The Eucharist
The Source and Summit
£15.00
A guide for the one act that will define a priestly life
At the centre of this book stands a single scene: a priest, at an altar, speaking the words Christ spoke the night before he died. Everything Archbishop Dr Felix Gibbins writes across these twenty chapters is preparation for that moment, and for the lifetime of ministry that flows from it. The Eucharist: The Source and Summit is a full, unhurried introduction to Eucharistic theology, built specifically for seminarians and formation candidates, and rich enough to reward any serious Catholic reader.
Not a manual. A companion.
Each chapter opens with a personal word to the reader and closes with a reflective summary, a set of questions for further thought, and a resource index of primary sources, magisterial documents, and further reading. The voice throughout is that of a formator speaking to a candidate he knows will one day stand where these words point: direct, warm, and unwilling to let the subject remain abstract.
The full sweep of the tradition, in four movements
Scripture and origins: Melchizedek, the Passover, the manna and the showbread, the four Last Supper accounts, and the Pauline and Johannine witness, establishing that the Eucharist did not begin at the Last Supper but was prepared for across the whole of salvation history.
The Fathers and the Schools: the Didache, Ignatius, Justin Martyr, and Augustine; the Berengarian crisis and the Fourth Lateran Council; Aquinas's Eucharistic synthesis; the Reformation controversy across Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin; and the Council of Trent's decisive response.
The modern engagement: the Liturgical Movement from Guéranger to Vatican II, the metaphysics of transubstantiation, and the twentieth century reformulations offered by Rahner and Schillebeeckx, weighed honestly against the Church's continuing teaching.
Formation for the altar: the Eucharist as sacrifice, as the ground of adoration, as the source of the Church's unity and her ecumenical hope, as the pattern of Christian moral life, and as the seminarian's own daily discipline of Mass, adoration, and the Divine Office.