There are thousands of ways to honor God… That means that, as usually happens, every saint becomes noted for exemplifying one way in particular. For St. Peter Julian Eyrmard, the way was deep devotion to the Holy Eucharist.
Peter was a Frenchman, born at LaMure, a village near Grenoble. Until age 18 he worked at his father’s trade, knife-making. But his dream was to become a priest. After finishing his studies, he was ordained to the diocesan priesthood in 1834. He soon won a name for his zeal in diocesan service. But he had a second dream too: to join a religious order. In 1839 the Marist Fathers accepted him. By 1845 his talents were so appreciated by the Order that he was appointed superior of his Marist province. From the outset, Father Peter’s devotion had focused on the Eucharist. Without that devotion, he testified, “I should have been lost.” He recounted an experience that he had had one Corpus Christi. While carrying the Blessed Sacrament in the two-hour-long procession, he received a unique grace. “My eyes were filled with tears,” he later wrote. “My soul was flooded with faith and love for Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. Those two hours seemed but a moment. I laid at the feet of Our Lord the Church in France and throughout the world, everybody, myself.”
The next step in his devotion followed in 1851 when he made a pilgrimage to the famous French shrine of Our Lady of Fourvieres. Here the inspiration came to him very strongly to found a religious order dedicated principally to honoring the Blessed Sacrament. Having obtained a release from the Marist Fathers, he established, in 1856, the Congregation of Priests of the Most Blessed Sacrament. It received initial approval from Pope Pius IX in 1859. The members performed the usual priestly tasks, especially preparing adults to make their first communion; but the center and key of all their activities was perpetual adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. Lay brothers assisted the Fathers in their work. In 1858 Eyrmard also founded a parallel community of nuns, the Servants of the Blessed Sacrament. For priests in general he set up the Priest’s Eucharistic League (still flourishing), and for the laity the Archconfratemity of the Blessed Sacrament, a society with parish branches.
A tender-hearted, loving person, St. Peter Eyrmard possessed to a rare degree the virtue called in Latin pietas. Our word “piety” comes from this, but in English it has usually come to mean something rather different. Basically, piety means a loyal devotion to the person, places and things that are closest to us and entitled to our special affection. Thus, it was typical of St. Peter that, when he visited his hometown (for which he had an enduring fondness), he would always pray at the font where he was baptized, the altar of which he received his first communion, and the graves of his parents.
Peter’s lifelong devotion to the Holy Eucharist was the supreme phase of this native piety. It reminds us forcibly of the treasure we all have in the Real Presence. It prompts us to ask ourselves how strong is our own piety towards the Blessed Sacrament. Do I enter church modestly clothed? Do I behave reverently in the church where Jesus is enshrined? Do I genuflect before the tabernacle? Do I receive communion only with a clean soul and proper dignity of body? Do I make a point of coming to church to pay a visit to Christ in the Eucharist even outside of Mass time? These acts of piety, you will recognize, are traditional signs of Catholic reverence. They are part of the etiquette of our faith. --Father Robert F. McNamara
(Year C). Eucharistic Adoration has for its object the Divine Person of Our Lord Jesus Christ present in the Most Blessed Sacrament. In this Sacrament he lives, he wishes us to speak to him and he will speak to us. Everyone may speak to our Lord. Is he not there for all? Does he not say: Come ye all to me?
This familiar converse between the soul and our Lord is true Eucharistic meditation; it is adoration. Everyone has the grace for it. To succeed in it, and to shun routine and dryness of the heart, however, the adorers should draw their inspiration from their own attraction of grace or from the different mysteries of our Lord's life: from the Blessed Virgin or the virtues of the saints, in order to honor and glorify the God of the Eucharist by all the virtues of his mortal life, as well as by those of the saints, of whom he was the means and the end, and of whom he is today the crown and the glory. Look upon your hour of adoration as a heavenly hour, an hour in Paradise. If you go to it as if you were going to heaven to the Divine Banquet, you will long for this hour and hail it with joy.
True love looks not at what it gives but only at what the beloved merits. Jesus, pleased with you, will speak to you and your heart will open to the rays of that Sun as the flower bathed and refreshed by the dews of night, opens under the beams of the radiant orb of day. His encouraging voice will penetrate your soul like fire consuming the substance which offers no resistance. Like the Spouse in the Canticle, you will exclaim: "My soul melts with joy at the voice of my beloved." You will hear him in silence or rather in the sweetness and most powerful action of love. You will become one with him. What most unfortunately checks the growth of grace and love in our soul is that hardly have we reached the feet of our good Master before we begin to speak to him of ourselves, our sins, our defects, our spiritual poverty. In doing so we tire our minds by the sight of misery, our heart grows sad under the thought of our ingratitude and infidelity. Sadness gives rise to pain, pain to discouragement, and it is only by humility in bearing our trial that we escape from this labyrinth in the freedom of God.
Let us avoid this imperfection, and as the first movement of the soul ordinarily determines the following action, we must direct our first movement to God and say to him: "O my good Jesus, how glad I am to see you! What satisfaction I find in spending this hour with you and in telling you my love! O how good of you to call me! How sweet of you to love so poor a creature as I am! O yes! I, too, wish to love you!"
In order to adore Jesus well, we must remember that he is really present — as a living person — in the Most Blessed Sacrament. There he glorifies, and continues all the mysteries and virtues of his mortal life. We must remember that the Holy Eucharist is Jesus Christ, past, present and future; that the Holy Eucharist is the highest development of the Incarnation and the mortal life of the Savior; that Jesus Christ therein gives us all graces; that all truths culminate in the Eucharist; and that in naming the Holy Eucharist we have said all that can be said since the Holy Eucharist is Jesus Christ. Let the Holy Eucharist be the beginning and end of the meditation of the mysteries, the virtues, the truths of religion. It is the furnace though truths are only the flames. Let us start from the furnace and we shall spread abroad its flames. What is more simple than to find resemblance between the birth of Jesus in the stable and his sacramental birth on the altar and in our hearts?
Who does not see that the hidden life at Nazareth is continued in the Host of the Tabernacle, and that the Passion of the Man-God is renewed in the Holy Sacrifice at every moment of time and in all places of the world? Is not our Lord meek and humble in the Blessed Sacrament as he was during his mortal life? Is he not always the Good Shepherd, the Divine Consoler, the Friend of the heart? Happy the soul who knows how to find Jesus in the Eucharist and in the Eucharist all things else! (My Eucharistic Day)