Augustine Birrell Quotes

The real 'action' in the liturgy in which we are all supposed to participate is the action of God himself. This is what is new and distinctive about the Christian liturgy: God himself acts and does what is essential.

The Eucharistic mystery stands at the heart and center of the liturgy since it is the fount of life by which we are cleansed and strengthened to live not for ourselves but for God and to be united in love among ourselves.

You have the women sitting on the left and the men sitting on the right. Everything is to keep your mind focused on God... To me the most beautiful thing anyone on earth can experience, other than maybe marriage and child-bearing, would be the Orthodox Liturgy.

The Mass is the most perfect form of prayer.

In the Eucharist, priest and people together come to concelebrate. Here the ladder Jacob saw only as a dream becomes for us a reality, the medicine that cures our souls.

I knew I had to write a Mass of my own, but a real one.

The Eucharist is essential for us: it is Christ who wishes to enter our lives and fill us with his grace.

For faithful Catholics, communion is not just a nice ritual: It is the body and blood of Jesus Christ, and the ultimate sign of our willingness to be incorporated into the church.

No more doth it hurt to say that the body and blood are not in the sacrament.

Christ made the bread the sacrament of his body only: wherefore as the bread is no similitude of his blood, so am I not bound or ought to affirm, that his blood is there present.

My church is in the detention facilities where I preside and celebrate the Eucharist. To me that's the church. That's the people of God.

… a Roman Catholic believes that to be really the body of Christ which another man calls bread, he does no injury thereby to his neighbor.

My mother played the organ in church at Georgiana, and I sat on the seat beside her.

The unique and indivisible existence of the Lord glorious in heaven, is not multiplied, but is rendered present by the sacrament in the many places on earth where Mass is celebrated. And this existence remains present, after the sacrifice, in the Blessed Sacrament, which is, in the tabernacle, the living heart of each of our churches.

There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it.

In the Eucharist, the Son of God comes to meet us and desires to become one with us; eucharistic adoration is simply the natural consequence of the eucharistic celebration, which is itself the Church's supreme act of adoration.

And though we do have him before our eyes, masked in the Sacred Host, at mass and Benediction and within our lips receive him at communion, yet to hear of him and dwell on the thought of him will do us good.

The Eucharist is the full realization of the worship which humanity owes to God, and it cannot be compared to any other religious experience.... The risen Lord ... calls the faithful together to give them the light of His Word and the nourishment of His Body as the perennial sacramental wellspring of redemption. The grace flowing from this wellspring renews mankind, life, and history.

Then it was snack time, right in the middle of mass. Right out of nowhere, the priest would look down and say, 'Let's have some yum yums!' You would get in line - you would jump in the line - and you would go up and get the crouton O'Christ.

I acknowledge that the sacrament of the altar is very God's body in form of bread, but it is in another manner God's body than it is in heaven.

...In this world I cannot see the Most High Son of God with my own eyes, except for His Most Holy Body and Blood.

It is not the man who is responsible for the offerings as they become Christ's Body and Blood; it is Christ Himself who was crucified for us. The standing figure belongs to the priest who speaks these words. The power and the grace belong to God. 'This is My Body,' he says. And these words transform the offerings.

I still believe in getting married in churches and baptizing children. I go through those motions.

I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament.

The Eucharist is that love which surpasses all loves in Heaven and on earth