Commenting on Pope Benedict XVI’s apostolic exhortation on the Eucharist, Archbishop Donald W. Wuerl of Washington, D.C., said the document reminds Catholics that the Eucharist is “a mystery to believed and to be celebrated and to be lived.”

“Our eucharistic life, our spiritual life, our Christian life should be reflected in our daily life,” he said. The pope’s March 13 letter, “The Sacrament of Charity,” teaches that “you can’t have a spiritual life cut off from daily life,” the archbishop explained. “We must live out the Eucharist in a way that begins to transform ourselves and the world around us.”

Living the Eucharist is specifically addressed in a section of the papal letter called “a mystery to be proclaimed.”

The Eucharist is the gift Jesus “makes of himself, thus revealing to us God’s infinite love for every man and woman,” the pope writes. But the love we celebrate in the sacrament, he says, is “not something we can keep to ourselves” but is to be shared with all people.

He adds: “What the world needs is God’s love; it needs to encounter Christ and to believe in him. The Eucharist is the source and summit not only of the church’s life, but also of her mission.”

And the implications of this?

“We cannot approach the eucharistic table without being drawn into the mission (of bringing Christ to others) which ... is meant to reach all people,” the pope says. “Missionary outreach is thus an essential part of the eucharistic form of the Christian life.”

Pope Benedict also explores what living the church’s mission entails.

First, it involves being a witness by the way we live — of giving “testimony of a consistent Christian life.”

The pope writes: “The wonder we experience at the gift God has made to us in Christ gives us new impulse to our lives and commits us to become witnesses of his love ... through our actions, words and way of being. ... Witness could be described as the means by which the truth of God’s love comes to men and women in history, inviting them to accept freely this radical newness.”

In the Eucharist, Jesus “makes us witnesses to God’s compassion towards all our brothers and sisters. The eucharistic mystery thus gives rise to a service of charity towards (our) neighbor, which ‘consists of the very fact that, in God and with God, I love even the person whom I do not like or even know.’ ”

Church communities, “when they celebrate the Eucharist, must become ever more conscious that the sacrifice of Christ is for all, and the Eucharist thus compels all who believe in him to become ‘bread that is broken’ for others, and to work for building a more just and fraternal world,” the pope writes.

Pope Benedict also says there are “social implications” to the eucharistic mystery. Quoting the 2005 world Synod of Bishops on the Eucharist, he writes: “ ‘All who partake of the Eucharist must commit themselves to peacemaking in our world scarred by violence and war (and) by terrorism, economic corruption and sexual exploitation.’

“Precisely because of the mystery we celebrate, we must denounce situations contrary to human dignity, since Christ shed his blood for all, and at the same time affirm the inestimable value of each individual person.”

Pope Benedict writes: “We cannot remain passive before certain processes of globalization which not infrequently increase the gap between the rich and the poor worldwide. ... It is impossible to remain silent before the ‘distressing images of huge camps throughout the world of displaced persons and refugees. ... Are these human beings not our brothers and sisters?’ ”

He adds: “The Lord Jesus, the bread of eternal life, spurs us to be mindful of situations of extreme poverty in which a great part of humanity still lives; these are situations for which human beings bear a clear and disquieting responsibility. ... The food of truth demands that we denounce inhumane situations in which people starve to death because of injustice and exploitation, and it gives us renewed strength and courage to work tirelessly in the service of a civilization of love.”

Pope Benedict concludes his letter with these words: “The Eucharist makes us discover that Christ, risen from the dead, is our contemporary in the mystery of the church, his body. Of this mystery of love we have become witnesses.”