The Church calls the Most Holy Eucharist, the “source and summit of our lives,” because it underscores not just the importance, but also the absolute necessity that the Most Holy Eucharist must have in our lives as Catholics.

Today Jesus finishes what has come to be called His Bread of Life discourse and, at this end, as we hear, the disciples are shocked. And, they aren’t just shocked; they are even questioning whether they can accept Him, whether they believe all that He has taught, all that He has done.

Because, while those in the first reading decided to continue to serve the Lord, and to believe in Him since they saw the miracles and felt His protection, those in our Gospel that witnessed the same, that felt the same, find themselves now questioning whether they can continue on with Him, whether what He spoke was, indeed, truth or something else. And, as a result, they find themselves making a very difficult choice: to continue following Him or to completely abandon Him.

Never once does Jesus recant on what He has said nor does He explain Himself, or apologize for asking them to partake in, what to many, seems like cannibalism, instead, He questions their faith and He says: “What if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before?”

As if to say, if you saw that miracle, would you then believe? Would you then stay? But they were trying to understand a mystery of faith without faith they were trying, as our Gospel puts it, to understand with the eyes of the flesh, but as Jesus says, it is the spirit that will give this insight, because His words are Spirit and life, His words can only be understood with the ears of faith and with a heart that trusts.

Jesus knew that, ultimately, only some would accept Him and what He had to say and others, simply, would not. He knew, as sad as it may be, that, in the end, not everyone would continue following Him. And, unfortunately, many people did leave; they returned to their former ways of life and they abandoned Jesus, because they could not accept the reality, the truth that many people cannot accept today.

This is why Jesus asks probably one of the most difficult questions of the twelve, His very own friends, those who have been with Him from the beginning, have seen His miracles, have lived side by side with Him, following Him from town to town, boat to boat, mountain to mountain: “Do you also want to leave?” As if to say, “after all this do you still truly believe I am who I say I am?” And He waits for a response.

And, St. Peter, on behalf of the twelve, responds simply and clearly: “Master to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

And, yet, that same question He poses to us as well, a question He asks us every day of our lives, a question we hear in the face of temptation, in the face of despair, in the face of sadness, in our darkest hour, in our brightest hour, in our confusion and in our doubt: “Do you also want to leave?”

There is no harder question that we can answer in our lives, nor more difficult, because it is, as it was to the twelve, our very Savior asking if all He has done is not enough for us, if what He has given is still lacking, if we can find something or someone greater than He who laid down His very life for us, and continues to do so in the perpetual sacrifice He has left us on that altar. 

It is His most intimate and His most personal question for us, and, at the same time, the most somber, because He is not just asking us if we believe Him, but if we trust Him, if we love Him enough to remain with Him always.

I think this question is even more poignant, especially in light of all of the recent scandals, because this question was posed to His closest friends, the disciples, those who would eventually become our modern day bishops. As I try to wrap my head around these scandals, the one thing I often think about is whether the intense suffering that Jesus endured at His Passion wasn’t just for the generic “our sins,” but more specifically, the sins of those closest to Him, the way they used their power and their authority, given to them by God, to betray both the confidence and trust of the people, but also the one who brought them there in the first place.

Perhaps, Jesus’ suffering was so intense because the sufferings of His heart eclipsed those of His body, perhaps, this is the reason God gave us devotion to His Sacred Heart, a Heart that beats and bleeds for all of us, a heart, as I have shared before in the miracle of Lanciano, that manifested itself in the Most Holy Eucharist.

His was and is a heart that suffered so much in order that we could have that gift of the Most Holy Eucharist, which is why the pain He must have experienced and continues to experience is knowing that without the priest, there is no Eucharist, while He watches those closest to Him forget that without the Eucharist, they truly cannot survive.

I don’t want to minimize the gravity of the situation, but this is what we are seeing. A priest, a bishop, especially, can become no different than a CEO, and when that happens, to put it bluntly, all Hell, literally breaks loose.

St. Alphonsus Liguori put it well he said: “What...if he saw our priests employed in mercantile affairs, acting as the servants of seculars...forgetful of the works of God; if, in a word, he saw them seeking, as St. Prosper says, ‘to advance in wealth, but not in virtue, and to acquire greater honors, but not greater sanctity...’What a misery,’ says St. Gregory, ‘to see so many priests seeking, not the merits of virtue, but the goods of this life!”

I know we have to avoid the simple solution to a complex problem, but it always seems that the crises in the Church is a symptom of a larger problem, and that problem is always the same, if we don’t have holy priests, if we don’t have shepherds, those willing to do what is necessary for the laity to know his name, to hear his name, then we are simply spinning our wheels and speaking without doing or, in some cases, failing to listen to the Holy Spirit speaking in us. St. Josemaria Escriva says it well: “A secret, an open secret: these world crises are crises of saints.”

Perhaps this is what is necessary for the Church to grow; maybe the Church has become stagnant, not because of declining numbers, not because of lack of vocations, but lack of holiness in the priest.

This is why it is so important to pray for the priest, to pray for the bishop, because, as we have sadly seen, they need our prayers. Yes, they need to repent, yes, they need to atone for every one of their sins, and some even need to be arrested and stripped of their faculties that they have made the choice to deprive themselves of, but they also need the support from you, from everyone, they need prayer, they need sacrifice, they need spiritual assistance if the Church is going to survive.

Every single day Jesus asks us that same question, “do you also want to leave?” And we can respond like Peter or the thousands who left, because every single day, as He did with the disciples, Jesus patiently waits for our response.

What, then, will that response be?