In 1963 I was in Ireland at the very time of Pope Paul VI's coronation and when President John F. Kennedy, the first Irish Catholic President of the United States, was visiting Ireland. It was a grand celebration. The Papal Flag, the American Flag and the Irish Tri-Colors were flying from every telephone pole. In the village where I was staying, they organized a solemn Te Deum. The whole village assembled in the parish church; men on one side, women on the other. After the prayers, the pastor and chief magistrate made speeches during which they proclaimed an amnesty for all the prisoners in the local jail in honor of the Pope's coronation and the President's visit. We were told that as the bells rang out, the doors of the jail would be opened. I was very impressed. Only afterwards did I learn that there had been no prisoners in that jail for the last 40 years. The mayor had the local constable round up a few town drunks and lock them up so that there would be prisoners for the amnesty.

The Curé of Ars as a seminarian was saved by a comic opera amnesty as well. In those days seminarians were drafted in the army. The young John Vianney proved to be a feckless soldier. He was separated from his company of soldiers and so was considered a deserter and was forced to live in hiding. But the marriage of Napoleon III to the Hapsburgh Archduchess was marked by an amnesty for draft dodgers and deserters, so John M. Vianney could come out of hiding and return to the seminary.

As a young priest in Washington, 80% of my parishioners were so called, "illegal aliens." We all lived in the ardent hope for an amnesty. But the Greatest Amnesty is the Sacrifice of Christ who paid our debt, who stepped in front of the bullet to save us. "By His stripes we are healed." We were under a sentence of death - but the amnesty of Calvary has spared us.

In this Jubilee Year, we relive the great events of this Amnesty; they are mediated to us through the priesthood of Jesus Christ, instituted as a sacrament together with the Eucharist on Holy Thursday. It is the Last Supper when Jesus pronounces His farewell address, but even as He says Goodbye, Jesus is assuring us that He will continue to be with us even to the end of time through the Eucharist and His priesthood. Jesus Christ has kept that promise for 2000 years.

Introducing Christians into the Third Millennium of their history as it does, the Jubilee of the Year 2000 inspires us to contemplate with ever-new eyes the mystery of the Incarnation of God. In Jesus of Nazareth, God became a human being in order to reveal the Trinitarian mystery of the divine love and to save humanity. The mystery extends through history, and human beings in every age have asked themselves how it is possible for God to love so intensely as to give over the divinity in the supreme act of death on the cross. This event does not regard only a fact of the past, but, through the mediation of the Eucharist, is activated every day to the end of time. Indeed, it attests that Jesus is with us forever and loves us, offering us the forgiveness of reconciliation and communion of life with God. The Eucharist is the Source of Life for the Church.

It is therefore quite meaningful that Pope John Paul II has called for the celebration of a Eucharistic Congress in Rome and here in Denver Archbishop Charles has given us this opportunity to be par of a Eucharistic Congress, a fitting centerpiece for the Jubilee Year.

The Russian Nobel Prize Winner, Alexander Solzenitsyn says he recalls three episodes especially from his boyhood. One was being taunted by other boys as he walked with this mother to the towns only remaining church; another was having someone tear away the cross hanging from his neck. The third was hearing old people say: "Men have forgotten God, that's why all this has happened." All of the oppression, the hopelessness, the Gulag, the torture chamber, the despair, it all came about because people have forgotten God.

Forgetting God is very dangerous. We are here today because 2000 years ago God said to us, "Do this in memory of me. Never forget my love - I am with you always if only you will recognize me in the breaking of the bread."

Our spiritual amnesia leads to so much heartbreak. Cervantes, in Don Quixote, gave the world a striking metaphor. Don Quixote is insane; but he is more sane than all the sane people because he sees the really real, what is good, noble, what is important. If you come to our nursing homes in Fall River, you will see the Alzheimer's patients wandering about. On each of their doors is a glass box with photos of their families to remind the staff that these people are persons just like us. How important it is to remember that in giving care to them with love, with concern, and to know they are in God's hands.

Sometimes I think the Alzheimer patients are a new metaphor. The world is being run by people with a spiritual amnesia - they have forgotten about God. And when we forget about God, we forget who we are, who people are. We forget what is truly important.

