23.The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass

 

What other blessing can I look forward to if I return to the Catholic Church? You can expect to obtain this blessing. You will be enabled to go back again to the heights of Calvary and to take your stand with your forefathers beneath the Cross of Christ, side by side with Christ’s own Mother Mary and the beloved Apostle John. In other words, you will be able again to assist at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

Previously we have spoken of that moment in the Mass when the priest utters the words of consecration. At this moment through the power God has given him, the bread and wine in the hands of the priest become the living Body and Blood of our Lord. This is the most essential part of the Mass. “For this is My Body,” said Christ. The priest says the same. “For this is the chalice of My Blood, which shall be shed for you and for many unto the remission of sins,” said Christ. The priest says the same. For Christ and the priest are performing the same function. The night before He died, with His Apostles gathered around Him, Christ, the eternal High Priest, offered up His Body and Blood in an unbloody manner. It was the same Body and Blood that He was to offer up in a bloody manner the following day on the Cross. The priest today, and all days since the Sacrifice of the Son of God on Calvary, offers up the same sacrifice in the name of Christ and by the command of Christ.

This was the sacrifice foretold by the prophet Malachias in the Old Testament. God used this holy man to announce that the time would come when He would no longer be pleased with the sacrifices of the Old Law. The sacrifices of the Old Law would be succeeded and replaced, he said, by a clean victim. This new victim would be offered up as a sacrifice to God not only in Jerusalem upon a single altar but also in every part of the world. When Christ came, He sent His Apostles to all the world, and over all the world, the clean sacrifice of which He Himself would be the Victim, would follow their footsteps. “I have no pleasure in you,” said God through the mouth of His prophet, “and I will not receive a gift of your hand. For, from the rising of the sun, even to the going down, my name is great among the Gentiles, and in every place there is sacrifice, and there is offered up to my Name a clean oblation; for my name is great among the Gentiles, saith the Lord of Hosts.” Upon but one altar in all the world is that prophecy fulfilled today. That is the altar whereon Jesus Himself is the clean Victim, where under the appearances of bread and wine through the hands of the priest, He offers His own Body and Blood again to His heavenly Father, as He had offered it that first Good Friday on the heights of Calvary.