Bread of Life, bread for the poor

Saint Ignatius Theophorus wrote seven epistles while trudging from Antioch to Rome. As Roman soldiers pushed him toward martyrdom in a coliseum, Ignatius decried a different enemy of Christian faith: docetism, whose Christian adherents claimed Jesus never existed physically on Earth—that he only appeared to. In denying the Incarnation, Ignatius says, such heretics also fail to see the Lord’s presence in the Eucharist and in the poor. “They have no concern for love, none for the widow, none for the orphan, none for the oppressed, none for the prisoner or the one released, none for the hungry or thirsty.” And “they abstain from Eucharist” because “they refuse to acknowledge the Eucharist.” Ignatius, help us to see Jesus—in all the places he said he’d be. MEMORIAL OF IGNATIUS OF ANTIOCH, BISHOP, MARTYR