Jun 4 Thu
How is the immediate preparation for communion in the Mass Liturgy?
Our Mother the Church offers us two prayers of preparation for the Lord's coming into our bodies. These prayers date from about the tenth century. They are full of fervor, rather subjective in tone, and suited for private piety, as they are intended for the personal preparation of the priest who recites them.
In the first prayer, the priest begs Christ, Son of the living God, to grant salvation to his servant and to deliver him from all his sins and from every evil.
In the other, the priest declares his own unworthiness and his confidence in Christ's mercy. He asks that the reception of the Eucharist may work not to his condemnation but to his own good.
The priest's personal preparation also allows us to prepare ourselves in silence, not with the noise of words, but with an abundance of acts of love. We feel unworthy as the moment to receive our Lord approaches. But we decide to go on because we know he wants to remain in the consecrated species as our nourishment and the remedy for our weaknesses.
We should never dare to receive the Eucharist in a state of mortal sin. To do so is a sacrilegious abuse of God's mercy. Only a shallow and false love, based on mere sentimentality, can bring us to such a detestable course of action. This mistreatment of the sacrament is a grave offense against God.
St Paul's warning on this issue is quite clear:
"Anyone who eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily will be behaving unworthily towards the body and blood of the Lord. Everyone is to recollect himself before eating this bread and drinking this cup, because a person who eats and drinks without recognizing the body is eating and drinking his own condemnation."
And Pope John Paul II warns us:
"Quite frequently, many participating in the Eucharistic assembly go to Communion; sometimes, there has not been due care to approach the sacrament of penance to purify one's conscience. This can mean that those approaching the Lord's table find nothing on their conscience, according to the objective law of God, to keep them from this sublime and joyful act of being sacramentally united with Christ.
Behind this, there could be the mistaken idea that the Mass is only a banquet in which one shares by receiving the body of Christ to manifest, above all else, fraternal communion."
Therefore, we cannot –and should not– receive our Lord with a soul stained by sin. If we realize we have committed a serious sin, even if we feel contrite, we cannot receive the Holy Eucharist without sacramental confession.
It is not only that penance leads to the Eucharist, but that the Eucharist also leads to penance. For when we realize who we receive in Eucharistic Communion, a sense of unworthiness springs up almost spontaneously, along with sorrow for our sins and an interior need for purification.