The Eucharistic Mission

To fill out adequately the idea of the impending Eucharistic Congress, it is well to recall the memory of the great names in the past entitled to honour in connection with the Blessed Sacrament. Among these, the name of the Angelic Doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas, assuredly occupies a front if not the chief place. On the score of doctrine and devotion, he has given us light and impulse, forming the Catholic Tradition for all time. It is doctrine is the source of all the Eucharistic teaching which, sealed with the approbation and almost verbal quotation of the Council of Trent, has passed into the Catholic mind, and remained there as a steady and brilliant light. His contribution to the Eucharistic devotion has been equally remarkable and equally emphatic. From these two sources flow that Eucharistic life which gives a public and formal meaning to the Congress. As a help to the understanding of the remarkable event now impending, and as a kind of commentary upon it, I propose in the following pages to draw out briefly what we owe to St. Thomas Aquinas in the sphere of Eucharistic truth. It is recorded in the life of St. Thomas how on one occasion he knelt before the crucifix and heard the Divine words, 'Bene scripsisti de Me, Thoma' (Thou hast written well of Me, Thomas). It is not, perhaps, so well known that these words had reference to his writings on the Holy Eucharist. At that time a controversy had been going on in the schools concerning the 'accidents' in the Holy Eucharist. St. Thomas was asked to solve the resulting difficulties, which he did in words that have glowed ever since with this mark of Divine approbation, and have been the law of teaching on this deep and abstruse subject.