54 for a gift, giving prompts giving, love calls for love. Thanks to this, the Eucharist becomes a special place of God’s personal meeting with man in the atmosphere of true love. The Eucharist leads man to a union with God and consequently, to the primacy of Christ in the heart of a Religious. However, if Christ still does not have the prime place in the heart of a sinner, the Eucharist shall awaken a desire for it. “O love! O tenderness! O generosity, thanks to which You impart Your body to us, O Jesus! You invite us, wretched mortal men aware of our unworthiness, to bravely approach Your Divinity. You encourage us, people with defi led lips, to fearlessly partake of the most sacred Banquet. You tell us, awestruck by Your Majesty, to confi dently eat the Bread of Angels: ‘Take it and eat it.’ And a proof of love and generosity of even greater weight is the fact that You do not bar anyone from this holy table, but instead say to all: ‘Take it.’ Thus, won over by this great kindness and graciousness of the host, I, although a man of unclean lips, open my mouth and heart to You, my dearest God; may it be done onto me according to Your word. ” Summing up, we may venture to say that Blessed Stanislaus leads us to the conclusion that the priority of spirituality is revealed thanks to the Eucharist. On the other hand, the communal character of the Eucharist leads to a new understanding of the fraternal relations in a religious community and the entire Church as a community of the faithful, where the primacy of God ought to reveal itself and where love ought to become the basis for all relations. Basically, we could say that all of the domains of the religious life ought to be subordinate to the primacy of the spiritual life understood in the above-presented manner. However, among the previously mentioned means there is one, which is traditionally recognized as indispensable, also by our Marian tradition. It is a certain irrevocable dimension of asceticism. This is undertaken not so much as a special exercises leading to perfection (as asceticism is usually and commonly regarded), but more as an asceticism understood in the context of the primacy of the spiritual life. In other words, there is a close cooperation with a well-understood religious spirituality for the purpose of its deepening, or eliminating everything that impedes giving priority to God. In this sense, life’s toils and trials accepted in faith and love of God, suffering caused by illness, age, misunderstanding, or work-related diffi culties and problems in ministry, which give the feeling of “fruitlessness,” can also have an ascetic character. Actions of self-restraint that are closely linked to one’s religious vocation have an extraordinary importance: the Religious undertakes them in order to give real primacy to the spiritual life and to genuinely place Christ in the center of everything. Asceticism undertaken in total awareness—as reinforced by the document Ripartire da Christo—contains the elements crucial for the veracity of a religious spirituality, because it is a manner of becoming like Christ, while its various forms “have
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