THE WORLD'S GREATEST SECRET
John Mathias Haffert
table of contents
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE SECRET TODAY
This book could just as well
have been called "The World's Greatest Mystery." But we have
preferred to refer to the Eucharist as the World's Greatest Secret because
that is what It was when Christ first presented It to the world by the Sea of
Galilee; this is what it remained during the early centuries of the Church;
this is what It is to most persons outside of Christian Communion in the world
today. As was to be expected, Ecumenical Council Vatican 11 was enormously
preoccupied with this Mystery, this Secret of Christian life. Perhaps few
effects of the Council have been more palpable. The changes in the Eucharistic
arrangements have been so great that if a person had been spirited out of this
world before the Council and suddenly returned now, he might not know that he
was in a Catholic church when he looked at the sanctuary. He might even have
more doubts as the Mass progressed with the priest facing the congregation,
prayers in the vernacular, lectern on the side of the altar, and even a
different prayer used at the distribution of Communion. The most notable
change in the church itself would often be the location of the tabernacle,
which up until the time of the Ecumenical Council was the most prominent
feature in every Catholic church. Indeed it would seem that the altar was
designed largely to support the tabernacle, and the ornamentation behind and
around the altar used as a decoration or background to the tabernacle.
2 Now sometimes it might be
difficult to know where the tabernacle is located. The altar is moved forward,
standing like a table in the center of the sanctuary. it is possible that the
small elevation on top of the table would hide a tabernacle beneath it. Or
might it be that a simple structure, perhaps covered by a veil, off to one
side, with little ornamentation around it, might be dis. Centered as the
repository of Christ physically present in our midst because of a lamp burning
closer to this spot than to some other? Yes, in some churches it is like this,
In other churches the tabernacle remains central with an ornate reredos to
declare the splendor of its Royal Inhabitant, and another altar used for the
Sacrifice of the Mass will have been erected some distance it front of it. The
reason for these variations, of course, will be the individual zeal and sense
of artistry with which each pastor will have applied the rulings of the Ecumenical
Council concerning the Eucharist and the Eucharistic'( Liturgy. But the reason
behind all of these changes n simple. The essence of the Eucharist, as the
Council emphasized is sacrifice. As a wonderful consequence of this sacrifice
the Presence of Christ is in our midst. As was said earlier in these pages,
the Eucharistic( Liturgy makes Calvary present. The moment of consecration
gives the participant an enamored moment of intricacy with the Divine. The
Psalmist said, "What shall I give to the Lord for all that be has given
me?" While the Psalmist could not answer this question in the days of the
Old Testament, modern man can answer "I could give Him back His own Son,
nailed to a cross in reparation for my sins and for the sins of the
world."
3 And this is the heart of the
world's greatest Secret. in the prayers said during and just after the
consecration, we find the full meaning of the Eucharistic Liturgy-. The day
before he suffered he took bread in his sacred hands and looking up to heaven,
to you, his almighty Father, he gave you thanks and praise. He broke the
bread, gave it to his disciples, and said: Take this, all of you, and eat it:
this is my body which will be given up for you. When supper was ended, he took
the cup. Again he gave you thanks and praise, gave the cup to his disciples,
and said: Take this, all of you, and drink from it. this is the cup of my
blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant. It will be shed for you
and for all so that sins may be forgiven. Do this in memory of me. Father, we
celebrate the memory of Christ your Son. We, your people and your ministers,
recall his Passion, his resurrection from the dead, and his ascension into
glory; and from the many gifts you have given us we offer to you, God of glory
and majesty, this holy and perfect sacrifice: the bread of life and the cup of
eternal salvation. Look with favor on these offerings and accept them as Once
You accepted the gifts of your servant Abel, the sacrifice of Abraham, our
father in faith, and the bread and wine offered by your priest Melchisedech. Almighty
God, we pray that your angel may take III, sacrifice to your altar in
heaven. Then, as we receive from Your Son, this altar the sacred body and
blood of your son, let us be filed with every grace and bless. (Through Christ
our Lord, Amen.)
