December 1. (First Sunday of Advent). I think that there is no passage in the Gospel which has made a deeper impression on me nor transformed my life more profoundly than this: ‘Whatsoever you do to one of these the least of my brothers and sisters, you do unto me”. When we reflect that these are the very words of Uncreated Truth, those of the mouth which said, “This is my body, this is my blood”, how powerfully we are impelled to seek and love Jesus in these little ones, sinners, poor people. St. Charles de Foucauld
December 2. All the glory, grace and happiness that our Lord Jesus Christ brought to the world with His humanity, life, suffering, death, resurrection and ascension into heaven, all of this He bestows on every single person with His holy body and blood. There is no imaginable grace not embraced in this divine gift. Think as deep or as high or as interiorly as you may in your devotions, whatever you frame by your own powers is all nothing compared to the holy Sacrament. Johannes Tauler
December 3. In the gift of the Eucharist, Christ endows the Church with the ‘real presence’ of his body and blood together with an inner participation in his mission to the world. If the mission of the Son is to redeem creation by means of an exchange (admirabile commercium) in which he offers himself eucharistically to the world and receives the world as gift from the Father, then the Church is called to enter into Christ’s life and mission by eucharistically receiving creation in its entirety as a gift that mediates and expresses the triune life — thereby confirming and fulfilling God's original plan for the world. Hans Urs von Balthasar
December 4. If the Word of God is living and powerful, and if the Lord does all things whatsoever he wills; if he said, "Let there be light", and it happened; if he said, "let there be a firmament", and it happened; ...if finally the Word of God himself willingly became man and made flesh for himself out of the most pure and undefiled blood of the holy and ever Virgin, why should he not be capable of making bread his Body and wine and water his Blood? St. John Damascene
December 5. The mission of the Son, in its difference from and its relation to the mission of the Holy Spirit, is expressed in the Eucharistic species themselves. The species of wine, as the symbol of blood, with its fluidity, its fiery ardor, its bouquet at once heady and delightful, and its life-giving power, suggests to us the Holy Spirit, whose procession is a welling forth from the heart of the Father and the Son, whose mission is an outpouring, and who is in Himself the flood and fragrance of the divine life. It sets Him before us as the wine gushing from the divine grape-cluster, the Logos; as the wine of ardent love, of refreshment, of life, of the ecstatic happiness poured forth over the world in the sacred blood that was pressed from the human heart of the Logos by the force of His love, and is now poured into us the Eucharistic blood. Matthias Scheeben
December 6. The words “This is my body and this is my blood” hold the most perfect solution to the question of Emmanuel, or God-with-us, a question that has kept the heart of humanity in suspense for a long time – for humanity is divine in origin and therefore constantly strives to communicate personally with its source and ultimate end. Through these words, not only Bethlehem, Nazareth, Capernaum, Tiberias and Jerusalem – in other words, Palestine – but the whole earth has become the dwelling place of the Man-God. St. John Baptist Scalabrini
December 7. The Lord Jesus himself proclaims, 'This is My Body.' Before the blessing of the heavenly words something of another character is spoken of; after consecration it is designated 'body'. He himself speaks of his blood. Before the consecration it is spoken of as something else; after the consecration it is spoken of as 'blood'. And you say, 'Amen', that is, 'It is true.' What the mouth speaks, let the mind within confess; what the tongue utters, let the heart feel. St. Ambrose of Milan
December 8. Mary looks upon us with increased love and tenderness when we have received Holy Communion, for she sees in us something which belongs to her; she feels that the blood of Jesus, which flows then in our veins, forms, as it were, a sacred bond of relationship and consanguinity also with herself. Bl. Ildefonso Schuster
December 9. By the same food we are formed and are fed. As a woman feeds her child with her own blood and milk, so too Christ himself continually feeds those whom he has begotten with his own blood. St. John Chrysostom
December 10. The marvelous example of Christ’s humility shone forth when, girt with a towel, the King of Glory diligently washed the feet of the fishermen and even of his betrayer. The marvelous richness of his generosity was manifest when he gave to those first priests, and as a consequence to the whole Church and the world, his most sacred body and his true blood as food and drink so that what was soon to be a sacrifice pleasing to God and the priceless price of our redemption would be our viaticum and sustenance. St. Bonaventure
