Do This in Remembrance of Me, by Michael Pakaluk

BE AFRAID, by Rodney Pelletier
March 30, 2021
Fauci Has No Idea What’s Going On In America, And That’s Just How We Might Beat Him, by Christopher Bedford
March 30, 2021

*Image: Friend of the Humble (Supper at Emmaus) by Léon-Augustin Lhermitte, 1892 [Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA]

By Michael Pakaluk, The Catholic Thing, March 30, 2021

Michael Pakaluk, an Aristotle scholar and Ordinarius of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas, is a professor in the Busch School of Business at the Catholic University of America. …

Michael Pakaluk“This is my body, the body given on your behalf.  This you are all to do, for a remembrance of me.” (Lk 22:19)  Thus a rather wooden and literal translation, which preserves the word order, and the oddities of the original language, clearly connoting something strange and mysterious.   What does it mean?

When I was a Protestant, I would hear that the Eucharist is solely a memorial, no different from the Washing of Feet, or Stations of the Cross, because Jesus said so: it was “for a remembrance.”

Of course, it doesn’t follow.  A remembrance need not be solely a remembrance, and the very thing remembered, or something close to it, can be the means of remembrance.  For instance, it makes perfect sense for a married couple to regard their intimate union as a remembrance of their wedding – their original act of union – but need it be said that an act which can procreate a child is hardly a “mere” remembrance? …