The Past

The idea of the Eucharist Project was conceived over twenty years ago as its founder and director, Kenneth Howell, was translating many of the Greek and Latin fathers of the church. Having discovered collections of eucharistic texts of the church fathers translated into Spanish and Italian, he was amazed to find that no such work existed in English. At first, he determined one day to produce volumes like the ones he read in other modern languages but then realized that a searchable website would far more useful in today’s environment.

At this same time, Kenneth Howell also discovered a need to write better histories of eucharistic theology than had been produced so far. A comprehensive history in English did not exist. Although Darwell Stone’s widely used History of the Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist served many students of the subject well for many years, it was nevertheless incomplete and lacking the historical acumen that had become standard since Stone’s day. Howell then resolved that a scholarly comprehensive history would be his last contribution to the church and the world. In that line, Howell published two articles in theological journals (Toronto Journal of Theology, Nova et Vetera) and completed a volume on the eucharistic theology of St. John Chrysostom entitled Golden Mouth, Golden Chalice to be published soon by Catholic University of America Press.

Howell’s interests, however, have never been purely scholarly. Around 2015, he teamed up with Thomas J. Kronholz to begin a devotional book of readings from the saints and blesseds of the church. Mystery of the Altar was published in 2020. Emmaus Road Publishing produced a handsome volume with eucharistic readings for every day of the year from every century of the church, from the Didache to St. John Paul II.

Along with these readings, Howell, Kronholz and a growing team of scholars continued to translate Greek and Latin texts of the church fathers in anticipation of producing this website.

The Present

The Eucharist Project is now poised to begin presenting these eucharistic writings of the church fathers to the world. Although no church father ever wrote a treatise devoted to the Eucharist — the first one was written in the ninth century — there are thousands of passages about the Eucharist embedded in their homilies, commentaries, catechetical orations, and a host of other genres. Building on the achievements of past scholars and using the electronic resources available today, our translation team is updating the database of texts weekly. So, frequent visits to the site are encouraged.

You, our users, are very much a part of our work. We encourage you to communicate with us about texts we may have missed or ways in which you think the translations might be improved. Please keep in mind that our policy has been to translate as literally as possible while still preserving the meaning so that knowledgeable users can detect the correspondences between the English and the original language. Our aim is to make this website the very best it can be since there is no comparable project anywhere on the web.

To access the texts, look under Accessing Texts and Translations.

The Future

The Eucharist Project is more than a website with texts. Its long-term goals are educational and pastoral. It seeks to promote knowledge of the Eucharist which in today’s cultural-philosophical environment is a large and daunting task. This knowledge can and must be joined to pastoral care at all levels of church and society. To serve those two purposes, members of our team are available for speaking engagements, retreats, and other venues. To find out more, contact each team member individually.

The future work of this website, once phase one described above is complete, can move in one of two directions. One path would be to include eucharistic texts from other ancient languages like Syriac and Coptic. The other would be to translate the existing texts into other modern languages such as Spanish, French, German, and Italian. We hope that we can move ahead on both fronts at the same time.