December 11. Who among us, dear brethren, could think it possible that Jesus Christ, out of love for His creatures, would have gone so far as to nourish our souls with His adorable body and His Precious Blood unless He Himself had not assured us of this fact? A soul may receive its Creator, and as often as it desires! O abyss of goodness and love of God for His creatures! St. John Vianney
December 12. O Jesus, Son of Mary, our brother and Savior, by the mystery of your body and blood, the body and blood you received in Mary’s womb and share with us when gather around your altar, preserve in us the gift of faith. It is our salvation and the salvation of all. It is God’s glory and your glory. Let it always be not only our glory but our joy. Let is be such today, and for eternity. Pope St. John XXIII
December 13. Oh, how sweet and pleasant to that soul and to Me is holy prayer, made in the house of knowledge of self and of Me, opening the eye of the intellect to the light of faith, and the affections to the abundance of My charity, which was made visible to you, through My visible only-begotten Son, who showed it to you with His blood! Which Blood inebriates the soul and clothes her with the fire of divine charity, giving her the food of the Sacrament [which is placed in the tavern of the mystical body of the Holy Church]. St. Catherine of Siena
December 14. What we enact in the Church's sacrificial rite, in our adoration of this Sacrament, in the receiving of Your Body and Blood, will, by Your grace, always be enacted and celebrated in the sacred enactment of our own life, in its daily routines and in its climaxes, in life and in death. We ask the grace, that in this Sacrament You may be to us the food for our journey when we part from this world, when our death.shall be taken up in Yours and the night will come when no one can be active any longer, when everything will sink into the nameless majesty of death. Karl Rahner
December 15. As the grains cannot be separated from their union once the bread has been made, and as water cannot return to its own proper state once it has been mixed with wine, so the faithful and the wise, who know they have been redeemed by the blood and passion of Christ, ought like inseparable members so to cling to their head by the consecration of themselves and their fervent religious life, that they cannot be torn from Him either by their own will, or by compulsion, or by ambition for any earthly good, or finally by death itself. St. Caesarius of Arles
December 16. O my God, holiness becomes Your House, and yet You make Your abode in my breast. My Lord, my Saviour, to me You come, hidden under the semblance of earthly things, yet in that very flesh and blood which You took from Mary, You, who did first inhabit Mary’s breast, come to me. My God, You see me; I cannot see myself… You see how unworthy, so great a sinner is, to receive the One Holy God, whom the Seraphim adore with trembling… My God, enable me to bear You, for You alone can. Cleanse my heart and mind from all that is past… give me a true perception of things unseen, and make me truly, practically, and in the details of life, prefer You to anything on earth, and the future world, to the present. Amen. St. John Henry Newman
December 17. The Holy Spirit “formed” the body and blood of the Infant in the womb of the Blessed Virgin and so, also, in the Eucharist the Gifts are overshadowed by the same Holy Spirit so as to be ‘made’ the body and blood of Christ. Nicholas Cabasilas
December 18. Eternal Wisdom [Christ]: Answer Me now a question. What is that of all lovely things which is most agreeable to a loving heart? The Servant: Lord, to my understanding nothing is so agreeable to a loving heart as the beloved Himself and His sweet presence. Eternal Wisdom: Even so. See, and on this account, that nothing which belongs to true love might be wanting to those who love Me, did My unfathomable love, as soon as I had resolved to depart by death out of this world to My Father, compel Me to give Myself and My loving presence at the table of the last supper to My dear disciples, and in all future times to My elect, because I knew beforehand the misery which many a languishing heart would suffer for My sake. The Servant: Oh, dearest Lord, and art Thou Thyself, Thy very Self, really here? Eternal Wisdom: Thou hast Me in the sacrament, before thee and with thee, as truly and really God and Man, according to soul and body, with flesh and blood, as truly as My pure Mother carried Me in her arms, and as truly as I am in heaven in My perfect glory. Bl. Henry Suso
December 19. Jesus, Who has come to nourish our spirit with His own Body and Blood, does so not to be transformed into us, but in order to transform us into Himself. He has given Himself to us in order that we may belong to Him. For the center of this great mystery is the Eternal Father's design to re-establish all things in Christ. Thomas Merton
