WOF 223: The Eucharist in the Early Church (Part 1 of 2)

The Word on Fire Show - Catholic Faith and Culture

Brandon Vogt

God, Vogt, Catholicism, Catholic, Faith, Christianity, Barron, Religion & Spirituality, Christian, Church

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🗓️ 16 March 2020

⏱️ 36 minutes

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Summary

The fathers of the Second Vatican Council referred to the Eucharist as the source and summit of the Christian life, that from which authentic Christianity flows and that toward which it tends. Yet a recent Pew Forum study found that only 30% of church-going Catholics believe what the Church teaches about the Eucharist, that under the forms of bread and wine, Christ is really present in the sacrament.

That alarming statistic is why Bishop Barron devoted an hour-long keynote address to the topic at the 2020 Los Angeles Religious Education Congress. Today we share the first half of his talk, which looks at the Biblical and patristic basis for the doctrine of the Real Presence, and next week we'll share the second half. Enjoy!

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the Word on Fire show. I'm Brandon Votte, the host and the content director
0:10.2	here at Word on Fire. Over the next couple weeks, instead of having a conversation with Bishop
0:16.0	Baron, we're going to share the two halves of a talk Bishop Baron recently gave at the
0:21.8	2020 Los Angeles Religious Education Congress. The talk was titled The Real Presence of
0:28.4	the Eucharist, pretty self-explanatory about what it's about. But he gave it in response to
0:34.0	the findings of a recent survey from the Pew Research Center, which found that only 30%
0:39.4	of Catholics in the pew, so these are Catholics that are actually going to mass and showing
0:43.8	up believe what the church teaches about the Eucharist, that it's actually truly the body
0:49.6	and blood of Jesus Christ. So like many of us, he found this study alarming and distressing
0:55.8	and thought, it's time to reinforce this core central belief of the Catholic faith. In
1:02.0	this first half of the talk, we're going to get a little background on the biblical basis for
1:06.8	the church's understanding of the real presence, namely the great sixth chapter of John, John
1:12.2	chapter six, which is the bread of life discourse, where Jesus commands His followers to eat His
1:17.9	flesh and drink His blood. From there, Bishop Baron takes us on a tour of the patristic witness,
1:23.9	in other words, what the church fathers, the earliest Christian theologians had to say about
1:28.9	the Eucharist. So we get to learn from St. Ignatius of Antioch and St. Justin Martyr, St.
1:34.7	Irenaeus, Origen, Gregory of Nissa, John, Christus, St. Augustin, and more. If you watched the recent
1:40.9	episode we did on the church fathers, this will bring you back to a lot of those key figures in
1:45.7	the early life of the church. So that's what we'll listen to in the first half of this talk. And
1:50.4	next week we'll listen to the second half. The whole talk is about an hour and 15 minutes long.
1:55.8	So we're going to break it up into about 35 minute segments. So sit back and enjoy the first half
2:01.6	of this talk from Bishop Baron on the real presence of the Eucharist. Enjoy.
	...

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