The Eucharist must be the heart of the priest’s life. This truth was driven home by the archbishop of Santo Domingo, Francisco Ozoria, during his homily Tuesday at the International Eucharistic Congress currently underway in Quito, Ecuador.

In his homily, Archbishop Ozoria warned that, although social pastoral care is very important, when a priest prioritizes a social activity instead of celebrating the Mass, he fails to put the sacrament given by Christ its proper place.

“All these activities, without the Eucharist at the center, are empty, because in the Eucharist we have Jesus Christ, who is the center of our being,” Archbishop Ozoria stated during a homily given before dozens of bishops, priests, and religious in attendance, along with the lay faithful.

Without this clarity, Archbishop Ozoria continued, people are being taught “not with words but with actions that other things, other activities, are more important than the Eucharist,” he emphasized.

The archbishop of Santo Domingo went on to stress that the objective of Eucharistic congresses is “precisely to prioritize the sacrament of the Eucharist” and place it at “the center of Christian life, as the source and culmination of the life of the Church.”

And priests, he noted, “have to express this by all means. In our teachings, in our homilies, in all pastoral activities we must express this centrality of the Eucharist.”