BIG C CATHOLICS

Appearence Behind Locked Doors , Duccio di Buoninsegna, c. 1308. Fr. Charles Irvin Senior Priest Diocese of Lansing ( Click here for today’s readings ) At the Last Supper, shortly before He suffered and died on the Cross, Jesus gave us the stupendous gift of His Body and Blood, now really and truly present to us in the Eucharist. He gave us this gift at the very core of His redemptive sacrifice for us. Then, when He rose from the dead, His very first act was breathe out Holy Spirit upon His apostles and into His Church. “Peace be with you,” He said to them. “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” And when He had said this, He breathed on them and said to them: “Receive the Holy Spirit.” What does that mean for us? Our Church leads us now into what we might call “The time of the handing over of the Spirit.” To examine the significance of that time let’s return to God’s first breathing forth His Holy Spirit, that life-giving creative act of God that we find in the

The Last Supper , Juan de Juanes, 1562, Museo del Prado, Madrid. Holy Thursday Evening Mass of the Lord’s Supper, April 13, 2017 By Msgr. Bernard Bourgeois  Ezekiel 12:1-8, 11-14; Psalm 116:1 Corinthians 11:23-26; John 13:1-15  “I have given you a model to follow, so that  as I have done for you,  you should also do.” (John 13:15) As a child growing up at Sacred Heart Parish in Bennington, Vermont, I remember one particular Holy Thursday Mass in which Holy Cross Father Richard Sullivan, former president of Stonehill College and a longtime friend of Sacred Heart Parish, preached that Holy Thursday was the birthday of the Eucharist. There would be no birthday cake or candles; this birth would be celebrated by going back to the roots of Christianity, to the Lord’s Last Supper, to that night in which Jesus instituted the Eucharist and the priesthood. Indeed, Holy Thursday is sometimes lost among the more popular feasts of Good Friday and of course Easter itsel

Fr. Charles Irvin Senior Priest Diocese of Lansing ( Click here for today’s readings ) Blood is life-giving; it is the essential element in sustaining us in life. Babies the womb receive oxygen and nutrients from their mothers’ blood. When natural disasters occur the Red Cross appeals for blood donors. During surgeries it sustains patients in life. In many cultures the bonding of people is sealed in rituals that mingle blood. In all cultures blood has a deeply religious significance. When God brought the Hebrew people out of their slavery in Egypt, the blood of sacrificed lambs marked their homes and they were spared the punishment that fell upon their Egyptian captors. Later, on Mt. Sinai, when God bound Himself to His people, Moses offered animal sacrifices and then took half of the blood and put it in basins, and half of the blood he threw against the altar. Then he took the book of the covenant, and read it in the hearing of the people; and they said, “All that th

Fr. Thomas J. Lane S.T.D. Associate Professor of Sacred Scripture Mt. St. Mary's Seminary Emmitsburg, MD ( Click here for today’s readings ) Is Jesus in the Eucharist the center of your life? We divide time into BC and AD; BC before Christ and AD, Anno Domini - in the year of Our Lord - since the birth of Jesus. This is our way of showing that Jesus is the center of history, Jesus is the most important event in history. Everything in history pales into insignificance compared to Jesus. It is the same in our lives. Jesus is or should be the center of our lives. Jesus is or should be the center of our week. Because Jesus is the center of our lives we come here to celebrate the Eucharist every Sunday and afterwards we go in peace to love and serve the Lord whom we encountered here in the Eucharist. Just as we divide time into BC and AD, before Christ and after his birth, the Sacred Scriptures do the same and so we have the Old Testament and the New Testament. In the Old