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The Most Holy Sacrifice
of the Mass
A Primer
for Clueless
Catholics
Part IV
The Road to Golgotha
We
had just said
that,
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“With
us, that new world of unspeakable
life and beauty will be revealed
— when we close our eyes. “As the
eyes of the body close, the eyes
of faith open. And what they will
see, discover to us, reveal, will
touch the fiber of our being — and
more than touch it, transform it!”
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How so?
Once you begin to understand where
you are — really and truly — a change,
a profound change, will begin to occur within
you. You will be unable to prevent it. Initially
— even necessarily – it will come to you through
your understanding, and as you enter more deeply
into the realization of where you are,
your understanding itself will begin to be eclipsed
by something deeper still, by something more
vital.
Understanding will
“tell”
you where you are — but faith will
take you beyond the appearances, to the the
realities beneath them. The change that will
come will occur within you
— not in the appearances of things about you.
You will have changed.
But as we had also said, before any of this
occurs, you must first understand what
is happening before you —
and it is this,
and nothing less than this:
Jesus Christ
is being crucified right before you.
He is on the Cross!
And you
are witnessing it. You are even taking part
in it!
It is not
another Sacrifice, but the
same Sacrifice that He enacted
2000 years ago. It is not a “re-enactment”
much as great battles are re-enacted for theatrical
effect. It is an “enactment”,
the “same”
enactment,
re-presented to us (not represented
to us, but “re-presented”)
to us ... enacted again while not being a second
or another sacrifice. It is the same Sacrifice,
with one exception: it is unbloody ... just
as it was unbloody when He gathered His Apostles
around Him at the very first Mass on
the night He was betrayed and before He was
crucified:
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“The
day before He suffered he took bread
in His sacred hands and looking
up to heaven, to you, His almighty
Father, He gave you thanks and praise.
He broke the bread, gave it to His
disciples and said: Take this, all
of you and eat it:
this is My body
which will be given up
for you. When supper was ended,
He took the cup. Again He gave you
thanks and praise, gave the cup
to his disciples, and said: Take
this, all of you, and drink from
it:
this is the cup of My blood,
the blood of the new and everlasting
covenant.”
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But now you witness it before you,
take part in it ... see the unspeakable value
of your life (in His love for you
Christ suffered and died) ... and the consequences
of your choices (the sins by which
and for which He suffered, was crucified,
and died) ... right before you!
Time, we told you, had been left in the vestibule
as we entered the Church. It no longer divides
us from that day.
We have entered
into something sacred, and everything sacred
is invested with the eternal, for it pertains
to God Who IS eternal;
Whose Son is eternal; the Son of God, now here
before us on that Cross of agony hewn from our
sins.
How then will you enter?
Everything
that leads up to the
Canon of the Roman Mass (that most
sacred part of the Mass in which the Consecration
occurs, when the bread becomes Jesus’
Body, the wine His Blood) is a prologue to that
epic moment when He will be sacrificed before
you.
When you passed
the doors leading into the Church and toward
the Sanctuary, you began to wend your way through
the road that leads to Golgotha, the Place of
the Skull, the Mount of Crucifixion — the
Altar of Sacrifice.
Not unlike 2000 years ago, the people that line
the way, the voices, the talking, the laughing,
together with all the other things that compete
for your attention as you walk that road to
your pew – one and all, they will call you aside,
distract you as though to call you away from
a false prophet on a road well worn and ultimately
tiresome ...
Something has changed, however. This day is
unlike other days. You have begun to understand
...
How, then, will you enter?
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What we have learned today:
The Mass is the re-presentation,
really and truly present before
you, of Jesus’
Sacrifice
on Calvary, and you have a very real
part in it.
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Totally Faithful
to the Sacred Deposit
of Faith entrusted to the Holy
See in Rome
“Scio
opera tua ... quia modicum habes
virtutem, et servasti verbum Meum,
nec non negasti Nomen Meum”
“I
know your works ... that you have
but little power, and yet you have
kept My word, and have not denied
My Name.”
(Apocalypse 3.8)
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