which the Lord assembles his people, unites them and builds them up by taking them into his sacrifice and giving himself to them, letting himself be received by us. If we separate the meaning of the assembly from the sacrifice, which Jesus gives, then the Eucharist can shrink to a mere sign of brotherly fellowship.

So the Eucharist is not merely a brief half hour in our day because the Lord is present in our churches and especially in this time of adoration. Pope Benedict says that the Eucharist is to breathe life into this sacred place so that whenever we come he may give us life. We are constantly imbued with the presence of the Lord who is waiting for us and with our silent readiness to respond.

In the Mass sacrifice is offered, the Eucharist originates and we receive the Lord in Holy Communion. As we ponder him in adoration we can only stand before him and adore, whether as priest or people. When we receive Holy Communion we do not only meet the Lord or receive a symbol. Communicating with Christ means having fellowship with him and that is why Communion and contemplation come together. A person cannot communicate with another person without knowing that person, must be open for that person and see them and hear them. Love or friendship always carries within it an impulse of reverence or adoration.
Pope Benedict wrote, “We cannot communicate sacramentally without doing it personally. Sacramental Communion becomes empty unless we repeatedly complete it personally. The words in the Book of Revelation, “Behold I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come into him and eat with him and he with me.” (Revelation 3:20) True communion can happen only if we hear the voice of the Lord, answer and open the door. That is why Pope John Paul stressed that we have to be generous in coming to adoration because our intimate, personal relationship with Christ is at the heart of our Eucharistic piety. In the death of Jesus each one of us has been loved to the end.

So, adoration is an exercise in sensitising our conscience. When the conscience becomes dulled this lets in the violence that lays waste the world. Anyone who gazes on the face of the Lord, which the servants of the Sanhedrin and palace servants have spat upon, will see in his face the mirror of our violence and a reflection of sin. Eucharistic adoration educates us in loving God in our neighbour and his sacrifice of his life meets us here and within this we meet love itself.

In this time of adoration we realise how near our God is to us. In the words of Deuteronomy, “What great nation is there that has a God so near to it as the Lord our God is to us whenever we call upon him?” (Deuteronomy 4:7) God knows us and waits for us in the Blessed Sacrament and that is why our churches should not be dead houses during the day. We come to ponder the great gift of God to us in the Eucharist, the fact that he is really present among us when we come to pray. We need both the public and communal prayer of the Eucharist and the personal encounter with Jesus which is transforming and which we now meet face to face.

Communion and adoration help us to find the centre of life as an essential friendship, a joy given for all of our life. What is important to remember is that we cannot immediately see the effect of being with Jesus when we go to Communion or in adoration. We see it with time. It is fundamental to be nourished by Jesus in Holy Communion and adoration. It is he who gives us enlightenment, offers us guidance for our lives, a guidance that we need.

Adoration, in the words of Pope Benedict, “is recognising that Jesus is my Lord who shows me the way to take and makes me understand that I will live well only if I know the road that he points out and follow the path that he shows to me. Therefore to adore means to say: “Jesus, I am yours. I will follow you in my life. I never want to lose this friendship, this communion with you.”

Adoration is an embrace with Jesus in which I say to him, “I am yours and I ask you, please stay with me always.” It is this invitation that we respond to tonight in adoration as we prepare two years away for the Sydney World Youth Day, a wonderful moment of grace for our Church, for its people and for the world in which we live.

+ Denis J. Hart,
Archbishop of Melbourne.