The Eucharistie Offering 1

There can be few questions about which discussion has been more lively and more fruitful in the first half of this century than that of the Eucharistic Sacrifice. And this theological discussion needs to be seen, if it is to be fully understood, against a background of practice and devotion. For in every part of Christendom, as the meaning of the Eucharist has been re-examined, so the place of the act itself within the life of the Church has been renewed. Everywhere there has been a growing desire to put the Eucharist back into the centre of Christian worship in those traditions where it had come to be neglected, and a growing desire to re-integrate the different parts of the action in those traditions, in which the different aspects of it had been, so to speak, separated out. It is impossible to separate Eucharistic practice and experience from Eucharistic doctrine; and if, in the past, distortions of the act have led to unbalanced explanations of it, so in the present, the renewal of the wholeness of the action has gone hand in hand with a recovery of the fullness of its meaning. Undoubtedly the growing desire for the restoration of the visible unity of the Church which has been manifested during the last fifty years has been closely connected with the growing desire to restore the fullness of the sacrament of unity: the one bread and the one body. All this makes it a particular privilege and a particular joy to write on such a topic in such a quarterly. For I believe that through no merit of our own, we are at the present time witnessing a recovery of Christian truth, a coming together of separated traditions which has promise of great gifts yet in store. And on this question of the Eucharistic Sacrifice in particular, there are signs of a new understanding and a new agreement which may perhaps be called spectacular.