Ultimately, the eucharist is considered the path to salvation: “Whoever feeds on this bread will live forever,” Jesus told his disciples in the Gospel of John.
Looming behind the U.S. bishops’ plans to issue new guidance on the sacrament is declining Mass attendance and the sense that many Catholics have lost a spiritual connection with the ritual and may not even understand the church’s teachings about it. Only about 30 percent of U.S. Catholics believe the core church teaching that the bread and wine become the literal body and blood of Christ; about 70 percent believe they are mere symbols, according to a Pew poll from 2019.
The sacrament is more than a set of theological beliefs. It wraps the divine and the human all into one, connecting the church and God across time and space.
Jennifer C. Reid, 50, recently rediscovered the altar candles from the day she received her first communion at St. Columbanus, on of the oldest Black parishes in Chicago, which she still attends. More than four decades later, the faded white taper candles, with wicks slightly burned, were still carefully stored in a long rectangular box with her initials on the bottom.
“I was sitting there holding them, flooded with those memories,” she said, remembering receiving the sacrament for the first time with her two sisters, in their little white veils, white dresses and white patent leather shoes.
Now Ms. Reid works at the church as a pastoral associate and distributes the bread to others at Mass after the priest has consecrated it. “I always look people in the eye before they receive communion because it means that much to me,” she said.
The Rev. Tulio Ramirez, a missionary priest from Colombia with the Yarumal Mission Society who works with Latin American immigrants in the Bronx, remembered celebrating Mass under a tree in Kenya. As the sun moved across the sky, people rose to carefully move the altar table, holding the bread and wine, to keep the eucharist in the shade.

Source: New York Times

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