CHURCH, EUCHARIST AND MISSION
- William McCormack

The Second Vatican got every one of us - Bishops, priests, theologians and indeed, every active Catholic - to think about the Church. The Council launched a world-wide effort to reflect on the nature of the Church and nearly twenty years later the flow of books and articles on the Church continues unabated.

To talk of Church is to talk Eucharist. To live the Church is to live the Eucharist.

One of the major fruits of this reflection is the centrality of the Eucharist in the life of the Church. There may have been times when the place of the Eucharist in Church life was so obvious it could be taken for granted. This was surely the case in New Testament times. But in modern times it has become obscure.

Since Vatican II, the centrality of the Eucharist is again very clear. To talk of Church is to talk of Eucharist. To live the Church is to live the Eucharist.

Another major result of post-Vatican II reflection on the Church has been the centrality of mission in the life of the Church. There has been a lot of confusion about the mission of the Church. Some have even questioned whether the Church should continue its missionary effort to all people (ad gentes).

Today, the central importance of mission is very clear. The Church is missionary by its very nature. To talk of the Church is to talk of mission. To live the Church is to live its mission, a mission as valid today as it ever was in ways both old and new.

Eucharist and Missionary
The renewed vision of the Eucharistic and missionary nature of the Church brought with it a new awareness of the missionary aspect of the Eucharist and the eucharistic aspect of the mission. In the introduction of his apostolic exhortation on the formation of priests, Pastores Dabo Vobis, Pope John Paul II spoke of the church as living a "fundamental obedience which is at the very heart of its existence and its mission in history."

The Pope spoke of that obedience as a "response to the command of Christ; 'Go therefore, and make disciples of all nations' (Mt. 28:19) and 'Do this in remembrance of me' (Lk 22:19; 1 Cor 11:24)." The command 'to announce the Gospel" is inseparable from the command "to renew daily the sacrifice of the giving of his body and the shedding of his blood for the life of the world."

In their pastoral on world mission, 'To the ends of the Earth,' the Bishops of the United States placed the Eucharist together with Baptism and Confirmation at the center of the mission spirituality they outlined for our Catholic people.

Today talking about the Eucharist means talking about mission, and talking about mission means talking about Eucharist. To live Eucharist fully is to be missionary. Nowhere has this been more obvious than in the recent International Congress held in Seville, whose central theme was "Eucharist and Evangelization". To speak of Eucharist and Evangelization in an international setting is to speak of Eucharist and world mission. This was reflected in conferences given at the congress, challenging all of us to see the Eucharist as an effective force for transforming the whole world.

These developments in the Church's awareness of itself as both eucharistic and missionary by nature are also at the center of the formative efforts of the Society for the Propagation of Faith. To be on target, the Church's mission must be eucharistic. Vatican II's Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy spoke of the eucharistic liturgy as "the summit towards which the activity of the Church is directed" and as "the fountain from which all its power flows" (10).

These extraordinary statements presenting the Eucharistic Liturgy as the summit and fountain, or source of Church life and activity, apply to the Church's mission: "For the goal of apostolic works is that all who are made sons of God by faith and Baptism should come together to praise God in the midst of his church, to take part in its sacrifice and to eat the Lord's Supper (10). The first and principal expression of the Church's apostolic work is its mission "to the ends of the earth".

October is a month to focus on the missionary aspect of the Church and its Eucharist. We do this in a special way on World Mission Sunday (which falls this year on October 24). On World Mission Sunday we do as Christians have done from the very first days of the Church. We associate ourselves with Christ's Eucharistic sacrifice for the life of the world: The Eucharist invites us to do what Christ did, in memory of him. We do that in sacrament, prayer and sacrifice, generously witnessing to the missionary nature of the Eucharist.

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