4 There is no doubt that since
the Middle Ages the emphasis on Christ's Presence in Our midst in the
Eucharist has sometimes come to be regarded with even greater reverence than
the essential reason for His Presence namely the Act of Sacrifice, the renewal
Of Calvary. Many Christians were even receiving Communion Outside of the
Eucharistic Sacrifice. Before the Ecumenical Council some steps were taken to
curb this, in both the Anglican Communion and the Church of Rome. Extremes are
usually to be avoided, and it might see" to some that to have the
tabernacle made inconspicuous is an extreme. In some churches an excellent
solution has been found by giving a reverent location to the tabernacle in the
apse of the church or in a special chapel it might be interesting to note that
in the very special Chapel of the Visitation Convent in Paray-le-Monial the
tabernacle has been very ingeniously incorporated into the altar itself, but
not receded so completely as to appear of less importance than the altar. In
this way it is identified with the table of Sacrifice. We have chosen to
present a picture of this chapel of Paray-le-Monial as it was up until the
time of the Ecumenical Council and as it is now. Many Christians passed
through this period of change with various degrees of subjective emotion. But
the emotional adjustment is very quickly made with the realization of the
importance of constantly identifying Christ's Presence in the Eucharist wit
the Sacrifice which gives us His presence. There is only o return which Christ
wishes from us, and that is sorrow for our sins and prayer for the conversion
of sinners.
5 The great lament to the
world in the messages of Lourdes and Fatima were: "So many souls are lost
because there is no one to pray and make sacrifices for them." And of
what use is it for us to go and feel comfortable in the Presence of Christ in
the Eucharist and miss the opportunity given to us in each Sacrifice of the
Mass to bring to bear upon the world the enormous sacrificial force of
Calvary? It is thought that any Christian could make it possible for a
thousand souls to be saved, who otherwise would be damned, by worthily
participating in even one single Sacrifice of the Mass. It is a common belief
that if any one of us could identify with the Heart of Mary as she kneels at
the foot of the Cross and offers her Divine Son to the Father for the
conversion of sinners, we would in that moment become a power like that of
Therese of Lisieux, Francis of Assisi, Anthony of Padua. For many of us the
world's greatest Secret will remain a secret. For some, the Secret will yield
Its meaning bit by bit, or perhaps even in one great flash of light.
Nevertheless, this Secret, this Mystery, will increasingly become the focal
point of man on this planet. It may have grown in importance more in the last
500 years, during which Christians for the first time began to question It,
than It did in the first 1,500 years when there was hardly any doubt. Today no
major city in Christian nations of the world is without a church where the
Eucharist is reserved. 0ften it is the richest, most important structure in
the entire city. But there are two major places in the Holy Land that are not
commemorated by churches: the place where the Eucharist was instituted and the
place of the Ascension. Why?
6 Why is there nothing but a
tiny room on the sp where Christ instituted the Eucharist? Why is there i
great church on the spot where He ascended into heaven forty days after His
resurrection? There may be various reasons, but we like to think it because
God did not want to commemorate a spot when Christ seemed to be leaving the
world. The very emptiness of these sacred spots on Mount Zion and on the Mount
of Olives recalls the truth the, suddenly became clear to the Apostles at
Pentecost: f, had not really left them at all. He had been with them i the
limited area of Palestine, but now He was to be with all men everywhere,
physically, really. When the early Christians received the Holy Spirit sent to
them by Christ as He had promised just before the Ascension, they suddenly and
wonderfully understood this. There in that same Cenacle room where He had
given them the Eucharist for the first time the Pentecostal light opened their
eyes to the Eucharistic Christ mot intimately present than He had ever been
before. The went forth to preach Him, to live for Him, to die for Him, to give
Him to us today not in the Cenacle but ii churches in every corner of the
world. Only one of the, twelve Apostles (excluding Judas) died in Jerusalem.
A] the others died establishing Christ's Church in different parts of the
world. Even the one who was beheaded in Jerusalem had just returned from
preaching the Eucharis tic Christ in the farthest western limit of the know'
world. But what about those of us who doubt? Can we not, with just a thought,
turn to the Mother of Christ, to ask her intercession that we, too, may realize
this more fully? Can we not feel the need to tell the Truth-giving Spirit,
Love Itself, that our minds are too small, our sins too great, our wills too
weak, our habits too gross, our way of thought too careless and shallow to
enable us to believe firmly without divine help?
7 Can we not feel the need
to pray for our own Pentecost, that His light may pierce the dark pall of our
doubts and fears? We may look upward toward that white disc which shines in
the monstrance as toward the chink through which, for just a moment, shines
the Light of the other world. For St. John writes: "Whatever came to be
i~, him, found life, life for the light of men. The light shines on in
darkness, a darkness that did not overcome it.... He was in the world, and
through him the world was made, yet the world did not know who he
was...." He is in the world now. That fact cannot be insisted upon too
often. But how many of us can really know Him? How many of us really
acknowledge Him? What about Christians, and even non-Christians, who have
never actually received Communion? Do they have no "life" in them?
It was the special vocation of Pope John XXIII to emphasize to the world -
even to apparent atheists - that God judges and visits men within the limits
and lights of each. To Pope John, most were brothers. Who would not receive
Communion if he knew and believed all that has been said of it in this book?
