The Mass Won't Change You, Unless You Offer Yourself

Six stone jars at Cana held an absurd amount of wine—and that overabundance becomes a doorway into how God gives at every Mass.

In this episode, I sit down with Fr. Mitchell Brown of Sacred Heart Cathedral to walk through the Liturgy of the Eucharist using his book Praying the Mass in Lent.

If you’ve ever felt like the Offertory is just “the part where stuff happens up front,” this conversation reframes it as the moment you place your whole life on the altar so Christ can transform it.

We explore:

• Why the Offertory is meant to be personal and interior
• How even a brief silence can hold your intentions, joys, and sufferings
• Why some liturgies intentionally reduce movement to protect this moment

From there, we move into the Preface and the Sanctus as a climb into thanksgiving and heavenly worship—drawing on Isaiah and Revelation to show why “Holy, Holy, Holy” is not just a hymn, but a participation in the prayer of the angels.

Finally, we slow down at the consecration and the claim at the heart of the Catholic faith:

the Mass makes Christ’s sacrifice present, and the bread and wine become the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Jesus Christ.

We also address the question many people have: why are Catholics so strange?—connecting it to John 6 and the radical reality of the Eucharist.

The Mass doesn’t end in the pew. It sends us out on mission—strengthened by the Eucharist to bring Christ into the world.

What is one thing you need to place on the altar at your next Offertory?

Transcript

Cana Abundance And Lenten Setup

SPEAKER_02 0:01

It's si uh six jars, fifty forty gallons each, right? It's a lot of wine. And that's the overabundance of what God wants to bestow upon us, which happens at every Mass.

SPEAKER_03 0:10

Yeah, my wife says I'm I'm I celebrate the wedding feast of Canaan uh too much. Welcome to Christero Cast, the official podcast of the Cristero Catholic Men's Movement. I'm Patrick Mason, and with me again today is Father Mitchell Brown of Sacred Heart Cathedral. And uh thanks for joining us again, Father. Glad to be here. So before we get started, I'd just like all of our viewers to consider uh liking and subscribing and sharing this uh podcast with their friends and family and anybody that might be interested in it. We've been running through uh Lint and and a lot of different topics that I think are really relevant to Catholic men today, and we just want that word to get further out there. So, Father, today uh we're in week four of uh Lent, and we're going through your book, Praying the Mass in Lent, where every day you've gone through a different part of the Mass, and this week really focuses on the parts of the Mass from the Offatory through the consecration, uh, which I think is properly referred to as that the liturgy of the Eucharist.

SPEAKER_02 1:22

Yes. That's the first part of it, and then the it leads into uh Holy Communion, which is the second portion of the liturgy of the Eucharist.

Offertory As Self Offering

SPEAKER_03 1:29

Got so why don't we just uh jump right in um with the offertory? You know, what is the significance of the offertory and and our participation in it in the mass?

SPEAKER_02 1:39

So there's a big shift, if you will, in the mass. After we finish the creed and the intercessions on a Sunday, everyone sits down and we move to the altar. We've gone from the place of the ambo, which represents the high mountain from which God speaks, and we move to the altar, which is the high mountain on which Christ was sacrificed. And so we are preparing for what's about to take place there. And so whether the gifts are being brought forward or the servers are preparing things, there's incense, all of this stuff, it is a moment in which we offer the gifts of bread and wine to God to become the body and blood of Christ. But we are also meant to offer ourselves. Um, unfortunately, I think this is the part of Mass that goes unused very easily because people are just waiting for Father to say the next prayer that they can respond to. But in that moment of silence, even if it's very brief at a daily mass, for example, this is when we are meant to offer everything we have and are to God, to place our hearts, our desires, our intentions, all the people we're praying for, our joys, our sorrows, our sufferings, our thanksgivings, to place those on the altar so that when the bread and wine are transformed into Christ, so are our intentions. And then we when we receive communion, we're receiving all of that that we have given to God, we're receiving it anew in a transformed way. So that simple moment is very powerful if we use it. And that's when we can bring ourselves to God and offer to Him with Christ all that we are.

Cathedral Choices For Deeper Prayer

SPEAKER_03 3:04

So I think a lot of people might think of the offery as just that moment in the Mass when people walk from the back to the front with the uh you know, with the gifts for the altar, or even worse, the offertory is just that passing the baskets around and putting your money in it. But in our mass at the cathedral, we don't have either of those. Can you explain how I'm what you know, why we do that? Why don't we have those at our mass?

