When we share in the Lord’s body and blood, when we eat his bread and drink his cup, this truly means that we die to the world and have our hidden life with Christ in God, crucifying our flesh and its weaknesses and its desires.
–Saint Fulgentius of Ruspe (Fifth – Sixth Century)
The Eucharist is a fire which inflames us.
— Saint John of Damascus (c. 676-750)
There is no prayer or good work so great, so pleasing to God, so useful to us as the Mass.
–Saint Lawrence Justinian (1381-1456)
Consider the generosity of our Savior: what He acquired by dying becomes ours by eating. As often as we receive this Sacrament with proper dispositions, we make our own the fruits of all the labors, injuries and sufferings of His life, especially those borne at the time of His passion and death. Just as the power and the sensations of the head reach all the members of the body, in the same way, because Christ is “the head of the Church which is His Body” (Eph. 1:23), the treasures of His grace are made abundantly available to all who through charity are one with Him as living members.
–Blessed Lois of Grenada (1505-1588)
If the Blessed Sacrament is Jesus all for us, is it not the most legitimate of conclusions that we should be all for Him? We should be all for Jesus, if Jesus is our all. And what does this mean? Surely, among other things, that the Blessed Sacrament should be to us just the single overpowering fact of the world. Our hands hold Him; our words make Him; our tongue rests Him; our body compasses Him; our souls feel Him; our flesh feeds upon Him, Him, the Infinite, the Incomprehensible, the Immense, the Eternal. Must not all life be looked at in this light, just as the whole Church lies in this light and has no other?
–Frederick Faber (1814-1863)
The effect of our sharing in the body and blood of Christ is to change us into what we receive.
–Saint Leo the Great (c. 400-461)
