The words necessary to consecrate the Holy Eucharist are the same words that Christ pronounces over the bread and the wine at the Last Supper, and which all priests, acting in the name of Christ, repeat in the celebration of the Mass.
The Mass is the true and proper sacrifice of the New Law in which Jesus Christ, through the ministry of the priest, offers to God the Father, in a mystical, non-bloody immolation, His Body and His Blood, under the species of bread and wine.
“For from the rising of the sun even to the going down, my name is great among the Gentiles, and in every place there is sacrifice, and there is offered to my name a clean oblation: for my name is great among the Gentiles, saith the Lord of hosts” (Mal.1:11).
It is a sacrifice, i.e., an oblation made to God of a victim out of honor and reverence, in order to show to the Creator and Master of everything His sovereignty over man, His creature. Here, the victim is none other than Jesus Christ, the Son of God incarnate, the perfect victim and alone worthy of God, of which the sacrifices of the Old Testament were only figures.
