Friends, welcome to Word on Fire Catholic Ministries.

Word on Fire is an apostolate dedicated to the mission of evangelization,

using media both old and new to share the faith on every continent

and to facilitate an encounter with Christ and His Church.

The efforts of Word on Fire engage the culture and bring the transformative power of God's

word where it is most needed.

Today, we invite you to join Bishop Robert Barron as he preaches the gospel and shares the

warmth and light of Christ with each one of us.

Peace be with you. Friends, we come this great feast day of Corpus Christi, and I want to tell

a quick story before I get started. Just the other day, Father Andrew Marshall, was a priest

from Scotland, was visiting me about a particular project. And in the course of our conversation, he said, you know, I did my studies over in Rome, and we had some mutual friends there, and I said, well, what'd you write on? And he said, I wrote on this whole idea of the Eucharist and manna in the church fathers. And I said, that is the strangest thing. I said, because this very morning, I was preparing for this homily because the readings for Corpus Christi reading ones about the manna in the desert, and then it's correlated to the Eucharist in the New Testament.

So I said, could you send me that dissertation?

So he did.

He sent it electronically.

Didn't read every word of it, but I read the

section precisely on this. So I want to give Father Andrews some credit for some of the things I'm

going to share with you today about manna and the Eucharist. You know, that's typical, by the way,

of the Church Fathers. They'll look at something in the Old Testament, and they'll see it as a type,

which means a kind of anticipation, symbolic anticipation of something in the New Testament.

Or they'll see the New Testament as a distant echo of something that was sounded in the Old Testament, right?

So a prime example of that is the manna in the desert, described in the book of Exodus,

and the Eucharist, the bread from heaven that Jesus gives us.

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