{"id":6883,"date":"2006-07-01T08:14:44","date_gmt":"2006-07-01T08:14:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/07\/the-martyrs-cup.html"},"modified":"2006-07-01T08:14:44","modified_gmt":"2006-07-01T08:14:44","slug":"the-martyrs-cup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/07\/the-martyrs-cup.html","title":{"rendered":"The Martyr’s Cup"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday was the feast of the First Martyrs of Rome. Mike Aquilina, from the Touchstone archives, with a piece on the importance of Eucharist to those early Christians.<\/a><\/p>\n

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This is a precious snapshot, because we do not know as much about those first Christians as we would like to know. They were a small group, not especially wealthy, without social or political status, and often operating underground. What\u2019s more, over the next 275 years, imperial and local governments tried fairly regularly to wipe out all traces of Christianity\u2014destroying not only the Christians\u2019 bodies, but their books and their possessions as well. So what we have left are the handful of documents that survived\u2014mostly sermons, letters, and liturgies\u2014as well as a few other scraps of parchment or painted wood, and the shards of pottery that the desert sands have preserved for us.<\/p>\n

Yet what we see in those surviving documents and what we find in the archeological digs confirm all that we learn in the Acts of the Apostles, especially in one small detail: The first Christians \u201cdevoted themselves to the apostolic teaching, to the communion, and to the breaking of the bread and the prayers.\u201d One phrase especially\u2014the breaking of the bread\u2014recurs in many of the scraps we have from those first centuries, and it always refers to the Eucharistic Liturgy, the Lord\u2019s Supper.<\/p>\n

Our first Christian ancestors devoted themselves to the Eucharist, and that is perhaps the most important way they showed themselves to be Christians. No Christian practice is so well attested from those early years. No doctrine is so systematically worked out as the doctrine of the Eucharist.<\/p>\n

It was when they gathered for the Eucharist that all this\u2014their common life, their charity, their fidelity to the teaching of the apostles\u2014happened most clearly, directly, intensely. They experienced fellowship with each other and together heard the apostles\u2019 teaching, and they broke the bread in the accustomed way, as they said the customary prayers.<\/p>\n

So it was in the newborn Church. The Church took its identity from its unity in belief and charity, which was sustained by the Eucharist.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday was the feast of the First Martyrs of Rome. Mike Aquilina, from the Touchstone archives, with a piece on the importance of Eucharist to those early Christians. This is a precious snapshot, because we do not know as much about those first Christians as we would like to know. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6883"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6883\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}