May 7 Thu
Why does the priest break the Host?
The priest takes the host and breaks it over the paten. He places a small piece into the chalice while saying, “May this mingling of the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ bring eternal life to us who receive it.”
The breaking of the loaf of bread is a familiar ceremony. The father, presiding over the table, would perform the ceremony.
At the Last Supper, our Lord also broke the bread. It was in the act of breaking bread that the disciples at Emmaus recognized the risen Lord. As if it were a Mass celebrated by the Lord, the breaking of the bread was preceded by the liturgy of the word: While they were walking, “Jesus explained to them the passages throughout the Scriptures that were about himself.”
The two disciples returned to Jerusalem, announcing that they had recognized the Lord “at the breaking of the bread.”
In apostolic times, this gesture of Christ gave the entire Eucharistic action its name, “the Breaking of the Bread.” We see in the Acts of the Apostles Saint Luke writing that the Christians “were persevering in the doctrine of the apostles, and in the communication of the breaking of the bread, and in prayers.”
Saint Paul drew a lesson from the fact that all those present shared the same loaf:
The fact that there is only one loaf means that, though there are many of us, we form a single body because we all have a share in this one loaf.
This ceremony also had a practical reason: the need to break the big loaf of bread by the deacon before its distribution. We read in the Didaché (year 110):
Lord, just as the matter of this bread was scattered on the hills and was made one when it was gathered together, so too may your Church be gathered in one into your kingdom from the ends of the earth.
And Saint Cyprian, in laying stress on the Church’s unity in opposition to schism, wrote:
The Lord’s sacrifice proclaims the unity of Christians who are bound together by a firm and unshakable charity. For when the Lord calls the bread, that has been made from many grains of wheat, ‘his Body’, He is describing our people whose unity He has sustained; and when He refers to wine pressed from many grapes as his Blood, He is speaking of our flock, which has been formed by fusing many into one.
In the ancient Church, some fragments of consecrated hosts were reserved. Two of these were called ‘sancta’ and ‘fermentum’. The sancta was to be consumed at the next Mass to be celebrated; it was dropped into the chalice. This gesture seemed to have meant the affirmation of the unity of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ until the end of the world.
The pope or bishop sent fragments of the hosts he had consecrated, the ‘fermentum ’, to priests of the nearby parishes -“so that,” Pope Innocent I explained, “especially on this day, they do not think themselves cut off from our communion.”