Only such a man has DO life in him. All others have it as an object of desire,
an unacknowledged center of their lives. The tragedy of Christian disunity is
never more evident than in the presence of this Sacrament of Unity How much of
that tragedy lies at the door of those who profess belief in It?
8 And how great a
responsibility lies upon those who possess It! Sometimes we argue: But if He
is here, why doesn't He do something to straighten out this mad, evil world?
Why doesn't He sweep away slave-labor camps? Why doesn't He end wars, perfidy,
conflicts and injustices of all kinds? The answer is clear: These evils result
from neglecting and rejecting Him. That was the Message of Fatima, confirmed
by a pre-announced public miracle witnessed in our own day by some 100,000
witnesses! He makes Himself peculiarly available and accessible in the
Eucharist, but He does not force us to accept Him. We must reach out to Him if
we are to increase the love among men which abolishes these evils and brings
peace. Cardinal Montini of Milan, who later became Pope Paul V1, said in a
public speech: "We shall love our neighbors and those far afield. We
shall love our country, we shall love other people. We shall love Catholics,
the schismatics, the Protestants, the Africans, the indifferent, the Moslems,
the pagans and the atheists. We shall love those who merit and those who do
not merit being loved " Where, oh, where can we find such love? A love
that embraces such a conglomeration of human creatures? After Cardinal Montini
became Pope he told the world 'A here he expected such love to be found. He
wrote an encyclical on the Eucharist which we have appended 10 these pages. In
an earlier chapter we mentioned the Eucharistic "'Son of the Patriarch of
Constantinople, first made Public in March 1967.
9 After describing his
vision of the Eucharist the Patriarch said: "I should like to visit the
pope In Rome as soon as possible. The Church and the world are surfeited with
gestures and nice words. We must go straight to the point. Jesus said to
Simon: Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch. And Simon
answered, Lord, we toiled all night and took nothing.' But at your words I
will let down our nets. And when they had done this, they enclosed a great
school of fish. Think of it, just think of it' With Saint Peter in the West
and Saint John in the East, one vast net could be thrown into the sea of the
world and encircle with love all those 900 million Christians." (See
Athenagoras, p. 267-68 .) Ultimately the secret of Christianity is Christ
Himself as a Living, Present Reality, a Divine Love meeting human love. It
will always remain a secret in the sense that it is the secret of the fidelity
of many Christians, the unrecognized source of their strength in the face of
hardship and trial, and the wellspring of their holiness. For others in our
modern world it is a secret in the sense that they do not know about it, or if
they know about it in some sort of cursory way, they ignore it or turn their
backs upon it. And so they live in darkness, tragically miserable, not
realizing that a remedy is at hand. Today three small nations which claim to
be Christian, but which are dominated exclusively by those who no longer
believe in the Eucharist, are the world's unhappiest people. They have the
highest suicide rate per capita of all nations on earth despite extremely high
standards of living.' Currently they are plunged into an agonized
God-searching reminiscent of the Mycenae, Age.
10 All Christians sooner or
later must come to the reification that they cannot turn from Christ, as at
Capernaum I shrug their shoulders and say: "This is hard to end we Who
can take it seriously?" (Jn. 6:60) Whether they be the leaders of 214
divisions of ~h Church meeting in Geneva, or 2,500 bishops meeting L Rome, the
voice they hear is from the same discourse the night before He died:
"This is my Body; this is m Blood.... Father, 1 pray that they may be one
as You an 1 are one." Pope John Paul 11, speaking at a seminary in the
arch] diocese of Milan on May 21, 1983, said: "It is because of the
Eucharist that the members of the Christian community are identified
mystically with th Body of Christ, which is the Church, and become on among
them. "Therefore all the sacraments, as well as all the ecclesiastical
ministries and works of the apostolate, are closely bound up with the Most
Holy Eucharist and ordained t, it. The Eucharist is truly the heart and the center
of the Christian world. In it is contained the Church's entire spiritual
wealth, Christ himself, the living bread, wit through his flesh, made vital
and vitalizing by the Holy Spirit, offers life to men.` The central reality of
Christianity always will be unity with the submission of Christ's human will
to His Father. And the Eucharistic Liturgy looms up to such vast importance
because it makes the peak of Christ' I submission (the sacrifice of Calvary)
actually present.
