Lisbon (Fides Service) - In an article on “Eucharist and Mission two inseparable words” Bishop Manuel Neto Quintas, auxiliary Bishop of Faro and President of the Portuguese Bishops’ Commission for Missions said “Every time the Church comes together to celebrate the Eucharist, she celebrates her origin and accepts with the same vigour with which Christ conferred it, the command to carry the Good News to all nations”. The article is visible on the web page of the Pontifical Mission Societies in Portugal.
The Bishop underlines that sacramental communion, as an expression of full participation in the Eucharistic sacrifice, renews and consolidates the incorporation in Christ worked through baptism and it sends each Christian and the whole Church to be signs and channels of the salvation worked by Christ, by announcing and living the Gospel. “The lives of the Church and every individual Catholic converge in the Eucharist through a continual process of configuration with Christ and the exercise of his evangelising mission”.
Therefore, “the Eucharist is an excellent means for re-launching with boldness mission ad gentes since it is the source of dynamic impulse for the Church’s evangelising activity: it is food with which every Christian must nourish him or herself in order to carry to all men and women the love of God revealed fully in Christ”. Every Christian community must have its roots and centre in the Eucharist. “The evangelising impulse born of the Eucharist properly celebrated and lived leads Christians to be missionaries in every environment of life”. (R.Z.) (Agenzia Fides 29/10/2004; righe 20, parole 251)