A week last Monday Pope Leo presented his first major teaching document to the Church and the world – Magnifica Humanitas – safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence.

“Never has humanity had such power over itself. New technologies open up a horizon extending in directions that are imaginable but not yet fully predictable”.

He recognises that over the centuries, technological development has brought progress and significantly improved the living conditions of humanity.

At the same time, each phase of progress has also revealed the ambiguity of tools that can cause harm when not oriented toward the common good. 

He reflects upon how human nature does not change as technology does. He quotes the Old Testament story of the Tower of babel.  How the Book of Genesis describes how after settling in a plain in the land of Shinar, the people decided to build a city and a tower “with its top in the heavens.

Fearing being scattered across the earth, they sought to guarantee stability and power for themselves, and above all to “make a name” for themselves. It was an impressive aspiration: a single language, a single technology, a single direction.

However, the project concealed a profound danger.

It was a project conceived without reference to human frailty or to God, supported by a uniformity that sought to eliminate difference and diversity and that chose homogenization over communion.

When a city is built on pride and the claim to self-sufficiency, communication breaks down, languages are confused and people no longer understand each other. The result is not unity, but dispersion.

Babel thus reveals the limits of any effort that, however grandiose, arises from self-centredness and self-affirmation, sacrifices human compassion and dignity for efficiency and aspires to reach heaven without God’s blessing”.

“And still all too often, we place our hope in unlimited “upgrades,” in forms of progress that exacerbate divisions and inequalities, and in immediate solutions incapable of really healing people’s wounds. Healing comes when compassion is the motivation and having received the embrace of God we can try to understand and embrace others”. 

On this great feast day of the Body and Blood of Christ we recognise that here in the Eucharist is God’s physical embrace of us. 

The Eucharist is a meal we share together. The Last Supper was many things, but it was also a meal, a time of human fellowship, a celebration at table. So too for the Eucharist, it is many things, but it is also a table for a family to gather around, where joys can be shared and sorrows can be held.

The Eucharist is a moment of our communion with each other inside the Body of Christ. At a Eucharist, not just the bread and wine are meant to be changed into the body and blood of Christ, so too we, who celebrate it.

That is why St. Augustine, when giving out communion, would sometimes say, “Receive what you are.” So, it strengthens us for service in Jesus’ name. to serve others and look outwards, the Eucharist is a prayer for the world, making Christ’s flesh food for the life of the world.

The Eucharist is a sacrifice. It takes us to Calvary, plunging us into the saving event of Jesus’ death as a Christian Passover supper. The Eucharistic prayer does not just ask God to change the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, it also asks God to make the saving event of Jesus’ death available for us to participate within today.

The Eucharist is the manna for the desert times, the difficult times of our lives – food for the journey. Just as God fed his people in the desert in Exodus with manna each day, so now, day in and day out God feeds us with bread from heaven. 

The Eucharist, the Blessed Sacrament, Holy Communion is a great act of hope, taking us to Calvary not to be hopeless at the foot of the cross but to see there in Jesus God’s love and mercy. A source of hope for this life and the next, that the body of Christ broken there for us, which we receive in each Mass is a foretaste of the eternal feast of heaven. 

Without the Mass, this gathering: our faith, discipleship, and community would eventually fall apart. In the words of Ronald Knox, “the Eucharist is our one great act of fidelity to Jesus.”

 Truth be told, we all at times struggle and get things wrong and have to begin again, but we are faithful in one major way, we keep the Eucharist going – and that single act is always what saves us in and through the loving embrace of God, in Jesus in Holy Communion – the body and blood of Christ.

Fr Steven