Yesterday was the feast of the First Martyrs of Rome. Mike Aquilina, from the Touchstone archives, with a piece on the importance of Eucharist to those early Christians.

This is a precious snapshot, because we do not know as much about those first Christians as we would like to know. They were a small group, not especially wealthy, without social or political status, and often operating underground. What’s more, over the next 275 years, imperial and local governments tried fairly regularly to wipe out all traces of Christianity—destroying not only the Christians’ bodies, but their books and their possessions as well. So what we have left are the handful of documents that survived—mostly sermons, letters, and liturgies—as well as a few other scraps of parchment or painted wood, and the shards of pottery that the desert sands have preserved for us.

Yet what we see in those surviving documents and what we find in the archeological digs confirm all that we learn in the Acts of the Apostles, especially in one small detail: The first Christians “devoted themselves to the apostolic teaching, to the communion, and to the breaking of the bread and the prayers.” One phrase especially—the breaking of the bread—recurs in many of the scraps we have from those first centuries, and it always refers to the Eucharistic Liturgy, the Lord’s Supper.

Our first Christian ancestors devoted themselves to the Eucharist, and that is perhaps the most important way they showed themselves to be Christians. No Christian practice is so well attested from those early years. No doctrine is so systematically worked out as the doctrine of the Eucharist.

It was when they gathered for the Eucharist that all this—their common life, their charity, their fidelity to the teaching of the apostles—happened most clearly, directly, intensely. They experienced fellowship with each other and together heard the apostles’ teaching, and they broke the bread in the accustomed way, as they said the customary prayers.

So it was in the newborn Church. The Church took its identity from its unity in belief and charity, which was sustained by the Eucharist.