11 Perhaps a lifetime of
prayer and study would not suffice to plumb the depths of Christ's above
statement. it certainly is not the intention of this book to try. But it ~
enough for the average Christian to know that any pre son can most easily
enter into this sublime identification with the obedience of Christ by daily
participation in t Eucharistic Liturgy. All are obliged to participate once a
week. But how much spiritual growth is possible if we limit ourselves to this
minimum? And how much if we fail to prepare our selves and bring to bear a
maximum of attention? Some cannot participate in the Liturgy each day, but all
can meditate on the Liturgy of the Word and say the i prayers, climaxed by
spiritual communion, in union with the Eucharistic miracle taking place in
every other part of the world "...not a new body, for He has only one;
but an extension to His body, or better, a transposition of His body into a
new dimension." All that we have tried to say in this book may be
summarized in a few paragraphs based on Saint Mark: The world's greatest
Secret began on a mountain in Palestine with the miracle of the loaves and the
incredible words: "I am the bread of heaven... you must eat MY flesh...
" Pictures of this miracle became the most frequently used by early
Christians as modern archeologists have discovered. We used an entire chapter
to describe this event almost at the very beginning. Everyone went away when
Christ said that He would give His flesh to eat and His blood to drink, and
that they would not live if they did not eat Him. But the Apostles themselves,
though deeply shaken, did not leave. Immediately after this Christ sent the
Apostles across the Sea of Galilee.
12 A severe storm arose.
They were rowing against hea seas, fearfully straining to gain the shore, when
suddenly a ghostly figure moved over the waves. It seemed to pass them. Saint
Mark says: "... He meant to pass them by. When they saw him walking on
the lake, they thought it was a ghost and they began to cry out. They had all
seen him and were terrified. He hastened to reassure them: 'Get hold of your.
selves! It is I Do not be afraid!"' (6:48-50) Why did Christ put them to
such a test? Their cries seem to indicate sheer terror. Why did He who loved
them so much, pretend to go by in the storm? Saint Mark (6:51-52) explains:
"And they were utterly beside themselves with astonishment, for they had
not understood about the loaves, because their heart was blinded. " True,
they had not gone away like the others. But like many Christians today, they
had not remained because they truly believed they would one day eat His flesh
but rather because, as Peter said, "Lord, to whom shall we go?" (Jn.
6:68). After the terror-lesson of the storm, Christ calmed the wind. He
proceeded to perform so many miracles that people began to forget the hard
saying and again they wanted to proclaim Him King. Saint Mark says: "And
he got into the boat with them, and the wind fall .... And crossing over, they
came to the land... And wherever he went, into village or hamlet or town, they
laid the sick in the marketplaces, and entreated him to let them touch but the
tassel of his cloak; and as many as touched him were saved" Qn. 6:51, 53,
56). Finally He called Lazarus from his grave in the presence of a host of
witnesses, and they broke branches from the trees, laid cloaks in His path,
and called Him King even up to the very gates of the Temple.
13 But it was to fulfill the
hard saying that he had come. This was to be not only the secret of His Church
but His greatest gift to men: Bread which would enable them near to die. So He
chose a supper instead of a crown. He chose bread and wine to perform the
first of innumerable transubstantiations and then performed the miracle of
Lazarus in Himself as His final proof. What a mystery and lesson ring out
today in those incredible words of Saint Mark describing the frightened
disciples in the endangered ship: "They were utterly beside themselves...
because they had not understood about the loaves. " Millions of doubting,
divided disciples of Christ have huddled through the storms of two global
wars. Before the now-rising waves of the atomic armament race they seem to
know, collectively, that this is a fateful hour for them. They strain at the
oars with pleas for ecumenism.* Frightened cries rise from a building in New
York City where they have been striving to establish unity under law. only to
be thwarted again and again by waves of atheistic anarchism. The storm mounts.
So far the cries of fear do not have the shrill of sheer terror. And no one
claims to have seen a specter moving over the waves, unless it might be the
miracle of the sun at Fatima performed at a specified time and place "so
that all may believe.
14 But if we are looking for
one, profound explanation Of the modern storm, might we not find it in that
simple sentence of Saint Mark: "They had not yet understood the miracle
of the loaves because they hearts were blind"? Could it not be that too
many have followed Christ simply because they know He has words of eternal
life rather than because they recognize the world's greatest secret, because
they understand the miracle of the loaves? He could cure at a distance, but He
preferred to be touched and to touch - even with as intimate an element
spittle. He preferred to give Himself by touch - " ... and as many as
touched him were saved. And He has remained through the mystery of transubstantiated
bread to touch and be touched.. now. Thus the world's greatest secret becomes
the world greatest hope. At this very moment another heart which might have
passed by in the storm may be hearing H voice from a nearby tabernacle:
"Do not be afraid. It is L " - Mk. 8:23
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