Given for you

Mahatma Gandhi is quoted as saying:

The political and journalistic world can boast of very few heroes who compare with Father Damien of Molokai. The Catholic Church, on the contrary, counts by the thousands those who, after the example of Fr. Damien, have devoted themselves to the victims of leprosy. It is worthwhile to look for the sources of such heroism [T.N. Jagadisan's 1965 publication Mahatma Gandhi Answers the Challenge of Leprosy]

Who was Father Damien of Molokai?  He was a Belgian Catholic priest of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, who was canonised in 2009.  He voluntarily ministered among people afflicted with leprosy in Hawaii for 16 years until his death in 1889.  He shared their lives, treated their wounds and eventually contracted the disease himself.  He frequently spoke of the Mass and the Eucharist as the source of strength that sustained his mission.

His story reminds me of a TV documentary made at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic when, in Tallaght University Hospital, Dublin, the chaplain was filmed in the wards behind curtains talking to God and a person who was dying. 

I captured the words used by Fr John Kelly on the RTE Investigates programme aired in February 2021:

Through this anointing that the Lord, who is love and mercy, will help you with the grace of the Holy Spirit, and may God now free you and bring you to a place of peace and rest. Don't be afraid to let go now and find your peace. And we ask the Lord to be with all your family, to give them comfort and consolation. All the hard work, and all the things you did, to make their lives meaningful. Wonderful memories that will be cherries now forever.

There, alone behind the isolation curtains, this dying person may well have been comforted by the priest's words before slipping away. The chaplain survived the epidemic. Others were less fortunate (in Italy for example).

Here is an extraordinary detail for me: I recall speaking to the same Fr John Kelly in December 2001 two days before my late father died and just a few months after he began as chaplain in that hospital.  Fr John assured me that he had spoken with my Dad and that he had let go of some things and was ready for the journey. I will never forget that moment. Then, twenty years later, the same priest appeared on my television screen, ministering to another dying person in the same hospital.  The words of the chaplain were for me as well.

These examples are relevant to the Eucharist because they reveal something of the self-giving love that flows from it. Saint Damien ministered among those suffering from leprosy at great personal cost. During the Covid-19 pandemic, hospital chaplains, nurses, doctors and carers likewise remained at the bedside of the sick despite the risks involved. The Eucharist is not merely a doctrine to be believed; it is a way of life that draws Christians into Christ's own self-offering for others.