SPEAKER_02 3:30

So after COVID, um, you know, it took a long time for some of the normal things to come back. And when we were doing some research at the time, we realized that bringing up the gifts is not required by the church. It's called praiseworthy. Uh there's some other praiseworthy things like veiling the chalice, for example, um, but it's not required. And I noticed that we had started to have a breakthrough in the way people pray in that moment. And so instead of waiting for the gifts to be brought forward, we've just moved right to the altar. There's nothing wrong with that, but it it seemed to me that that was a big moment of distraction, um, especially when when the ushers would, you know, have the little kids do it. It's very cute, but we don't need cute at that moment of the mass. We're going to the cross, right? And it can just distract people from what we're actually meant to be doing in that moment. And similarly with the collection, when it gets reduced to uh let me find my wallet while Father's doing his thing up there, right? There's not necessarily that cognizant connection between I'm offering some money, which is a symbolic offering of myself, uh, or or the people bringing forward the gifts. It's an offering of the community. Now, that's a a fine place for those things. That's where the church has those. They're not required at that moment. So we we aren't uh, you know, breaking any rules in that way. But I think it we had become very accustomed to praying well in that moment. And I didn't want to interrupt what people had started to learn. So we've really tried to foster that in that moment, uh a time of silence and prayer, or if the antiphons are going on trying to associate with what the priest is doing instead of having kind of a chasm between the sanctuary and the knave, between the priest and the people, trying to unite what the two people two groups, if you will, are doing at that moment of offertory.

SPEAKER_03 5:06

No, it makes a lot of sense. And then after the offertory, then we go into the preface. Is that right? And what's the preface?

SPEAKER_02 5:13

So the preface is one of it's it's kind of an odd mix between an ordinary and a proper, uh, because there's a preface every single day, and there are very similar elements to every single preface. But the preface can vary uh based on day, based on saint, based on season. Um, so right now there are different options for Lenten prefaces, then there will be a series of Easter prefaces. But in times when we have a lot of saints, there are prefaces for uh pastors, for um virgins, for martyrs, uh, for all sorts of different categories of saints. And each of these prefaces starts off with thanksgiving and praise. This is where we have that small dialogue, the Lord be with you, lift up your hearts, let us give thanks to the Lord our God. And then every single one of them starts off saying it is truly right and just always and everywhere to give thanks and praise to God through Christ. And that is essential for what we are entering into with the Eucharistic prayer, because that's the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving par excellence. And so we're telling the priest is telling the people as he prays to God, this is what we have to do. We have to thank God, we have to praise him. And then there are some uh small changes based on the day or season about what the saints might teach us or what the season is about, or the fruits of fasting and abstinence in this, in this time of Lent. So that part can change. But every single day it starts off with Thanksgiving and praise and then leads us to join the heavenly choirs of angels as they sing holy, holy, holy to God. So that moment it it shows in its prayer we have shifted from uh, you know, a moment of homily and and creed when we're we're praying together and we're remembering what we are doing here on this earth. We have entered into heaven. We have stepped out of this world into eternity and into infinity, and we are there with God as the angels sing and praise his name. So it's a powerful moment if we have the ears to hear.

SPEAKER_03 7:06

Yeah, I was just thinking as you were talking, um, before you even said it, how appropriate it was. And so with the offertory, we're sitting down and we're, you know, you're you're preparing the altar and we're at we should be preparing our hearts and offering ourselves to God. Then all of a sudden we all stand up and then we're all singing. And and I think, I mean, for the most part, I mean, I guess we sometimes say it, but uh oftentimes, especially on Sunday, we sing the Psalmtu's. And that is the I mean, the words of where do the words of the Sanctus come from? From the angels, right? Praying.

SPEAKER_02 7:39

Yeah, it's a couple of places we have it in Isaiah 6, where he the heavens are opened, he looks up and sees the seraphim praising the God, the name of God as he sits upon his throne. And then that's taken up again in the book of Revelation, which is the book of heavenly worship. We see over and over so many of the things that we're used to at mass taking place in heaven. And that united with our liturgy shows us that we are entering into what's already taking place in heaven in a perfect way. We're in we're imitating it, we're allowed to participate it here in it here. But those two places show us that when we say those words, we're doing what the angels are doing. They're teaching us how to pray at that time.

