FHC Preparation

At the Last Supper, Jesus offers His Body and Blood for our salvation. As Catholics we have always taken Jesus seriously and literally when he pronounced that the bread was His Body, and the wine was His Blood.

Another time Jesus told his followers bluntly, “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, you have no life in you … My flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed.” (John 6: 53, 55). Many followers begin to abandon him because this is a “hard saying.” (v 60). But Jesus doesn’t soften his teaching, in fact he repeats the claim.

Jesus then turns to his closest followers, the Apostles and asks if they will also abandon him. He is willing to let all his followers go, rather than change this teaching. 

In the first centuries of the Church, the Christians were so adamant of this teaching of Jesus that other groups would call them cannibals. 

“This is the wonderful truth, my dear friends: the Word, which became flesh two thousand years ago, is present today in the Eucharist.”
St John Paul 2