The spring semester’s final meeting in the “Catholic Conversations” lecture series featured Msgr. Paul McPartlan, a priest of the Archdiocese of Westminster (UK) and professor of the Catholic University of America in Washington, who presented “The Eucharist: Source and Summit of the Christian Life.”
“This is the great treasure at the heart of our Catholic lives, and we can never exhaust this treasure” he told a group of about 40 people May 2 at St. Thomas More Oratory on the campus of University of Delaware in Newark.
Msgr. McPartlan was born in Newcastle upon Tyne and graduated from Cambridge in mathematics in 1978.
Having studied philosophy and theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, he was ordained a priest by Cardinal Basil Hume in 1984. He gained his doctorate from Oxford, and then served for four years in a London parish. After holding a postdoctoral research fellowship at St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge, from 1993-1995, he was appointed to the faculty of Heythrop College in the University of London, where he taught systematic theology for ten years before coming to CUA in 2005.
Msgr. McPartlan served for two terms on the International Theological Commission (2004-2009, 2009-2014). A member of the International Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church since 2005, he has participated in international Anglican-Roman Catholic and Roman Catholic-Methodist dialogue.
He was appointed as a papal chaplain by Pope Benedict XVI in 2008, and served as acting dean of the School of Theology and Religious Studies at CUA in 2014-2015.
“I said earlier, the Eucharist is the heart of the church,” he said. “We might even say it’s the very engine room of the church where the faithful and the ministerial priest interact so as to give full effect to the salvation won by Christ, bringing the world to the altar and taking all the grace that is concentrated here back out into the world.
“Is this teaching widely known? I think we can agree it is far from widely known. The indispensable contribution that all of the faithful make in the celebration of each and every Mass … the decree on the ministry in life of priests at Vatican II, actually said that the faithful are called to offer themselves, their works and all of creation with Christ, and that priests should teach the faithful to offer the divine victim to God the father in the sacrifice of the Mass, and with the victim to make an offering of their whole life.
“The faithful need to be taught this,” he said, “because we haven’t heard enough of this.
“The liturgy is actually an action, a priestly action of the whole body of Christ. We gather as a priestly people and the prayers of each and every one present are an integral part of what’s happening.”
“The Eucharist is not just one of seven sacraments in the church,” Msgr. McPartlan said. “It’s the defining celebration that the church has. The church’s defining act in which all of the faithful have a part to play so that the saving work of Christ, still today, can reach and transform the world.”