SPEAKER_03 8:15

And then immediately after that, we're down on our knees and in prayer, like worshiping our God. There's just something awesome about that. So we're we're internally gathering ourselves, and then it's like we're standing to attention, like, hey, take notice of what's about to happen. Now praise God, and then down on our knees. Yeah. God is coming.

Postures Genuflection And Humility

SPEAKER_02 8:33

You know, that's that's a good uh uh segue, I guess, into to considering what we get made fun of for Catholic calisthenics. Yeah, I was thinking that the up, down yeah. But all of those have their purpose. We sit in receptivity to receive the word of God or to prepare ourselves. We stand at attention, as you said, because the king is present. And then especially in the Eucharistic prayer where Christ transforms the bread and wine into his own body and blood, we are kneeling in a humble position, right? This is one of the besides prostration, that's the most humble position we can be in. It's also a dangerous one, if you will, because for example, when martyrs are put to death, they're forced to kneel. We're forced to bend the knee to someone that is higher than us. Uh in this case, it's voluntary. And so we are able to show with our bodies what we acknowledge in our hearts and what we believe. It's like we're joining ourselves with Christ at his execution. Yeah. Yeah. All of this, you know, all of the mass is the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ made present. We're not sacrificing him again. We're entering into the one sacrifice, but we imitate him in his own prayer. And as we talked about last week, we're using our bodies, which he gave us, to pray, because we can't just zone out and hope something happens, right? We have to use our bodies to teach our hearts and teach our souls. And that in that moment, when we kneel, especially because we don't usually kneel anywhere else, it tells us something important is happening. Someone important is here.

SPEAKER_03 9:55

Yeah, I mean, and I guess that's what we call the postures of prayer, right? What are the postures?

SPEAKER_02 10:00

So there's standing, sitting, kneeling, uh prostration, which is not as common. Uh that happens at ordinations, uh, consecrations, and on Good Friday. So that'll be coming up soon when the priest comes in and lays prostrate before the mass or before the liturgy begins. Uh, and then there's also procession when we're in move in movement. Yeah. Like a Eucharistic procession or even procession in the Mass itself, like coming up. Yeah. So coming in, uh, the gospel procession, the Eucharistic uh the um communion procession, and then when we leave the church as well.

SPEAKER_03 10:32

And so you go, so we go straight into this posture of kneeling before our God. And I guess that's why we genuflect at the beginning of Mass, too, because we're gin uh, you know, if you're uh not used to coming to a Catholic church and you see all the Catholics genuflecting before they go in into the into their pews, that's that's another part of the the posture.

SPEAKER_02 10:52

Yeah, and that that even happens outside of mass, right? When we're in a uh just coming in for to a church for a visit or or before after leaving a pew or something, it's to recognize the presence of Christ in the church.

SPEAKER_03 11:02

I think uh Father Keller told me once that, you know, as Catholics we genuflect on our right knee, whereas traditionally you would genuflect on your left knee to like royalty or the king or something like that, but but the right knee was reserved for God.

SPEAKER_02 11:15

Right. And it there's a symbol of strength there, right? That biblically uh and and then in the Roman Rite, the right side is the side of strength. And so we're pushing our strength down to acknowledge that that this God that is before me deserves my best. Um and even in in ancient times or medieval times rather, um I've read this once, I'm not sure if it's true, but I like it, so I'm gonna repeat it. That's on the internet, it's true now. Of course, yes. So a sword for a knight would be on his left side. So if he's genuflecting with his right, and he if he's going to pull his sword, he's gonna cut his leg. So it's a symbol of I'm vulnerable before you right now. Um and so there's another aspect of of humbling ourselves before Christ.

SPEAKER_03 11:57

Oh, that's that's actually really beautiful. And it's so good that like we've talked about before, that the Catholic Church acknowledges and like you just mentioned, acknowledges like we as human beings are both body and soul. And we do not neglect one or the other, even in our worship, or especially in our worship. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 12:14

Because that's that's the best use of human nature is to worship God, right? We are meant to do that. And now we're not going to be genuflecting these kind of things at the grocery store or something, but learning how to do this at mass teaches us who we are and how we are supposed to carry out our life as humans.

SPEAKER_03 12:31

And then comes the consecration, which is well, I guess the Eucharistic prayer and the consecration, which I guess is is what the mass is all about, right? I mean, that is the the point, the high point of the mass.

