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Eucharist (Koinē Greek: εὐχαριστία, romanized: eucharistía, lit. 'thanksgiving') [1] is the name that Catholic Christians give to the sacrament by which, according to their belief, the body and blood of Christ are present in the bread and wine consecrated during the Catholic eucharistic liturgy, generally known as the Mass. [2]
Some Christian denominations [1] [2] [3] place the origin of the Eucharist in the Last Supper of Jesus with his disciples, at which he is believed [4] to have taken bread and given it to his disciples, telling them to eat of it, because it was his body, and to have taken a cup and given it to his disciples, telling them to drink of it because it was the cup of the covenant in his blood.
In the Catholic Church the Eucharist is considered as a sacrament, according to the church the Eucharist is "the source and summit of the Christian life". [83] "The other sacraments, and indeed all ecclesiastical ministries and works of the apostolate, are bound up with the Eucharist and are oriented toward it.
With the exception of Churches of the Armenian Rite, the Maronite Church, and the Syro-Malabar Church, Eastern Orthodox Church and Eastern Catholic Churches use leavened bread for the Eucharist. Thus, the sacramental bread is the Resurrected Christ.
The Eucharist, the Church's sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, is the way by which the sacrifice of Christ is made present, and in which he unites us to his one offering of himself. The Holy Eucharist is called the Lord's Supper, and Holy Communion; it is also known as the Divine Liturgy, the Mass, and the Great Offering.
The Catholic Church sees the Mass or Eucharist as "the source and summit of the Christian life", to which the other sacraments are oriented. [15] Remembered in the Mass are Jesus ' life , Last Supper , and sacrificial death on the cross at Calvary .
The Council of Trent, held 1545–1563 in reaction to the Protestant Reformation and initiating the Catholic Counter-Reformation, promulgated the view of the presence of Christ in the Eucharist as true, real, and substantial, and declared that, "by the consecration of the bread and of the wine, a conversion is made of the whole substance of the bread into the substance (substantia) of the body ...
This is the practice at least of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church [6] and the Greek Byzantine Catholic Church. [ 7 ] Some Eastern Catholic Churches (for instance, the Ethiopic Rite Catholics of Ethiopia and Eritrea) have adopted the use of unleavened bread, justifying it by reference to the ancient Jewish practice of using only unleavened ...