Part 1: Adoration. Starting at the beginning of the Gospel. Here is where you pay the first obligation: honor and praise the majesty of God Who is worthy of infinite honor and praise. Humble yourself with Jesus by plunging into the depths of your nothingness. This is a time to thoroughly humble yourself, internally and externally, before such an immense majesty.

Part 2. Atonement. After the Gospel until the Elevation. Glance over your sins and recognize your debts to Divine Justice.  Repeat many acts of contrition.

Part 3. Thanksgiving. From the Elevation to Communion.
Stir your soul to wonder at the overflowing torrent of great and good gifts bestowed on you or designed for you by God.  Here you can offer in return a gift of infinite value: the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ.  Invite all the angels and saints to thank God on your behalf.  Offer sincere prayers of Thanksgiving.

Part 4. Petition. From Communion to the end of Mass.
Look upon the God who is within you… now is the time to summon up the holy courage to ask God for many graces.  This courage comes from Jesus: He has united Himself to you in the Eucharist, He is praying with you on your behalf.  Do not ask for small things – ask for great things! Do not ask with lukewarmness, ask with great confidence! If your prayers are united to those of Jesus, they will indeed be heard. Ask for help for all your needs, spiritual and temporal.

from the writings of St Leonard of Port Maurice

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How will Jesus triumph? 

Very often I hear questions coming from wounded priestly and apostolic hearts. These questions are as follows: what can be done to turn those who are Christians merely in name into real Christians? How can we make them live their Christian faith and morals? What can be done to make them come back to a holy and fruitful Christian austerity? In a word, how can we convert this world which after twenty centuries of Christianity is obstinately going back to the most corrupt and degrading paganism? 

The answer to these heartfelt questions can be found in one word: go to the tabernacle! Priest, go to the tabernacle! Let us draw power from the tabernacle! Nobody goes to the Father except through His Son, Jesus. He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life! We do not journey along this Way, this Truth and this Life of God merely by speculative, intellectual studies of Jesus, but by living faith in Him, by constant contact with Him in His present state on earth which is His sacramental state: the Real Presence. 

Is there a disoriented piety, coldness in charity, an absence of justice? That means that the Eucharist is unknown and untasted. Are there errors, darkness, doubts, ignorance, lack of knowledge?  That means that people are not being guided by the sanctuary light of the tabernacle. It is the most clear and illuminating light of all the lights on earth! Is there a spiritual anemia, agony, death, and souls who are wasting away? That means they are poorly fed or poorly “digesting” the Eucharist! 

St. Manuel Gonzalez Garcia

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In the holy Mass, Christ fulfills what is the most true and consoling promise which is recorded by the evangelist Saint Matthew: “Behold, I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world.” (Mt. 28:20). These words are not to be understood as referring only to His divinity, in virtue of which He is everywhere present, but also to His sacred humanity, in which He dwells among us, present in the Mass and in the adorable Sacrament of the altar, ready at all times to listen to our prayers, to afford us assistance in our need.

It must, moreover, be observed that in the Mass Christ is not merely present in person, as in the adorable Sacrament of the altar: He is there as our Victim, our Mediator, as the Atonement for our sins. For since Christ exercises in the Mass His sacerdotal functions by right of His office, it belongs to Him as Saint Paul says, “That He may offer up gifts and sacrifices for sins”. ( Heb.5:1). That He may offer up Himself to His heavenly Father for the sins of the people, as He offered Himself up to Him up on the Cross.

+Fr. Martin von Cochem

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O Lord Jesus, the Eucharist is the most wonderful work of Your love. Out of infinite love, You have given me not only what You have but even what you are!

In Holy Communion You give me Your Body, Your Blood, Your soul, Your divinity, Your merits and Your graces. Nowhere else do You bestow these graces more abundantly than in this Sacrament. May such a love awaken a return of love in my heart!

I want to receive You in Holy Communion more frequently, so that I may abide in You and You in me. Then will my prayers be truly powerful, because they will come from a heart that is one with Your own in deepest love and friendship. I shall pray to the Father in Your Name and I shall be heard, for You said, “If you ask the Father anything in My Name, He will give it to you.” (Jn 16:23)

O Jesus I can do nothing better than to present my prayers to You after Holy Communion. These moments are most precious, because You are with me as God and Man for the very purpose of helping me and making me holy.

From the Novena of Holy Communions

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I thank You, Lord, Almighty Father, Everlasting God, for having been pleased, through no merit of mine, but of Your great mercy alone, to feed me, a sinner, and Your unworthy servant, with the precious Body and Blood of Your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.

I pray that this Holy Communion may not be for my judgment and condemnation, but for my pardon and salvation. Let this Holy Communion be to me an armor of faith and a shield of good will, a cleansing of all vices, and a rooting out of all evil desires. May it increase love and patience, humility and obedience, and all virtues. May it be a firm defense against the evil designs of all my visible and invisible enemies, a perfect quieting of all the desires of soul and body.