"Do this in memory of me!" There are many less people in church that when I was a child. Many go to church looking for entertainment. We are like sick people who do not know enough to go to the doctor. "Why go to the doctor? - It is probably boring."

The hell that Solzenitsyn experienced in the horrors of the concentration camps of Siberia and the crisis in modern society is because people have forgotten God. People do not come to church because of spiritual amnesia - either they have forgotten about God or they have forgotten what the Mass is. I remember as a seminarian reading an interview with Flannery O'Connor in which she recounted an incident from her childhood in the deep South where less than 5% of the population was Catholic. Flannery invited a young Baptist girl to come to Mass one Sunday. The girl had never set foot in a Catholic Church and went with great curiosity. After the Mass, Flannery O'Connor was anxious to hear her friend's reaction to the Catholic Church. The girl said how very impressed she was and went on to explain why: "You Catholics must really have something. The sermon was so boring, the music was awful and the priests mumbled in that language nobody could understand, and all those people were there. You Catholics must have something very special. What brought Catholics to Church every Sunday morning in those days was the Eucharist. People were not there to be entertained or to experience a barn-burner sermon or to attend a concert, they were there because of their faith, unwavering faith in the Eucharist: Jesus Christ present on our altars. In today's Church, religious illiteracy and secularization of the culture have undermined that faith. We have parents who send their children to CCD, like soccer practice, yet not to Mass.

The Holy Father has given us this Jubilee Year - a Eucharistic Year - as a time of spiritual renewal. I pray that this year of grace will help Catholics to deepen their love for the Eucharist, the center of our life as Catholics. If this happens, I am sure that the identity crisis of priests will disappear and that vocations to the priesthood will increase.

We are here today to say that God has not forgotten about us. He still loves us: "Even though a mother might be capable of forgetting her child, I shall never forget you. Your face is carved in the palms of my hands." We are here to say to the world God has not forgotten us - His cry is like the stirring lyrics of the song that says: "The only thing I ask is that you remember me as loving you."

"Do this in memory of me." Do what? Take bread and say: "This is my body …" His love is present to feed us. Happy are we if, like those first Christians, we too can say that we recognize Him in the breaking of the bread, that we do this in memory of Him and of His love.

If Mass is a chore, a burden, a boring exercise, the problem is perhaps that we have forgotten how to pray. If we have first closed our chamber door to pray to our Father in secret, if we have knelt next to our child's crib and taught that child to call God our Father, if each day of the week is punctuated by time and space for God in prayer; then, and only then, will we truly be able to enter into the mystery, to be absorbed in the Eucharist. Then, it will all make sense.

We can admire the ingenuity of many human inventions. When I visit the classrooms in our schools today and see our little children in front of a computer keyboard and remember that when I was that age we were learning the "Palmer Method," carefully dipping our pens into an inkpot, I am amazed. So many marvels of science and technology!

The Eucharist is God's invention. It manifests the ingenuity of a wisdom that at the same time is the foolishness of love. The entire revelation of the work of salvation is astonishing, and the Eucharist constitutes a pinnacle of that mystery where in the simplest possible way the fulfillment of the divine design has far surpassed any possible expectation.

Where we can see only bread and wine, we stand before the assertion of the presence of God. How can we fail to be astonished at the fact that the One who is God offers Himself as food and drink to his very creatures. The One who is Lord places Himself entirely at our disposition, at our service. He has died for us on the cross and risen.

Why does He will that this offering be repeated through all time in the Eucharist? Why must God invent a new presence in the Christian assembly? To all our astonishment and questions, there is but one response: Everything in the Eucharist derives from love carried to extremes. All emerges from a limitless will to give. God's love is so inventive that He has devised a way to be close to us and to allow us to be united with Him and with our fellow disciples who share the same loaf and the same cup. For two thousand years we have experienced how the Church has developed, sprung up around the breaking of the bread, the Eucharist.

The first generations of Christians were celebrating the Lord's Supper even before the Scriptures were written down. In other words, the Mass is older than the Books of the New Testament; and when it came time for the Church to determine which Scriptures were inspired and should be included in the Canon of the Bible, one of the criteria was to choose readings that were being read at the celebration of the Eucharist.

