ARTICLES

If You Live Alone...

HELPS AVOID GOSSIP, TOO

Only there, J.R.R. Tolkien once wrote, will you find "the one great thing to love on earth." Only there, insisted the author of the The Lord of the Rings , "you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity." Only there, the "Master of Middle-earth" maintained, you will find "the true way of all your loves upon earth." But Tolkien, a devout Catholic, wasn't talking about his Middle-earth fantasy-land: he meant Jesus' real presence in the Blessed Sacrament.

So there's no need to go traipsing about Middle-Earth desperately seeking the one great thing to love on earth: the quest for the most precious ends at Most Precious Blood parish, 1245 Fourth Avenue, Chula Vista.

"I come anytime I need to talk to somebody," said Lucy Fernandez before visiting the Blessed Sacrament, "because I live alone. I feel like I'm talking with someone I can trust with all my life." This someone, Catholics believe, is Jesus Christ really present in the Blessed Sacrament -- the Real Presence. In the teeth of the Protestant Reformation, the sixteenth-century Council of Trent confirmed the Catholic belief that the Blessed Sacrament contains "the body and blood, together with the soul and divinity, of our Lord Jesus Christ ... truly, really and substantially ..."

Christ is "present in many ways to his Church," the Catechism of the Catholic Church explains, "in his word, in his Church's prayer, 'where two or three are gathered in my name,' in the poor, the sick, and the imprisoned, in the sacraments of which he is the author, in the sacrifice of the Mass, and in the person of the minister. But he is present most especially in the Eucharistic species," i.e., under the appearances of the bread and wine after consecration by the priest. "The priest," St. John Chrysostom explains, "in the role of Christ, pronounces these words, but the power and grace are God's. This is my body, he says. This word transforms the things offered."

That's why "the mode of Christ's presence under the Eucharistic species is unique," says the catechism. That's why the Eucharist is "the perfection of the spiritual life and the end to which all the sacraments tend," says St. Thomas Aquinas. And that's why Catholics have traditionally called it "the Most Blessed Sacrament." During the Second Vatican Council Pope Paul VI reaffirmed that "The Catholic Church has always offered and still offers to the sacrament of the Eucharist the cult of adoration, not only during Mass, but also outside of it, reserving the consecrated hosts with the utmost care, exposing them to the solemn veneration of the faithful ..."

Since 1985, this cult or worship of the Blessed Sacrament has been going on day and night at Precious Blood, according to Judy Gagliardi, adoration coordinator for 12 years now. There are 168 hours in a week, and for every one of them Gagliardi -- a widow with a job and a family to raise -- must schedule at least one person to be present before the Blessed Sacrament exposed. Why this continuous adoration?

"Why?" Gagliardi replied. "Because there are so many people."

But what about the wee hours of the morning? Why not adoration during the working day, as it's held at St. Jude Shrine in Southeast San Diego?

"We have one man who comes all the way from St. Jude's parish," Gagliardi replied, "after work to cover 3 to 4 a.m. Not everyone keeps banker's hours, and neither does Christ. But there's another reason.

"In a real dark night of the soul," F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, "it is always three o'clock in the morning." And over the years, Gagliardi, who has often dragged herself out of bed to cover an hour when the adoration chapel might otherwise be empty, has been rewarded by watching how Christ invisibly, silently comforts despairing souls.. She recalls a lady who came in, crying, "pray for my son: he was just thrown in jail" and a young man, about 20 years old, who kept saying over and over, "Please Jesus."

"He came over to me," Gagliardi remembers, "and said, please pray for me. He put his head in my lap and sobbed."

Ironically, it was in the "cry room" of Precious Blood Church that perpetual adoration was first started by Father Eugene Fischer, now retired from the diocese. The parish is currently served by the Oblates of Mary Immaculate; Father Frank Wagner, OMI is its pastor. "Father Frank has been very good about letting us do whatever we want," Gagliardi said. He recently provided new carpeting for the perpetual adoration chapel, which is now a large, separate oratory in the building containing the parish offices.

But not every pastor is so supportive. "To tell you the truth," Gagliardi said, "I don't think most of the priests want" perpetual adoration. "They do not want to deal with the fact that they have to keep these chapels occupied with bodies for 24 hours. They have enough problems." No problem: "The rest of the parishes can be feeder parishes into this chapel," she said.

"We don't want Jesus to be alone," Gagliardi went on. "But our biggest fear is somebody taking the Blessed Sacrament and desecrating it in a 'Black Mass' or something." Yet she notes that "we've never had an incident where I've ever had to call the police." The Precious Blood chapel, unlike the perpetual adoration chapels at St. John the Evangelist in Encinitas and Holy Spirit in San Diego, is always completely unlocked. "As you see," Gagliardi said, "you can come anytime you want."

And Fernandez, a registered nurse, does just that; and when she does, she comes out feeling refreshed.. "Anytime I leave the chapel I feel comforted," she said. "He's the source of comfort." She'd rather pour her heart out to him than "someone you don't know ... you end up being a gossip," Fernandez said.

Tolkien would understand. He wrote those words about the Blessed Sacrament in a 1941 letter to his son Michael, who had gone off to fight for England. Little did the Oxford don realize during the darkness and frustation and death of those days that he would write a masterpiece which would be a light to many people, Catholic and non-Catholic alike.

"Out of the darkness of my life," he wrote his son, "so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament.... There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves upon earth, and more than that: Death: by the divine paradox, that which ends life, and demands the surrender of all, and yet by the taste (or foretaste) of which alone can what you seek in your earthly relationships (love, faithfulness, joy) be maintained, or take on that complexion of reality, of eternal endurance, which every man's heart desires."