SPEAKER_02 12:45

Yeah, the the purpose of the mass we could say is twofold, to give glory to God and salvation to souls in that order. We can't reverse that or we risk losing both. But when we come to mass, we've talked about this before. I'm not there to worship God. I'm there to enter into Christ's worship of the Father. And at that moment, when we follow his command to do this in memory of me, he is worshiping the Father and leading the entire church in that same worship of God. And so that is the perfect glorification that the Father can receive from his son. And we are allowed to participate in that. It's a very humbling reality. But at that moment, when the priest is lifting up what has become the body and blood of Christ, it's almost as if Christ himself is showing his wounds to the Father, saying, This was for your glory and their salvation. And there's this intermediation happening between God and his people, right? With Christ there in the priest acting in the person of Christ. So that moment is everything that God wants and deserves for himself extended to us as well. So, and you can see that in the fact of first Christ Himself, who is human and divine, uniting those both in himself. But then in the elements of bread and wine, Fulton Sheen talks about this that there are no better elements that our Lord could have picked. Because to make bread or wine, you need lots of grain and lots of grapes that represent us coming from all our walks of life, all these different situations that have to go through fire and a wine press. They have to go through a passion, a suffering, a death, so they can be made something better. And so though the elements of bread and wine represent what not only happened to Christ in his suffering, but how we are associated with him in our daily sufferings and our taking up of the cross and our Lent and penances and how that glorifies us by being associated to Christ as we come to the Father through him.

SPEAKER_03 14:35

I can't remember, I mean, I think probably lots of people have said this. Maybe it's uh Cheston, though, that had a whole section on the appropriateness of bread and wine also to our conversion in Christianity from a natural pagan people into a divine people of God, because bread and wine were the two things that were the most uh essential to ancient civilization, right? I mean, bread was the staple of every civilization and and wine, you know, people say, Well, why not water? Well, actually, water wasn't always the safest thing to drink, but wine was was, and it was fermented and it was safe to drink. And it was also there's something royal about it that you're you're at a you're at a feast. You're not you're not just you know everyday everyday nourishment kind of thing.

SPEAKER_02 15:26

Yeah, there yeah, there's something festive, there's something royal. Uh the wedding feast of the lamb. That's what's happening at mass. That it's the sacrifice of Calvary, the wedding feast of the lamb, all wrapped up into one mystical reality. And so we're able to rejoice in the presence of what looks like wine, but is actually the blood of Christ, right? So, for example, when he's at the wedding feast at Cana, it's not just that he's wanting the party to go on. He's showing by multiplying or by by changing water into wine, he's showing how abundant God wants this feast to be. It's uh six jars, fifty forty gallons each, right? That's a lot of wine. And that's the overabundance of what God wants to bestow upon us, which happens at every mass.

SPEAKER_03 16:07

Yeah, my wife says I'm I'm I celebrate the wedding feast of Canaan uh too much. Um what about uh, and I just think as you're talking about too, of all the references to bread and wine in the Old Testament, that was you know, whether it's man in the desert, um, the the woman who uh was starving, that's always a really powerful reading for me. When the woman is starving, her children are about to die, and I can't remember which prophet it was that gave her Elijah, that gave her the jar that would produce bread bread for her and her family uh in abundance. And it's so much as you read the Bible, you know, whether you're going through a Bible in the year podcast or just listening in Mass, there's so many references to bread and wine in there.

SPEAKER_02 16:49

Yeah, and it starts off pretty early, right? Um, with Melchizedek. He offers bread and wine as an acceptable sacrifice to God, which later on would seem weird because the big sacrifices are all bloody sacrifices of animals. But he's offering an anticipation of an acceptable sacrifice to God in an unblocked. And that leads, of course, to what we do at Mass. This is an unbloody representation of the bloody sacrifice of Christ and in what looks like bread and wine. But then over and over, yes, you mentioned the manna, which is also uh a time when God gives quail, so he gives flesh and bread to the people. And then it it it just abounds the ways he uses bread, even some of the Psalms, right? That this is our strength, this is uh the the way that he gives us joviality, the way that he continues to sustain us. It's there. And for those who have eyes to see, as we we Christians do, we can see he was preparing for what was going to happen in the Eucharist.

SPEAKER_03 17:44

And this is gonna be a test of whether I was actually paying attention in your homily this morning. But you actually mentioned, I think, about how um I think it was the readings today where they left their their sacrifices, like the quail and the beast, they left the sacrifices of the beast behind. Um, that we as the Christian people, we no longer do that. We no longer sacrifice the beasts because we have the ultimate sacrifice, the ultimate pure sacrifice. And that's actually it's it's kind of amazing how how poetic God is. So it starts with the Melchizedek who offers bread and wine, and he says, Oh, this is fitting. Then we go through all these bloody sacrifices for what, thousands of years until we get to Christ. And Christ is in some ways the ultimate bloody sacrifice, but the way we participate in that sacrifice is back to the beginning with bread and wine, not truly bread and wine, truly, truly Christ.

