Ave, verum corpus natum de Maria Virgine! Several
years ago I celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of my priesthood. Today I have
the grace of offering the Church this Encyclical on the Eucharist on the Holy
Thursday which falls during the twenty-fifth year of my Petrine ministry.
As I do so, my heart is filled with gratitude. For over a half century, every
day, beginning on 2 November 1946, when I celebrated my first Mass in the
Crypt of Saint Leonard in Wawel Cathedral in Krakow, my eyes have gazed in
recollection upon the host and the chalice, where time and space in some way 'merge' and the drama of Golgotha is re-presented in a living way, thus
revealing its mysterious 'contemporaneity'. Each day my faith has been
able to recognize in the consecrated bread and wine the divine Wayfarer who
joined the two disciples on the road to Emmaus and opened their eyes to the
light and their hearts to new hope (cf. Lk 24:13-35).
"Allow me, dear brothers and sisters, to share with deep
emotion, as a means of accompanying and strengthening your faith, my own
testimony of faith in the Most Holy Eucharist. Ave verum corpus natum de
Maria Virgine, vere passum, immolatum, in cruce pro homine! Here is the
Church's treasure, the heart of the world, the pledge of the fulfilment for
which each man and woman, even unconsciously, yearns. A great and transcendent
mystery, indeed, and one that taxes our mind's ability to pass beyond
appearances. Here our senses fail us: visus, tactus, gustus in te fallitur,
in the words of the hymn Adoro Te Devote; yet faith alone, rooted in
the word of Christ handed down to us by the Apostles, is sufficient for us.
Allow me, like Peter at the end of the Eucharistic discourse in John's Gospel,
to say once more to Christ, in the name of the whole Church and in the name of
each of you: 'Lord to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal
life' (Jn 6:68)."
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