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Good evening.

Thank you all for coming out on a Thursday night.

I'm grateful to the Timistic Institute for the invitation to come speak and to the Newman Center for your hospitality.

So, without further ado, in its dogmatic

constitution on the church, Lumengencium, the Second Vatican Council declares that, quote,

the Eucharistic sacrifice is the source and summit of the whole Christian life. In recent years,

this phrase has become something of a catchphrase for Catholic efforts at Eucharistic Evangelization.

And it's often employed as a memorable, alliterative way to say something like, the Eucharist is really important.

Yet beneath this pithy slogan is a profound theological claim that too often remains unexplored.

What does it mean for the Eucharist to be the source of the Christian life? And what does it mean to hold that the Eucharist is the summit

of that same life? The phrase suggests not merely that the Eucharist is really important,

although it is, but also that the Eucharist

plays a unique role in relation to the rest of the Christian life, including and especially

our pursuit of holiness in the moral life. In what follows, I wish to meditate on how the Eucharist

is both the source and the summit of the Christian moral life. That is to say, how the moral life flows from the Eucharist is both the source and the summit of the Christian moral life.

That is to say, how the moral life flows from the Eucharist as its origin, and how it's directed back to the Eucharist as its consummation. In doing so, I'll draw upon the thought of the 13th century

Dominican friar and Doctor of the Church, St. Thomas Aquinas, whose writings on both the

Eucharist and the moral life have played a pivotal role in the development of Catholic theology

...