SPEAKER_02 18:34

Yeah. And it's it's amazing to see the prophets in the Old Testament constantly saying these sacrifices are doing you no good because they're not transforming you from within. It was a hemorrhage of blood in the temple all the time. And the people kept falling away from God because it wasn't an interior transformation, right? Which is why the offertory is so important. Because if we are not participating well in that moment, it's harder to participate well in the Eucharist itself. And if we allow the Eucharist not to transform us, the fault is ours, and it's a grave fault, right? Because the Lord is perfect and he's going to give us everything we need. But if we're not disposed, if we're not doing what we can to be disposed, even asking, give me the grace of disposition, then the fault is ours. So using that moment is very important to recognize he wants to transform me and I need to give him everything. Otherwise, the Eucharist has no effect on us.

SPEAKER_03 19:31

So I mean, and then we start this off with the Eucharistic prayer. And there's four, is there four forms of Eucharistic prayer? Is that right? Well, there are a lot in the book. I only use one. Yeah. Which one is that? The first one. Yeah. And why is that? Because I I think I I'll confess to being, I mean, I don't know if we're under the seal of confession right now, but I'll uh I'll I'll say that there are times when maybe the kids are being a little cranky or they're hungry, and we get to the Eucharistic prayer. And I've been to a lot of mass. You could you could always tell because you know, if it's the third Eucharistic prayer from the rising of the sun, the setting, you know, you're getting the consecration really quickly. But if you start with the first Eucharistic prayer, you're like, yeah, we got a little bit, got a little bit of build-up. But why do you say that you only use the first one and that's your favorite or the best?

SPEAKER_02 20:15

So it's the most ancient for Rome. It's the one that we've always used. Uh there's a lot of beautiful theology in there, which it's it's not to say the other ones don't have that. But to my understanding, a lot of them were written by committee and not by saints. So I don't really enjoy that. But the the Roman canon just has since I pray it every day, I'm constantly seeing new things in there. I'm used to it. Um, it's a rhythmic prayer for me at this point, and I really find it uh a nourishing prayer for me as I'm praying it. Um and it's the first one, so I'll go with the first and the best.

Memorial That Makes Calvary Present

SPEAKER_03 20:45

Well, that's great. And so now we get to like the most serious moment um of our faith, which is the consecration itself. Um, and you alluded to this earlier, but when we're in mass, we're not just remembering the consecration, or we're not just remembering Calvary, or we're not just um uh you know having a new Calvary. We are actually at the foot of the cross at Calvary across space and time. We can't see it, but in that moment, we are at Calvary.

Transubstantiation And The Logic Of Faith

SPEAKER_02 21:17

Yes, that's that's what we call a memorial, right? In Exodus, I believe, 12 and 14, God is telling his people, you will keep this as a memorial sacrifice, which is not simply remembering nostalgically something of the past, it's making it present now by entering into God's own memory of it. And he's eternal. There's no yesterday or tomorrow for him, it's all today. And so at Mass, Christ is making what he did present to us. He's transporting us mystically to the foot of the cross, to the empty tomb, to the mount of the ascension, to give us the grace now that the apostles would have experienced visually, if you will, at that time. So we're not missing out at all on what the apostles were able to see because Christ is making it present now. He's giving Us in his own memory the eternal present, the eternal now of God, and giving us the sacrifice that he gave for us then.

SPEAKER_03 22:08

And now we get to the weirdest part and the most amazing part of our faith is that that bread and wine become the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Christ. So you're not just eating the physical body and blood of Christ, which would be weird enough. You're also consuming his uh soul and divinity. I mean, how do how does that work? And why do we why are Catholics so weird?

SPEAKER_02 22:38

Because we follow God. It's gonna make us weird.

SPEAKER_03 22:40

God's got a unique sense of humor.

