The Eucharist is the heart and center of our worshipping life, but in order to be this center it must have a many-layered whole in which to live. Eucharist presupposes Baptism; it presupposes continual recourse to the sacrament of penance. The Holy Father has emphasized this most strongly in his encyclical “Redemptoris Hominis”. The first element of the Good News, he stresses, was “Repent!” “The Christ who invites us to the eucharistic meal is always the same Christ who exhorts us to penance, continually sayong ‘Repent!’” (IV, 20).
Where penance disappears, the Eucharist is no longer discerned and, as the Lord’s Eucharist, is destroyed. But Eucharist also presupposes marriage and ordination, the social and the public structure of the Church. It presupposes personal prayer, family prayer, and the paraliturgical prayer of the parish community. I would just like to mention two of the richest and deepest prayers of Christendom, prayers which are able to draw us again and again into the vast river of eucharistic prayer: the Stations of the Cross and the Rosary. One of the reasons why, nowadays, we are so discountenanced by the appeal of Asiatic or apparently Asiatic religious practices is that we have forgotten these forms of prayer.
The Rosary does not call for intense conscious efforts which would render it impossible but invites us to enter into the rhythm of quiet, peaceably bringing us peace and giving a name to this quietness: Jesus, the blessed fruit of the womb of Mary. Mary, who cherished the living Word in the recollected quiet of her heart and thus was priveleged to become the Mother of the incarnate Word, is the abiding pattern for all genuine worship, the Star which illuminated even a dark heaven and shows us the way. May she, the Mother of the Church, intercede for us so that we may be enabled to fulfill more and more the Church’s highest task: the glorification of the living God, from whom comes mankind’s salvation.
From” The Feast of Faith, pp. 52-53
