Mass for the Newman College Seminaries Soccer Competition

Celebrated By Archbishop Denis Hart
at Newman College Chapel
on Saturday, 12th August, 2006, at 6.30am

Introduction

My dear young friends,

I am delighted to be one with you after your gathering for the soccer. I give a timely warning that after the World Cup soccer in Victoria is achieving increasing prominence. We do hope to reverse in the not too distant future the results of today.

I welcome you warmly because the Eucharist is the great prayer of thanksgiving to God in which we welcome him into our hearts and reach out to our brothers and sisters.

On these three Sundays the Gospels will focus on the food of the Eucharist as the conduit of God’s love to prepare us for the total giving of self which Jesus showed on the cross. This is the sacrifice of the cross, which nourishes us for our journey to priesthood and for our lifelong journey as members of the kingdom. Jesus proclaimed that the kingdom is here. This we do in our daily lives.

Let us call to mind our sins.

Homily

My dear young friends,

Each of you at this moment is following a call to the priesthood. Many of you I know will achieve ordination; others will not. I can promise you that each of you will be enriched by this time you have spent in the Seminary; of prayer, study, and unity of purpose. One thing that I have noted in our seminaries is the universal love of Jesus Christ and a desire to serve and follow him in the Church.

The priesthood does not belong to anyone. It is the Church, which ultimately gives the call and invites us to the priesthood, which will nourish people in God’s truth and love and walk with them towards eternal life.

You and I know that food is a basic need of human existence. We speak of being hungry for food or tired, and yet the greatest hunger of all is for the bread of life. In these Sundays Saint John tells us of that hunger and of Jesus’ teaching, “No one can come to me unless he is drawn by the Father who has sent me. I am the living bread, which has come down from heaven. Anyone who eats this bread will live forever.

Yet we know that the Eucharist is both sacrifice and sacrament. It is the re-presentation of the one perfect sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, made present in our own day and time. When our priests say, ‘this is my body, this is my blood’, they transform bread and wine into the body and blood of the Saviour. Each priest as a victim says, ‘this is my body also’, because he is given to be another Christ to give life to people.

There are two great challenges, which come from the Eucharist. First, to walk with Christ in our daily life, to know that it is he who nourishes and guides us on our journey. Secondly, in the words of the Rite of Ordination, “Know what you are doing, imitate that which you touch”. We know that in the Last Supper and the Cross Jesus gave himself that we might have life. As human beings we find it difficult to understand and yet in faith we accept it.

The Holy Father reminds us of an important dimension of the Eucharist, which he mentioned in his address to his collaborators on 22 nd December last year. After reviewing the events of the year; the death of John Paul II, the World Youth Day, the Synod on the Eucharist, he said these words, “It is moving for me to see how everywhere in the Church the joy of Eucharistic Adoration is reawakening and being fruitful. In the period of liturgical reform, Mass, and Adoration outside it, will often seem as in opposition to one another: it was thought that the Eucharistic bread had not been given to us to be contemplated, but to be eaten, as a widespread objection claimed at that time.

The experience of the prayer of the Church has already shown how nonsensical this antithesis was. Augustine had previously said, “No one should eat this flesh without first adoring it … we should sin were we not to adore it.” Indeed, we do not merely receive something in the Eucharist. It is the encounter and unification of persons; the person who comes to meet us and desires to unite himself to us is the Son of God. Such unification can only be brought by means of adoration.

Receiving the Eucharist means adoring the one whom we receive. Precisely in this way and only in this way do we become one with him. Therefore, the development of Eucharistic Adoration as it took place in the Middle Ages, was the most consistent consequence of the Eucharistic mystery itself: only in adoration can profound and true acceptance develop. And it is precisely this personal act of encounter with the Lord that develops the social mission which is contained in the Eucharist and desires to break down barriers, not only barriers between the Lord and us, but also and above all those that separate us from one another.”

My invitation to you is that just as theology needs to be studied on our knees, so too the whole preparation for priesthood needs to be completely Eucharistic. In the Mass, by which we give ourselves with Christ to the Father, and in adoration by which the union of persons, which mirrors the oneness of Jesus with his Father, shows our oneness with Jesus to be the very source of all that we do to prepare for the priesthood.

It is only in the clear light of God shining in our lives and in our hearts that we with our Superiors and the Church can discern the authenticity of the call to the priesthood and can know in our human weakness the grace-filled possibility of fulfilling it.

May the Lord be with us as we eat the bread of life, knowing that we will live forever.

+ Denis J. Hart,
Archbishop of Melbourne.