SPEAKER_02 22:43

He wants so desperately to be with us that he will do anything he can to commune with us. And he knows you can even look in in secular ways, in secular uh spheres. When people want to spend time with each other, when they want to get to know each other, when friendships are deepening, it's usually over a meal, right? That's been the way of humanity from the beginning. First meal in the garden didn't go so well, but we always want to share a meal with people. And God wants to do the same with us. He he started the Eucharist, he instituted this sacrament at a Last Supper, right? In a time of communal uh sharing with his friends. That's not all it was, but it that was the basis of it, right? And that was the memorial of Exodus, and he changed it to something new and beautiful. But I think when we see this at Mass, it's because he wants to be so close with us, so one with us that we consume him. We take him into ourselves and we're transformed into him. The St. Augustine talks about that. That with regular food, we eat it, transform it into ourselves. With the Eucharist, we eat this and we are transformed into him. That's what this communion is about, me being made one with God, because that's how desperately he wants to be with us and how deeply he loves us.

SPEAKER_03 23:55

I mean, it really is amazing. And I think of I think of Chesterton again, where, you know, when he was trying to figure out his faith, and he was not he was not Christian at all, really. And he started going through this and he kept hearing, you know, everybody on the left and the right and uh bashing the Catholic Church for different reasons. You know, he said at one point the Catholic Church is uh, you know, too old, and another part it's too young and naive, and another part it's uh it's it's too prudish when it comes to matters of of sex, and and another time it's too uh too liberal when it comes to those matters. And he started thinking, what a weird thing this church must be, that everybody has these complaints again. It must be like the most horrible thing that's ever existed. And then he starts looking into it and he's like, oh, this isn't a horrible thing. This is actually one of the most beautiful things, or is the most beautiful thing that's existed in our in our world. And then he starts finding that they were right about a lot of stuff. So those hard teachings like the Eucharist that were really difficult for him at first, it was through his recognition of the the beauty of the dichotomies in the church that really led him to be like, Yeah, I can't see this, I can't sense this. Where does Thomas Aquinas say like uh in his one of his famous prayers about the Eucharist? Like, I like Oh, only faith suffices. Only faith suffices. Like my my ears and my senses are not sufficient, only faith suffices. But once you get to that point and you've accepted it, I mean, the beauty, the depth of that beauty that you're just describing, there's no limit to it.

SPEAKER_02 25:27

And and we can only understand it from within, right? Uh as you said, we seem weird to everyone because we are. But when we're inside the church, inside the faith, that weirdness becomes beauty, if you will. Uh Pope Benedict talked about this as Cardinal Ratzinger. I think he was giving a talk at a cathedral in Germany. And he said that our faith is very much like stained glass. When you're outside the church, you can't make out what it looks like. It looks dark and gr gross and grimy. But when you walk into the church and see the beautiful colors and shades and hues and the things that these windows are communicating, you can be struck silent by the beauty of what's before you, the splendor of the light coming through and all that radiant beauty. That's the truth of the faith as well. And especially of something like the Eucharist. It makes no sense outside the church to people from the early church, right? People thought, are these people cannibals? Are they doing weird mystical things? Um, are they just worshiping bread? Are they just strange? Uh, and we still get those kind of things today in various forms. But when you're in the church and you recognize not only it is what what it is that we're doing, but what God has been preparing for us from all eternity, it makes all of that weirdness go away and we're just there before the majesty of God.

SPEAKER_03 26:41

When I think of uh, you know, I think back in the pagan era, in the pagan world, thousands of years ago when when uh you know Christianity first came about, it was weird enough because they had their they had their golden calves and their idols and their uh you know their statues of Zeus and and of uh Apollo and all these other uh all of their gods, and here are these weird Christians and they're they're worshiping a piece of bread. At best, or like you said, at worst, they're actually performing some kind of cannibalistic ritual, which I guess is why in in like John chapter six, um, which is always, I mean, as a Catholic, it has to be every Catholic's favorite chapter in some ways, which is why so many of Jesus' followers left him, right? He says, Unless you eat my body and drink my blood, you cannot have life within you. And he said, and I think you've mentioned before, he repeats it multiple times.

SPEAKER_02 27:36

Yeah, he doubles down and lets people walk away, not because they misunderstood him, but because they understood him well.

SPEAKER_04 27:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 27:43

And then he even tells his disciples, Are you gonna go too? I'm not changing this. I'm not adjusting this for your convenience or because this is a hard saying, which applies to many things he says, but especially there, he lets people go because they couldn't accept the Eucharist.

