Pope Pius XII picks up a new theme in Mediator Dei, so let’s begin this idea with the priesthood of Christ in the Eucharist. “Culmination and center” sounds like “source and summit,” doesn’t it?
66. The mystery of the most Holy Eucharist which Christ, the High Priest instituted, and which He commands to be continually renewed in the Church by His ministers, is the culmination and center, as it were, of the Christian religion. We consider it opportune in speaking about the crowning act of the sacred liturgy, to delay for a little while and call your attention, Venerable Brethren, to this most important subject.
A restatement of Church teaching in traditional language:
67. Christ the Lord, “Eternal Priest according to the order of Melchisedech,”[Ps.109:4] “loving His own who were of the world,”[John 13:1] “at the last supper, on the night He was betrayed, wishing to leave His beloved Spouse, the Church, a visible sacrifice such as the nature of (people) requires, that would re-present the bloody sacrifice offered once on the cross, and perpetuate its memory to the end of time, and whose salutary virtue might be applied in remitting those sins which we daily commit, . . . offered His body and blood under the species of bread and wine to God the Father, and under the same species allowed the apostles, whom he at that time constituted the priests of the New Testament, to partake thereof; commanding them and their successors in the priesthood to make the same offering.”[Council of Trent, Sess. 22, c. 1]
So far, so good.
Catholic Sensibility 