Arrangements can be made to have Holy Communion brought those who are homebound due to illness, age, or impairment of any kind or to celebrate the Sacrament of Anointing and Reconciliation with them. Please notify the parish office with the necessary information.
The holy Eucharist completes Christian initiation. Those who have been raised to the dignity of the royal priesthood by Baptism and configured more deeply to Christ by Confirmation participate with the whole community in the Lord's own sacrifice by means of the Eucharist.
At the Last Supper, on the night he was betrayed, our Savior instituted the Eucharistic sacrifice of his Body and Blood. This he did in order to perpetuate the sacrifice of the cross throughout the ages until he should come again, and so to entrust to his beloved Spouse, the Church, a memorial of his death and resurrection: a sacrament of love, a sign of unity, a bond of charity, a Paschal banquet 'in which Christ is consumed, the mind is filled with grace, and a pledge of future glory is given to us.
Many Protestants believe the Eucharist (or what they call "the Lords Supper") is not an offering of Christs actual body. Rather, it is a memorial meal where bread and wine are consumed in obedience to Christs command to "do this in remembrance to me."
The Greek word rendered "remembrance"
(anamnesin) however, refers to more than just a purely spiritual recollection. The command to repeat the rite is not a summons to the disciples to preserve the memory of Jesus and be vigilant (“repeat the breaking of the bread so that you may not forget me”), but it is an eschatologically oriented instruction: “Keep joining yourselves together as the redeemed community by the table rite, that in this way God may be daily implored to bring about the consummation on the [Second coming].
Jesus was instituting a fulfillment of the Passover, whose celebration “made present” in a mystical way the events of the Exodus. Therefore, through the new Passover the Eucharist would make Christ’s sacrifice present for all future believers.
According to the Catholic scholar Anthony Thiselton: “The Passover Seder enables Jewish households to
participate in the deliverance of the Passover
as if they were “there”. The Eucharist enables Christians to
participate in the deliverance off the cross
as if they were there. They are
contemporaneous sharers in the drama.