“There is close reciprocity between Eucharist and Church and between Eucharist and Christian life; the Eucharist possesses an intimate ecclesial dimension and, vice versa, the Church has a eucharistic dimension. We can equally say that the Eucharist models the life of each Christian and, consequently, that the Christian existence possesses a eucharistic form”, said the Right Rev. Ricardo Blázquez Pérez, Bishop of Bilbao and President of the Spanish Bishops’ Conference (CEE), on opening the 89th plenary assembly of the CEE in Madrid on 23 April. The plenary will end on 27 April. But “how is the eucharistic form of Christian life shaped and how is it expressed?”, asked the bishop, who recalled in his keynote address the first encyclical of Benedict XVI “Deus caritas est” and his postsynodal exhortation “Sacramentum caritatis”. “Whoever nourishes himself with the food of truth and of love that is the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ – he replied – shall live for ever”. In fact, living as a disciple of Jesus means living the various vocations that mature in the Church, “in daily life” as in “martyrdom, “in the evangelising mission” as in the “service that the Church wishes to perform to humanity”. So, “the eucharistic form impregnates and embraces the whole of our life in every situation”. There exists, in addition, “a close connection between eucharistic form and moral transformation”. The bishop of Bilbao also touched on the problem of “laicism” and what it means. “It is – he said – legitimate to speak of the autonomy of temporal realities, if by that we mean that created things and society itself enjoy their own peculiar laws and values that man discovers and orders for himself; but if autonomy is meant in the sense that created realities do not depend on God and that man may use them without referring them to the Creator, the falsity of this opinion is clear to anyone who believes in God, since the created being without the Creator is a contradiction in terms”. The intellectual reflection of Benedict XVI and the elucidation of his teaching, added Bishop Blázquez Pérez, “serve us as an expert guide”. Originally, he continued, ‘lay’ denoted “the condition of the Christian who did not belong to the clergy nor profess the religious life”, but in the course of time its meaning was debased into ‘secular’ and came to mean “relegating religion to the private sphere”, thus attributing to the term “an ideological connotation antithetical to what it originally had”. The Pope, he recalled, “propounded a healthy laicism”, which requires that the State “should not consider religion as a purely individual sentiment”, to be relegated to the private sphere. It thus forms part of a “healthy laicism” that “the representatives of the Church should pronounce on moral questions”. During the plenary assembly the Spanish bishops are also reflecting on Catholic schools and immigration. The former subject will be treated also in the light of a document presented by the episcopal Commission for teaching and catechesis. The episcopal Commission for migration has also prepared a basic text for debate on the “Church in Spain and migration”. During the session of 24 April, Archbishop Paul Josef Cordes, President of the Pontifical Council “Cor Unum”, spoke of the encyclical “Deus Caritas est”, and its repercussions on the pastoral ministry of the Church.