My message to the four thousand young people whom it was my joy and privilege to confirm this year was, "Look at the Eucharist - God is making Himself a gift to us!" The only way our life will find meaning and fulfillment is if we make ourselves a gift to God and to others. That is our mission. We are a Eucharistic people. We find our true identity when we are gathered around the altar. On the altar our God becomes a gift - a life-giving. St. Mark's Gospel describes the Last Supper saying that Jesus and the disciples sang songs of praise. Each day we gather in the Eucharist to sing songs of praise. For Catholics it is an effort. Remember Mark's words Jesus sang at the first Eucharist. We, too, must sing songs of praise to a God who is so good and so loving that He makes a gift of Himself to us.

Let me tell you one of my favorite parables that is from Japan. There was once a man who dwelt in a beautiful mansion on a mountaintop. Each day he would walk in his garden and enjoy the view of the ocean below. One day, as he was in his gardens, he saw a group of his neighbors on the beach below enjoying a picnic. Then he noticed a huge tidal wave rushing toward the shore. He wanted to warn his friends. He began to shout and wave his arms, but the distance was too great. The man decided to set fire to his house. When his friends on the beach saw the smoke and the flames, some said, "Let us climb the mountain and help our neighbor save his home." The others, however, said, "No, you go. That mountain is so high and we are having such fun here on the beach." Those who left the picnic to climb the mountain thought they were doing a service to their neighbor. Actually, they were saving their own lives. The ones who continued having fun on the beach perished. It is as the Lord said in the Gospel: The one who loves his life loses it and the one who hates his life will save it."

When we make a gift of ourselves to God and others, we may think we are sacrificing our lives. Actually, we are saving our lives by love. And when all is said and done, it is that faithful, generous, sacrificial love that matters. That is what saints are about. That is what the Eucharist teaches us.

Eucharist means Thanksgiving. We should never think of the Mass without sentiments of gratitude. For us, being a Eucharistic people must also mean that we are profoundly thankful to our God. This spirit of thanksgiving points to the social aspect of the Eucharist.

One of the ways we show our gratitude to God is by sharing our gift with others. As St. Paul writes: "God has made you rich so that you might be generous." Jesus shows us at the First Eucharist that the Mass is to be a font of charity. He begins the celebration by washing the feet of the disciples and giving them the command of mutual love. He found them fighting over first places at table and taught them to fight over the towel. And in another place in the Gospel, Jesus warns us not to bring our sacrifice to the altar if we are not reconciled to our brothers and sisters. Just last Sunday, we heard the Epistle of St. James who wants us not to discriminate against the poor at our assembly but rather see all of our brothers and sisters as united with us in one body.

In the Teachings of the Apostles the Bishop is ordered to take great care with the Sunday Eucharist, it is a sign of the Church. The welcome shown to strangers at this Eucharist is no little part of the sign: A special welcome is to be given to the poor, even if the Bishop has to surrender his own chair and sit on the floor. This way of putting it may seem exaggerated, but clearly one function of the assembly was to challenge the divisions that run through human society.

In Rome, as priests were obliged on Sundays to celebrate Mass for their congregations in their own churches (titles) and therefore could not take part in the solemn Papal Mass, a sign was used to bring out the unity of the one Christian community. Pope Innocent I wrote on this in 416. The porter of the Papal Mass was given a fragment of the consecrated bread after the fraction, or breaking of the bread, and the priest of the titular church received it and put it into his chalice at the same point in his own Mass, a beautiful sign of unity expressed in the Eucharist. Pope Paul VI once wrote: "The Eucharist has been instituted to make us Brothers, so that instead of being strangers, divided and indifferent to one another, we might be united, be equals and friends. The Eucharist has been given to us so that instead of a selfish apathetic crowd made up of hostile individuals, we might become a people, a true people, with one heart and one soul."

As a sacrificial meal, the Eucharist communicates the love that has inspired the sacrifice, a love that spared nothing in order to secure the happiness of others. In the Eucharist, Jesus willed to give His disciples the strength to love one another as he had loved them. He gave His disciples with the gift of His body and Blood, a power of love that knows no limits.

I once had a dear friend, an outstanding priest, Father Morty Fox. He was a talented, zealous priest with a magic personality that mesmerized everyone, even the worst enemies of religion. When Father Fox entered a room, the lights went up and the bells rang. He was a joy to be with.

