Many mysteries of faith dwell within the consecrated host and chalice. Each single drop or particle, for example, contains the whole of Christ’s body, blood, soul, and divinity. Further, since Christ can die no more (Romans 6:9), his body can no longer be separated from his blood—which means that his Precious Blood is consumed under the species of bread, and his Body received from the chalice. We might even speculate whether, in addition to Christ’s presence in the Blessed Sacrament, God the Father and God the Holy Spirit aren’t also really present in the host and eaten during communion: “He who eats it with faith, eats Fire and Spirit… Take and eat this, all of you, and eat with it the Holy Spirit” (Pope John Paul II, citing St. Ephrem the Syrian, in Ecclesia de Eucharistia, 17).
But there’s another most remarkable mystery that is worthy of our attention—the relationship between the Eucharist and martyrdom.
Ours is a sacramental nature. That is, human beings, composed of body and soul, communicate intellectual, emotional, and spiritual truths via sensible media, through things our bodies can see, smell, taste, touch, or hear. The trick—naturally or supernaturally—is to convey accurately and perceive correctly just what that otherwise insensible reality is being conveyed through actions, words, and objects.
Take the “strangeness” in that Mona Lisa smile. Does her mystic smile reveal loneliness, temptation, coldness or warmth, or a broken heart? But even if we have never seen da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or heard Nat King Cole’s crooning over her, we are familiar with the daily struggle to communicate clearly and perceive precisely the truth of the matter.
God knows our nature (he authored it, after all) and has always chosen to manifest, present, and communicate his life to us through material things. Such is the principle of the incarnation: Jesus is the visible “image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15). Thus, he says to Philip’s request that Jesus show them the Father, “Whoever has seen me, has seen the Father” (John 14:9).
Even after the ascension of Christ into heaven, God continues to communicate and we to perceive through sacred signs, or sacraments. Pope St. Leo the Great (d. 461) lays down, in the simplest yet profoundest terms, today’s sacramental principle: “What was visible in our Savior has passed into his sacraments.” That is, what Jesus did and said 2,000 years ago in the flesh—taught, healed, fed, comforted—he continues to do through the “sacrament of the Church,” his Body, and through the seven sacraments. This is especially true of his saving Paschal Mystery: his suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension.
Christ’s passion and resurrection are at the heart of his saving work, and, for this reason, they stand at the heart of Christian learning, liturgy, and life. Behind every truth, beneath every sacramental sign, within every moral action is the person and work of Christ. A Christian’s every thought, prayer, and deed ought to be an “active participation” in the passion of Jesus.
Truly, the goal of every life is conformity to Christ and his Paschal Mystery. Those who do this exceptionally well are called saints. And the saints who outwardly, sensibly, visibly conform themselves to Christ’s death are called martyrs. In other words: for those who are truly serious about sanctity and “active participation,” martyrdom is the best path.
But for the rest of us who are not quite ready for this level of identity with the Paschal Christ—“She thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quickly,” as a Flannery O’Connor character put it—there is a close, second-best option: the worthy reception of the Eucharist.
The reason why both the Eucharist and martyrdom are so closely related is that both make manifest through sensible expressions the one Paschal death of Christ. “Martyrdom,” writes Louis Bouyer, “is a kind of carrying out in actual experience of what is grasped in the Eucharist by faith” (Liturgical Piety, Providence: Cluny Media, 2021, p. 252). In a remarkable chapter on the Christian mystery and the saints from Liturgical Piety, Bouyer observes some extraordinary connections between the Eucharist and martyrdom, particularly in the early Church.
Consider the account of St. Polycarp of Smyrna, a disciple of St. John the Evangelist. “When the Bishop of Smyrna comes to the place where he is to be burned to death, as soon as everything is ready for the execution, he offers a prayer in the exact pattern of the Eucharistic prayer…asking it to bless the sacrifice which is now to be accomplished as a continuation of the Cross…. And the saint ends his prayer with a solemn doxology just as the flame is put to the pyre…. [A]s the fire comes close to the saintly old man, all the bystanders are struck by the impression that he does not seem to suffer; his face appears as shining in a divine light, and, to borrow a most characteristic image from the narrative itself, he looks like a heavenly loaf being baked in the furnace of divine love…” (253). As the account shows, what the Eucharist presents under the form of bread and wine, martyrdom manifests in the flesh of St. Polycarp.
Bouyer offers other examples connecting martyrdom to the Eucharist. St. Polycarp’s friend, St. Ignatius of Antioch, writes of his imminent martyrdom as an offering, and his body as wheat, “ground into flour between the teeth of beasts” of the Colosseum (252). Similarly, the account of St. Felicity’s martyrdom finds her screaming in pain at the birth of her child in prison prior to her death. When asked by a mocking guard how she hopes to withstand death for her faith when the pangs of birth cause her to cry out, she responds that in the circus “another will suffer in me” (254). By way of summary, Bouyer says: “[T]he martyrs experience what we should call a real presence of Christ at the climax of their martyrdom” (253, emphasis added).
The infamous Pew Study which inspired the United States’ Eucharistic Revival discovered that only 30% of Catholics recognized the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Christ. One hates to speculate how few would see in that same Eucharist a true active participation in the death and resurrection of Christ, a participation nearly identical with that of martyrdom.
