O Divine Eucharist
{Excerpt from "Jesus Our Eucharistica Love" by Fr. Stefano Maria Manelli, FI}
Jesus in the Eucharist is God Among Us
When St. John Marie Vianney arrived at the remote little village of Ars, someone said to him sourly, “Here there is nothing to be done.”
“Then, there is everything to be done,” replied the Saint.
And he began immediately to act. What did he do? He rose at two o’clock in the morning and went to pray near the altar in the dark church. He recited the Divine Office, he made his meditation, and he prepared himself for Holy Mass. After the Holy Sacrifice, he made his thanksgiving. Then he remained at prayer until noon. He would be always kneeling on the floor without any support, with a Rosary in his hand and his eyes fixed on the tabernacle.
Things continued this way for a short time. Then he had to start changing his timetable; and things reached a point requiring radical changes in his program. The Eucharistic Jesus and the Blessed Virgin Mary, little by little, drew souls to that poor parish, until the Church did not seem big enough to contain the crowds, and the confessional of the holy Curé became swamped with endless lines of penitents. He was obliged to hear confessions for ten, fifteen, eighteen hours in a day!
How did such a transformation ever come about? There had been a poor Church, an altar long unused, an abandoned tabernacle, an ancient confessional, and a priest with no resources and little talent. How could such a wonderful change develop in that unknown village?
St. Pio at San Giovanni Rotondo
We can ask the same question today regarding San Giovanni Rotondo, a town on Mt. Gargano, Italy. Until a few decades ago it was an obscure, unknown place amid the rough crags of a promontory. Today, San Giovanni Rotondo is a center of spiritual and cultural life and its reputation is international. Here, too, there had been an unpromising, sickly friar, an ancient, dilapidated little friary, a small neglected Church, with altar and tabernacle left ever alone to this poor friar, who wore out his beads and his hands in the untiring recitation of the Holy Rosary.
How did the change come about? What caused the wonderful transformation that came to Ars and to San Giovanni Rotondo, so that hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions, of persons have come to these places from every part of the earth?
Only God could work such transformations using, according to His ways, “the things that are not to bring to naught the things that are” (1 Cor. 1:28). It is all due to Him, to the divine and infinite power of the Eucharist, to the almighty force of attraction which radiates from every tabernacle, and which radiated from the tabernacles of Ars and San Giovanni Rotondo, reaching souls through the ministry of those two priests, true “ministers of the tabernacle” (Heb. 13:10) and “dispensers of the mysteries of God” (1 Cor. 4:1).
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