December 20. The fairest and most striking symbol of this glorification of matter is surely the Holy Eucharist. Bread and wine are the most noble things that nature produces by way of food. In the sacred rites of the Church these are changed into the most noble thing of all : the Body and Blood of the Son of God, indeed into that body which is glorified and raised up to the Godhead in Heaven. Pius Parsch
December 21. “And the word was made flesh." This became reality in the stable of Bethlehem. But it has also been fulfilled in another form. “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life." The Savior, knowing that we are, and remain, men who have daily to struggle with our weaknesses, aids our humanity in a manner truly divine. Just as our earthly body needs its daily bread, so the divine life in us must be constantly fed. St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross
December 22. Man brings to the temple his offering, bread and wine, and God in a regal gesture makes of it his flesh and blood. Humanity brings its purest offering, the Virgin, and God makes of her the place of his nativity, the Mother of all the living, Eve fulfilled. Paul Evdokimov
December 23. How strange it is, that it is our flesh and blood, these bodies, that Christ uses for His purpose of love, as He used common bread for the Sacrament of His body. Poor bodies of men, broken, twisted, drained, ugly, and Christ present where they are. The Incarnation is everywhere. Caryll Houselander
December 24. Because the Virgin received Christ through the Holy Spirit, who is Eternal Fire, he has also offered himself up, as the apostle said, through the Holy Spirit as a living sacrifice to the living God, and he will be burnt by the same fire on the altar, in that through the workings of the Holy Spirit, the bread and wine become the flesh and blood of Christ. Rupert of Deutz
December 25. Since it is the Body and Blood of Christ that we receive, the Eucharist supposes the Incarnation and the mysteries which are founded upon or flow from it. Christ is upon the altar with the divine life which never ceases, with his mortal life of which the historical form has doubtless ceased, but of which the substance and merits remain, with his glorious life which shall have no end. Bl. Columba Marmion
December 26. As they shed their blood for their brethren, the martyrs provided the same kind of meal as they themselves had received from the table of the Lord. Let us therefore love one another as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us. St. Augustine of Hippo
December 27. Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them. St. John the Evangelist
December 28. The vineyard of the world brings bad and sour fruit, and the wine-press of God-haters will flow with the blood of Christ’s members. At this moment when we stand about the altar to celebrate Christ’s coming, death and resurrection, he descends once more after a mystical fashion into the pit, and is pressed out as a precious vintage in the wine-press of his passion in order to set at rest our thirst for God. At this moment, the members of his body, we cannot know where or how many, suffer at the hands of evil men. And we who now drink of the wine from this press shall perhaps ourselves soon be cast into that pit, and crushed in that press for our membership in him. Sr. Aemiliana Lohr
December 29 (Feast of the Holy Family). Kneeling before the Father, from whom all fatherhood and motherhood come, future parents come to realize that they have been “redeemed”. They have been purchased at great cost, by the price of the most sincere gift of all, the blood of Christof which they partake through the Sacrament. The liturgical crowning of the marriage rite is the Eucharist, the sacrifice of that “Body which has been given up” and that “Blood which has been shed”, which in a certain way finds expression in the consent of the spouses. Pope St. John Paul II
December 30. Christ remains united with the world, not only eucharistically, through the mysterious partaking of His Body and Blood in communion, but also by the power of Christ acting in the world. This is His mystical, even if not sacramental, presence in the world; this is His invisible and spiritual presence in the world, His participation in human life, by which He fulfills His promise to abide with us always - now, and forever, and in the ages of ages. Sergei Bulgakov
December 31. We have no greater proof of Christ’s birth and of his love than our daily reception of his body and blood at the holy altar. We have sight of him who was once born of the Virgin and once and for all offered himself in sacrifice for us. What more can we ask? What greater gift could we give than bringing others with us to Bethlehem? St. Aelred of Rievaulx