The Sacrament of the Eucharist

The Nicene Apostolic Church (Autocephalous Catholic Church of Antioch) acknowledges in and through its works and worship, and fosters with seemly reverence and due solemnity, the deep and abiding wonder of Christianity.

Its teaching in regard to the Sacrament of the Eucharist may be summarised as follows:

By sacrifice man offers himself and his life to God, his sovereign Lord and Creator; by the Sacraments God gives Himself, He gives us a participation of his own divine life, to man. In sacrifice a stream of homage flows from man to the eternal source of all being; by the sacraments grace, sanctification, descends in copious flood upon the souls of men. This twofold stream from God to man and from man to God, flows swift and strong in the Eucharist, Sacrament and Sacrifice. As the culminating act in the life of Jesus Christ on earth was the sacrifice He offered on Calvary to His eternal Father, so the central act of Catholic worship in the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, is the Eucharistic Sacrifice, the Mass which He instituted to be a perpetual commemoration and renewal of it. Likewise, just as it was through the sacred humanity of Christ that God mercifully deigned to transmit to us the divine life of grace, so the Sacrament of the Eucharist, which truly contains that living and life-giving humanity, holds the principal place among the Sacraments instituted by Christ for our sanctification. 

Truly, really and substantially present upon the altar under the appearance of bread and wine, Christ our High Priest offers Himself, the infinite Victim, to His Father through the ministry of His Priests. This is indeed a sacrifice unto the odour of sweetness, in which Christ, God and man, offers to his Father an infinite adoration, a prayer of unbounded efficacy, propitiation and satisfaction superabundantly sufficient for the sins of all mankind, thanksgiving in a unique manner proportionate to God’s unstinted generosity to men. And then, as if it were in munificent answer to this infinitely pleasing gift which through Christ man has made to God, there comes God’s best gift to man: the all holy Victim, divinely accepted and ratified, is set before men to be their heavenly food. Through Christ we have given ourselves to God. Through Christ God gives His own life to us, that we may be made partakers of His divinity. The Victim of the Eucharistic Sacrifice, offered to man under the form of food, is the august Sacrament of the Eucharist.

The Teaching of the Catholic Church, G. Smith (London, 1956).