VATICAN CITY, OCT. 14, 2005 (Zenit.org).- Without the Eucharist, charity will not last, said a group of auditors addressing the Synod of Bishops.
Andrea Riccardi, founder of the Community of Sant’Egidio, acknowledged on Wednesday when he addressed the general assembly that «charity does not last without the nourishment of the Eucharist.»
«I saw this in many known and unknown lives among the poor,» he said.
Brother Marc Hayet, general director of the Little Brothers of Jesus, explained that their founder, Charles de Foucauld, who will be beatified Nov. 13, established contemplative fraternities who work among the poor and unite «the exposition of the Blessed Sacrament and an exposed life» of a religious.
He explained that a life exposed gives others the ability to see that «we have a job and a life similar to theirs, and that we share the same concerns for a more just and worthy existence.»
Luis Fernando Figari, founder of the Sodalitium Vitae Christianae, a new ecclesial reality that began in Latin America, said that the Eucharist is the key to the «new evangelization,» including within the Church herself.
In the Eucharist, he said, is found the answer to that «nostalgia of the infinite» that people today feel, but which is snatched away «by many substitutes which offer the ideologies and praxis of this time.»
Kiko Argüello, founder of the Neocatechumenal Way, told the synod: «We need Christ to give us, in the Eucharist, his dying for us, in the broken bread and in his blood poured out, in order to show his resurrection, his eternal life, to the world.»