One day, a remarkable thing happened. I was at my desk when the call came in saying that Father Fox had died suddenly. Shortly afterwards, I went to the Post Office to pick up the mail. To my great surprise there was a letter from Father Fox waiting for me. I was stunned. My friend, who never wrote except at Christmas, was now sending me a letter from the grave. I trembled as I opened the letter. I could see his smile, hear his laugh. Suddenly, he was alive and present once again.

Upon reflection on this strange incident, it occurred to me that the Eucharist is like that letter: a sign of love and friendship, a desire to communicate, to be present. But in Jesus' case, it was planned. It was intentional and the letter He sent was Himself. The Word made Flesh - made Eucharist.

The Old Testament story of Namaan the Leper has always fascinated me. In it I find a parable about modern man's search for the transcendence. In the story Naaman, the Syrian General, is suffering from leprosy and comes to the Prophet (2 Kings 5: 14) seeking a cure. Elisha stayed in his house and sent a servant to tell the General to wash himself seven times in the Jordan River. Naaman left in a rage - he had expected a better show - that the prophet would come and make an incantation, do a dance, go into a trance, impose hands, etc. - "The Rivers of Albana and Pharpar back in Damascus are better, he roared." Then a servant said, "But sir, if the prophet had told you to do something difficult you would have done it! " When he consented to follow the simple instructions of the prophet, he was cured.

In Book IV of the Imitation of Christ, "Many run to various places to visit the relics of departed saints and are full of wonder at hearing their deeds. They look with awe on the spacious church buildings, great architecture, they kiss the relics encased in silk and gold, but as Thomas a Kempis writes: "If this holy Sacrament were to be celebrated in one place only, and consecrated by only one priest in the world, with what great desire do you think men would be drawn to that place, and to such a priest of God, that they might (at least once) be witnesses of the celebration of the divine mysteries," and Mass is celebrated every day in our churches, everywhere. We seek the grandiose, the spectacular, the "gong show". Our God comes in humility and simplicity. As Ghandi once said: "There is so much hunger in the world that God could appear only in the form of bread. "

When people celebrate the Lord's Supper and receive the Eucharist, it is too easy just to think no further than flesh & blood and forget that the WORD became Flesh. They forget that they are receiving a word addressed to them from God. It is the most profound word possible, a word so all-embracing, so full of meaning that it transcends our comprehension. It is a word that resembles expressions of genuine human self-giving. But it is also a word that goes beyond all human self-giving and makes the impossible possible.

This Word says, "I love you," and proves it. Our human love is bound to come up against the boundaries that will always separate us in this world: in spite of all means of communication, each man remains an island. Each soul has its own consciousness and cannot fuse with another; bodies can only touch externally. That is how we are: we are finite. We are not gods. Only God's Word Who Became Flesh and dwelt among us, only the infinite and limitless Word, can transcend these boundaries: "Take, eat; this is my Body. Drink, this is my blood." "Take and eat," it means - take into yourself what seems only to exist side by side with you and, just as I can transcend the boundaries, so let your boundaries disintegrate by taking me into yourselves. In Me, God's Word-Made-Flesh, you are destined to be freed from your narrow confines to lead a new life, together with others and shared with them, a life of communion, a life as befits members of my body, nourished by the circulating blood of my all-embracing life."

This is God's gift to us in the Eucharist. Thus Augustine can say that God is more interior to us than we are to ourselves. And, as St. Paul says: "In Him we live and move and have our being."

The Eucharist is the source of life for each and every one of us. Christ is the Bread of Life, the manna that has come down from heaven.

I recall a few years ago there was a terrible airplane crash in the Andes. The plane was carrying the Uruguayan soccer team to Chile when the plane went down. They searched for weeks in the dead of winter. Finally, they gave up the hope of finding any survivors and a Requiem Mass was celebrated for the missing.

People were shocked when someone happened on the site of the crash and discovered that there were indeed several survivors. When the reporters arrived on the scene, they questioned the people on how they were able to survive without provisions for so many weeks. The men were reluctant to talk about it, until finally one broke the silence and said: "We were able to survive these long weeks without food here in the Andes because we consumed the flesh of our friends who died in the crash. It was a terrible decision for us, but we knew that if we did not do that we too would have died. So, we ate their flesh. We did it reverently, and what gave us the courage to take such a drastic step were Jesus' words. He said: "Unless you eat my flesh, you will not have life in you."