SPEAKER_03 27:57

And it's it's just and and he asks and he turns to his uh apostles and he says, Well, you know, will you lead me too? And and I think this is what one of Peter's heroic moments like, Lord, you have the words of eternal life. Where else are we to go? Yeah. It's not even necessarily like I want to stay here, but I don't got anywhere else to go. It's best to be here. Yeah. No, but I think that goes to your point of once you're in the church, right? Once you're in communion with God and he asks you to enter into an even deeper communion, which is why we call it communion, um, it does just make sense, right? And and it's kind of in some ways, you know, as a married man, I think of it as my relationship with my spouse too. We talk about us being one body. Um, and and in some ways, in our human ways, that's in the way the most intimate two human beings could be. And we we do it many times, feel like one body and one soul. And this is just it shouldn't be that surprising that our God, who is not human, can enter into an even more deep communion with us than even natural the natural communion of marriage.

SPEAKER_02 29:04

Yeah, it's a spiritual communion that transcends all of those things. And the marital union is is a um a type, if you will, of the Eucharist, of this union that God wants with his people, that Christ wants with his church. St. Paul talks about that in Ephesians 5, and it's it's in other places and like in the book of Revelation. Christ calls his bride to himself, and that involves all of us. He associates the members of his body to the head. That's all of us, the baptized members of the body. So that's a call, of course, for unity. We don't want division in the body of Christ, but it's also a call to humility to recognize we are called to great things, but he provides the grace for us to be able to enter into that well.

Sent On Mission Fueled By Eucharist

SPEAKER_03 29:44

Well, that's amazing, Father. And I think we'll go into a lot of that uh in our next episode when we talk about communion and and the practices of communion. Uh before we go today, though, I wanted to hit another topic um like we've been doing in the past episodes. So the Cristeros, we're rooted in prayer. We have daily prayer routines that we do every day. And we talked about your identity has to be rooted in Christ as your brother, God as your father, Mary as your mother. Um, and then we talk about relationship with our family and our parish and and our brothers in the church. Um but God is not just calling us to be internal or or be even in relationship with our family, our parish. He's actually calling us, all of us, to go in out into the world as missionary disciples on mission. And uh in the fourth week of the month, we follow a monthly cadence. The last week of the month or the fourth week of the month, we ask and we challenge our members to go out in the world and take their identity, take their relationships and become missionary disciples. Can you talk a little bit about that and maybe how um the Eucharist uh is sort of the fuel that we need to be those missionary disciples?

SPEAKER_02 30:56

At the end of his earthly ministry, Christ went up the mountain, took his disciples with him and said, Go and teach all nations, uh, baptizing them in the name of the Trinity. At the end of Mass, we take up something similar. It's jumping ahead in the book, but it's go forth, the Mass is ended. That's important for two reasons. The word mass comes from the word mission in Latin. You're being sent on a mission. And when we say go forth, that's not a kind, gentle, all right, be on your way. It's get out of here, scram, you have a job to do. The Lord is commissioning you to go spread his word, right? We can't keep this good news to ourselves. We can't uh treat it like it's just for us. Everybody needs Christ. And we see that with the apostles when they are filled with the power of the Holy Spirit. They go and 3,000 people are converted in one day. They are embracing the weirdness of our faith and it draws people in, right? If we shy away from those things, we'll never draw people to Christ. We have to embrace it totally. I say that as someone in a Catholic dress up the way that I am. But this is for every single one of us in our walk of life, in our state of life, in our vocation, in the places we find ourselves, we have to bring Christ to people. Um, I heard in a song just the other day, uh, the phrase was um, how can I stay to myself when I have the cure for disease? We know the good news. The world does not. Sometimes it refuses to. So many people are lost, but we know the remedy to their sinfulness, to the fallenness of this world. And that is Christ Jesus. They all need to know it. And so we have to spread spread that message. We have to bring Christ to them because there may be no other way for them to know the faith, to come into contact with Him, to come to church, to receive the sacraments, the beauty of our weird faith. Yeah. We are his instruments to bring salvation to the world.