May this Holy Communion bring about a perfect union with You, the one true God, and at last enable me to reach eternal bliss when You will call me. I pray that You bring me, a sinner, to the indescribable Feast where You, with Your Son and the Holy Spirit are to Your saints true light, full blessedness, everlasting joy, and perfect happiness. Through the same Christ our Lord. Amen.

St. Thomas Aquinas (Feast Day is January 28th)

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Our Lord has willed that the Immolation of the Altar shall renew the Immolation of the Cross, by reproducing it in order to apply its fruit to every soul. It is the same Christ who offers Himself to His Father in the odor of sweetness. This unbloody oblation is as acceptable to God as the Sacrifice of Calvary: here Jesus is the Victim, as He was when upon the Cross, and as He was when He came upon the Earth. Upon the altar, Christ Jesus comes again into this world every day as a victim; every day He repeats His oblation and His immolation for us.

Doubtless He wishes us to offer Him to the Father; but neither does He ever weary of urging us to offer ourselves to His Father in union with Him, that it may be accepted and, having shared in His Sacrifice here below, may likewise share in His eternal glory.

Blessed Columba Marmion

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The effects of Holy Communion on the soul and how it sustains, restores, and delights:  Communion sustains the life of the soul in a way similar to that in which foods sustain the body. The reception of the Blessed Eucharist keeps Catholics in God’s grace, since the soul recovers its energies from the continual wear and tear it suffers through the wounds of original sin and other personal sins. It maintains the life of God in the soul, freeing it from lukewarmness; and it helps us to avoid mortal sin and struggle effectively against venial sins.

The grace we receive each Communion delights the person who receives with good dispositions. Nothing can be compared to the joy of the Holy Eucharist. Enter the friendship and nearness of Jesus, present within us. Communion is the remedy for our daily needs, medicine of immortality, antidote against death, and food by which to live forever in Jesus Christ. It grants to the soul the peace and joy of Christ which is truly a foretaste of eternal happiness. We must ask Our Lady to help us to go to Communion every day with better dispositions.

From In conversation with God

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The Eucharist is the miracle of miracles; it is a living reminder of all the secrets of the holy faith, and therefore it deserves the highest honor. The same miracle of inconceivable love, realized for the first time in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary, is revealed anew, on our altars, though in a different way, during each Mass. The Word becomes flesh and dwells among us.

As then, this greatest mystery was hidden from the world, so it is hidden now. Although many secrets of love are presented to us by our holy Catholic faith, there is one amongst them that seems to exceed all others, or rather it is a gathering of all others, as it were a summary or a renewal. In this mystery of the Eucharist, all the fountains of God’s love gather in one hearth and make a kind of fire of love that constantly embraces the whole world, cleanses it, inspires human hearts, lights them up, lifts them up, sanctifies them, and makes them happy. This is the mystery of the Blessed Sacrament and the sacrifice of the Holy Mass.

For the sins ever repeated by people, Christ would have had to hang on the cross for all ages and call upon God’s mercy for us if His eternal wisdom did not invent another way of continuing and immortalizing the sacrifice of the Cross and giving us His infinite merits by the sacrifice of the holy Mass.

Love brings Christ to be born every day on the altar. This love urges Him to renew His Passion all over the world every day and to offer Himself constantly to His Father for our sins, as He offered Himself once on the Cross at Calvary. 

Blessed Honoratus Kozminski

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To our limited human reason, Jesus on the Cross may appear vanquished. On the contrary He is the all-powerful conqueror over sin and satan. He is the Lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the world, as His resurrection was to demonstrate in a visible and striking manner: victory over death, which is the consequence of sin, is the sign of victory over sin.

This admirable contrast of power in immolation is to be found in all souls in whom the image of the Crucified is profoundly imprinted: in Mary, Mother of Sorrows, in the persecuted apostles, who were considered the refuse of this world (1 Cor 4:13). This should teach us the marvelous fruitfulness of suffering when supernaturally endured in union with the Savior.

It is clear that our Savior’s passion was a true sacrifice, the greatest of all sacrifices! On the Cross, Jesus was at once priest and victim, for He was offering Himself up voluntarily. From the time He prayed at Gethsemane until He expired, all His words and acts were expressions of this voluntary oblation which is, as it were, the soul of this sacrifice of adoration, supplication, reparation, and thanksgiving.

Each day as we assist at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass let us learn to live by the sacrifice of the Cross which is perpetuated in substance on the altar. Let us especially ask for an understanding of the Cross and for a love of those crosses which Providence has reserved for us from all eternity until we enter heaven. Let us remember this law of Christian life: Unless the grain of wheat falling into the ground die, itself remaineth alone. But if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit (Jn 12:24).

Let us often repeat the seven last words of Christ, which are, so to speak, His testament, and let us ask Mary to enable us to understand them: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” “This day thou shalt be with Me in paradise.” “Woman, behold thy son. Behold thy mother.” “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” “I thirst.” “It is consummated.” “Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit.”

+Father Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P.

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