Indeed the Bread of Life contains the promise of immortality. When we eat His Body with reverence and faith, we will survive more than a crash, or a cancer, or a heart attack. We will survive death itself.

Christ wants us to hunger after that Bread of Life. In the Gospels, the disciples implore Jesus: "Sir, give us this bread always." To which Jesus replies: "I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst."

The Lord challenges us to believe in the Eucharist. What could be clearer: "I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world." We know that many were turned off by these assertions. Jesus never retracted anything. He doesn't call His disciples back and apologize by saying He was only using metaphors or figures of speech. Rather, he asks those who have stayed behind with their mouths open in shock: "Well, are you going to leave me too?" Peter, the rock of faith, replies in the name of those who remain faithful to Jesus. Those who accept His words and promises: "Lord, to whom shall we go, you have the words of eternal life." The Eucharist is the source of life. As we have seen, the Eucharist calls us to community, to service, washing our brother's feet, but it constantly beckons us to life and fidelity. The Eucharist is there as a constant call to live the life of grace. When we have sinned and strayed from God's path, it is often hunger for the Eucharist that beguiles us back to God. The hunger for the bread of life has brought many a sinner back from the realm of darkness, that place where the Prodigal Son longed for the husks that we being fed to the pigs. Many a sinner who seemed content to dwell in a foreign place far from the Father's house, have become aware of their need for conversion because of that hunger for the bread of life, the manna come down from heaven. How many people have found motivation and strength to return to the Father's House because of Holy Communion.

The fast the Church asks of us before receiving Communion has been reduced to one hour, such a short time that people hardly even avert to the fact that they are fasting. Still there is a great symbolic value to the Communion fast. It is one more reminder of the need to be prepared for Holy Communion. The Communion fast reminds us that the Eucharist is holy. We must prepare ourselves and we must have a true hunger for the bread of life.

The Eucharist is the source of the Church's life and energy. It is the great treasure that our Savior has left us. Even as He says farewell, He promises to be with us always, even to the end of time. The celebration of Mass allows us to be present at the Last Supper and on Calvary. In the Eucharist the Risen Lord gives us His Flesh and Blood for food and drink. In our Tabernacles, the Eucharistic Lord, Emmanuel, God-with-us, has pitched His tent to dwell among us, to be present to us.

Faith and love for the Eucharist cannot allow Christ's present to remain alone. Already in the Old Testament we read that God dwelt in a tent, or tabernacle, which was called a meeting tent. The tabernacles in our churches house Christ present among us so that we can have this meeting place with Him. The veils on our tabernacles are a sign of God's meeting tent. Recently I visited a beautiful chapel in Tegucigalpa with the marvelous inscription on the altar under the Blessed Sacrament: Magister adest et vocat te - "The Master is present and is calling you." (From John's Gospel, the words of Martha to her Sister, Mary.) In The Eucharist we can find the life-giving presence of a friend who is the Bread of Life and the source of life.

In this great Eucharistic Congress, we recall the two instruments that God has chosen as the means of giving us this great gift of the Eucharist. The first is Mary the Mother of our Redeemer. She said "Yes" to God allowing the Word to become Flesh. She is the wheat and flour from which the bread of the Eucharist is made. In the wonderful hymn Ave Verum, we pray: "Hail True Body of Christ, born of the Virgin Mary." Mary's body has given us Christ's Body. Her self-giving prepares us to be a Eucharistic people. At the Great Marian Shrines, Mary gathers the disciples who persevere in prayer in her company and they gather around the altar. Mary brings us Christ and leads us to Christ.

The other instrument by which the Eucharist comes to us is the ministerial priesthood. Without priests there is no Mass. All of us need to be promoters of priestly vocations in our families, our parishes, our schools and our communities.

I would encourage all of our people to join our love and devotion to the Eucharist with a profound love for the priesthood and pray for vocations.

Jesus Himself enjoins us to pray to the Lord of the Harvest to send laborers.

Let me close these reflections with that appeal -

Love the Eucharist, the source of our life.

Love the Eucharist - God present on our altars.

Love the priesthood that allows the miracle to continue.