SPEAKER_03 32:45

And I think uh, you know, last time we talked a little bit about St. Francis and his brothers, the start of the Franciscans, and how they really, at a dire time for the church, uh troubling time for the church, they they transformed the church, they saved the church in so many ways. And uh again, I was listening to my my daughter was listening to the story of St. Francis for the tenth time this week. And uh she there was a part where, you know, they weren't priests at this point. At this point, they're just kind of crazy men living on the streets, or right, living outside of Assisi wearing sackcloths and with nothing but sandals and begging for food. But they'd go to this priest and Assisi um, you know, for spiritual counseling and advice. And one time they went to him and they asked him to, you know, go through the scriptures with them and help them kind of refine their mission, right? They were this was before there was a thing called Franciscans, and they were, what is a Franciscan? What is our rule of life? What is our mission? And um there were three uh passages of scripture that that really struck them. Um and you know, one was I think around casting off the clothing of this world, which Francis did in grand fashion, threw off the clothing of his father and ran naked into the woods. Um and then the other was, you know, uh carry nothing, go out and be missionary disciples, carry nothing but your walking staff and your sandals and go out into the world, with the implication being you need nothing else, right? God has given you everything that you need, God will provide. And um, I think of the Eucharist that that is, I mean, in a way, God say, I'm giving you everything that you need right here. I'm giving you me and I am sufficient for everything.

SPEAKER_02 34:26

Yeah, and that that goes to the other parts of identity and relationship, right? Because we can't just go on mission not having any idea who we are or what we're supposed to do or how to find the support that we need. Because then we're just gonna hurt a lot of people, ourselves included. But if we go knowing full well that we are children of the Father, sons and daughters of God, that we are part of the body of Christ, members of his body, and that we go with the full support of heaven and the church on earth and the saints in heaven and on earth, that we have the beauties of the church who teaches us well what we are supposed to do, who we are, how God acts in the world, how he wants us to be one with him. We have all of these wonderful things that the world does not have and needs. So we have to have that. We have to be formed, we have to be praying, right? And we have to have things like this where we're working with others in our area to go into this together, right? Jesus himself sent them out two by two. He never sent them out on their own. So we have to be willing to take advantage of that support system, if you will, that God worked into the church so that we can bring the message in a in a worthy way.

SPEAKER_03 35:30

And then the last passage that struck them was take up my cross and follow me, or take up your cross and follow me, which means it's not gonna be easy. No. Um and in fact, I think my wife was reading Jacques one of Jacques Philippe's books, Father Jacques Philippe's books recently, and she said that a passage he said that brought her some consolation was um that all the suffering that God allows you to undertake is are is necessary. Right? Whether it's for your salvation or the salvation of others, that suffering is necessary. God does not allow unnecessary things. Um it's necessary for him to accomplish the good that he intends, which is a a tough thing. Um like we talked about with Teresa Vava, like no wonder you have so few friends, God.

SPEAKER_02 36:22

Yeah. And unless we're bringing the evil upon ourselves through sin, right? The go the Lord allows things in our life for his glory and our good. And even from our sin, he can draw great good. It if that weren't the case, then we wouldn't have crucifixes in our churches. That's the fruit of our sin, the death of God, the Son of God. But he was able to bring great life to all of us through that. And so that's not saying go and sin now. Yeah. But the Lord can even bring good out of that and change hearts in amazing ways. St. Paul and St. Augustine are testaments to that. They had wicked lives, and yet the Lord made them some of the greatest saints in the history of the church. So even from our sinfulness, he can raise new life if we at least try to move towards him.

SPEAKER_03 37:06

Yeah, I mean, St. Paul was literally, I mean, St. Paul was there at the execution of the first martyr, right? He he was there when they stoned Stephen. Yeah, it says he was consenting to it. Consenting to it, yeah. So this man that the the caused the first martyrdom, or was at least consenting to the first martyrdom, later becomes probably the two great the two apostles that we remember the most.

SPEAKER_02 37:30

Yeah. And it says even later, he was breathing murderous threats against Christians. We don't know if he actually murdered someone, but in his heart, he did. Yeah. And he was drawn from that to write most of the New Testament, and we rely on him for so much of our theology, for so much of our understanding about God, and the Lord can do the same with us.

Closing Prayer And How To Join

SPEAKER_03 37:47

That's amazing, Father. Um, I think on that note, we've given us a lot to think about this week. Would you mind uh closing us out with a prayer? Sure. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

SPEAKER_02 38:00

Lord God, you are bountiful and abundant in all that you give to us. Help us to receive this in thanksgiving and make a worthy offering of our lives back to you through Christ our Lord. Amen. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

SPEAKER_03 38:17

Thank you, Father, and thank you, everybody, for watching. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 38:29

Thank you for watching this episode of Christerocast. For more information on the Christeros or to join the movement, check out our website at theCristeros.org. That's theChristeros with an S.org. There you could find our daily reflection series as well as many of our publications and articles. Thank you for watching, and viva Christore.