Pontiff proposes Eucharist as cure for selfishness

(June 27, 2011) Pope Benedict XVI says the Eucharist is the antidote to the individualism in which the West is immersed and which is spreading throughout the globe. "The Eucharist is like the beating heart that gives life to the whole mystical body of the Church: a social organism entirely founded on the spiritual but concretely linked with Christ," the Pope said on Sunday before reciting the midday ‘Angelus’ with those gathered in St. Peter's Square. "Without the Eucharist the Church simply would not exist," he affirmed. The Holy Father explained how the Sacrament that makes a human community into "a mystery of communion is able to bring God to the world and the world to God." The transforming action of the Holy Spirit, which makes the bread and wine into Christ's body and blood "also transforms those who receive it with faith into members of the Body of Christ, so that the Church is truly the sacrament of the unity of men with God and of men with each other," he added. "In a culture that is ever more individualistic - like that in which Western societies are immersed and which is spreading throughout the world - the Eucharist constitutes a kind of 'antidote,' which operates in the minds and hearts of believers and continually sows in them the logic of communion, of service, of sharing, in a word, the logic of the Gospel," the Pontiff said.