“Here are Christians who are poor in spiritual goods, who are subject to a thousand infirmities, who are weak and languishing. My God! how then can they remain three, four or five and six months without giving this heavenly food to their souls? Beside the beautiful Sacrament, they are like someone who is dying of thirst beside a river, and would only have to bend his head to drink, or like a man who remains poor beside a treasure, who need only stretch out his hand.

Having a remedy so efficacious for curing their soul and a food so capable of conserving its health, how is it that they let it die of misery? My God! what misfortune and what blindness!

Alas! let us say it groaning. One spares nothing for a body which sooner or later will be destroyed and eaten by worms, and a soul created to the image of God, a soul that is immortal, is despised and treated with the greatest cruelty. Is it not, in effect, to treat it without pity, to let it die of starvation, refusing it the bread of life which alone can sustain it? But, we are peaceful and happy in this state. Yet you risk being surprised by death and cast into hell.

Is it because the devil is your master? If your faith was not dead, what confusion you would feel at seeing your father, or mother or brother or sister, or one of your neighbors go to the Holy Table to be fed with the adorable Body of Jesus Christ, and you, yourself, abstaining from it! O my God! what a misfortune! So great that one cannot understand it!”

(From The Eucharistic Meditations of the Cure of Ars)