The Everlasting Sacrifice

‘There could be only one thing perfectly worthy of being offered to perfect Love, and that would be something that embodied perfect love perfectly in our human nature, if human nature is to offer it. The divine Person of the Son of God in perfect love assumed a human nature. His love achieved this triumph, that He turned the climax of hate into the climax of love, making a masterpiece of spiritual beauty out of His murder by men. After his Ascension the Holy Spirit came, and one of His ceaseless energies is to make effective in the Eucharistic rite the very presence and reality of the perfect Sacrifice once offered on Mount Calvary, uniting the Eucharist celebrated this morning with that past of Calvary and with the everlasting present of the heavenly worship. Here are we, with the power to offer God the perfect Sacrifice; that which we offer is one in reality of love and identity of intention with the Sacrifice on Mount Calvary; and it is also one with the heavenly worship wherein the angels and archangels join with us as we join with them. So it is the perfect offering of perfect love to the all-perfect God Whom we worship, Who is Love, that we human beings are able to offer. What makes the Catholic Church altogether different from, and superior to, every other body is this: that we are able to offer and present unto God not only our selves, our souls and bodies, but the self, the soul, and the body of the perfect Man, tested to the uttermost, proved to the uttermost, triumphant in the uttermost - the perfect, everlasting Sacrifice’.

Father Andrew SDC, 1869-1946