n Sunday, October 2, Pope Benedict XVI opened the 11th ordinary assembly of the Synod of Bishops on the Eucharist:
“If we remain in Christ we too will bear fruit – he said – we will produce not the vinegar of self-sufficiency, malcontent with God and his creation, but the good wine of joy in God and love for neighbor… The Eucharist is the propelling center of all the Churches evangelizing activity, somewhat like the heart in the human body. Christian communities only because they are “Eucharistic” can they offer humankind Christ… The Eucharist shaped illustrious missionary apostles, in every state of life: bishops, priests, religious, lay people,; saints of active and contemplative life. We think on the one hand of St. Francis Xavier fired by love for Christ to go to the far East to announce the Gospel; on the other, St. Therese of Lisieux, a young Carmelite nun, whose feast we celebrated yesterday. In the cloister she lived her ardent apostolic spirit deserving to be proclaimed with St. Francis Xavier patron of the Church’s missionary activity.”
Already in 1997, Pope Benedict XVI, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, speaking on ‘the Eucharist as the source of Mission,’ made reference to St. Therese of Lisieux who can help us to understand how she came to be declared Patroness of the Missions, along side with St. Francis Xavier, the greatest missionary of modern times.
He said: “Therese never went to a mission country, could never engage in direct missionary activity. But she understood that the Church has a heart, and that this heart is love.
We think on the one hand of St. Francis Xavier fired by love for Christ to go to the far East to announce the Gospel; on the other, St. Therese of Lisieux, a young Carmelite nun. In the cloister she lived her ardent apostolic spirit deserving to be proclaimed with St. Francis Xavier patron of the Church’s missionary activity.”
Therese understood that the apostles do not anymore announce the Good News, martyrs cannot anymore she their blood, if this heart does not burn. She understood that love is all, and that it goes beyond time and space. And she understood that she, too, little nun behind the grates of Carmel in a little French town, could be present anywhere, because, inasmuch as she lived of love, she was with Christ at the center of the Church.
Shouldn’t we, perhaps, look for the origin of the difficulties of the Mission in the last thirty years or so in the fact that we have been thinking only of exterior problems, but have forgotten that all this activity must be constantly nourished from a deeper center?
This center, which Therese calls simply ‘heart’ and ‘love’, is the Eucharist.
In fact, the Eucharist is not only the permanent presence of the divine human love of Jesus Christ, who is always the origin of the Church, without whom it runs the risk of sinking, of being crushed by the gates of death. The Church, as presence of the divine human love Christ, is also and always the passage from the man Jesus to people, who become his very “members,” they themselves Eucharist and so they themselves “heart” and “love” for the Church.”
(From Xaverian Mission Newsletter)