Statement of Faith
The Orthodox and Catholic faith as delivered once for all to the saints
The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed
The word creed comes from the Latin credo — “I believe.” In the Orthodox Church it is called the Symbol of Faith: a bringing together, an expression, a confession. From the earliest days of the Church, Christians were required to state what they believed before being baptized. The simplest creed was the confession that Jesus is the Christ, and that the Christ is Lord.
As time passed and heresies arose, these confessions grew more precise. In the fourth century a great controversy shook Christendom: was the Son of God a creature, or was He eternal, divine, and uncreated? The Emperor Constantine called a council at Nicaea in 325 to settle the question. That council’s definition — expanded at the Second Ecumenical Council in Constantinople in 381 to include the full teaching on the Holy Spirit — became the Symbol of Faith accepted throughout the entire Church.
This Creed is prayed by the Franciscan Friars of the Forsaken at every celebration of the Divine Liturgy. It is the formal and official expression of everything we believe.
The Symbol of Faith, with Scripture
This Symbol of Faith is the only part of the Divine Liturgy prayed in the first person singular. All other prayers and hymns of the Liturgy begin with “we.” Only the Creed begins with “I” — because faith is first personal, and only then corporate and communal.
The Real Presence — Jesus Is Physically Alive in the Eucharist
Consubstantial with the elements of bread and wine
The doctrine of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist has been held from the very earliest days of the Church. For the first eight centuries of Christianity, there was no controversy regarding it. Christ is truly, bodily present — Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity — in the consecrated bread and wine of the Divine Liturgy. This is not a symbol. It is not a memorial only. It is the living Christ, offered once on the Cross and perpetually offered on the altar.
The Witness of Scripture
St. Paul writing to the Corinthians was unambiguous:
“Is not the cup of thanksgiving for which we give thanks a participation in the blood of Christ? And is not the bread that we break a participation in the body of Christ?”
1 Corinthians 10:15–16
“The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.’ … For whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord.”
1 Corinthians 11:23–27
The Witness of the Fathers
“They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they do not confess that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ, flesh which suffered for our sins and which the Father, in his goodness, raised up again.”
Ignatius of Antioch, Epistle to the Smyrnaeans — c. 110 AD
“We call this food Eucharist, and no one else is permitted to partake of it… not as common bread nor common drink do we receive these; but since Jesus Christ our Savior was made incarnate by the word of God and had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so too… the food which has been made into the Eucharist by the Eucharistic prayer… is both the flesh and the blood of that incarnated Jesus.”
Justin Martyr, First Apology — c. 150 AD
“Christ has declared the cup… to be his own Blood, from which he causes our blood to flow; and the bread, a part of creation, he has established as his own Body, from which he gives increase to our bodies.”
Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies — c. 190 AD
The Old Testament Prefigurements
The Eucharist was not invented at the Last Supper. It was foreshadowed throughout the entire Old Testament.
The Bread of the Presence. God commanded Moses to place bread on the table in the Tabernacle “before me always” (Exodus 25:30). This sacred bread — holy food set perpetually before the Lord — prefigured Christ who declared, “I am the bread of life” (John 6:35), and who promises, “I am with you always” (Matthew 28:20).
The Blood of the Lamb. The Temple sacrifice required a lamb without blemish — one that did not resist, run away, or cry out. Isaiah foretold: “Like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is dumb, so he opened not his mouth” (Isaiah 53:7). The Orthodox priest, as the counterpart not of the rabbi but of the ancient Jewish sacrificial priest, offers the Lamb of God on the altar at every Liturgy.
The Todah. The ancient Jews offered a special sacrifice called the Todah — the thanksgiving. Unlike other animal sacrifices, the Todah added the suffering of one’s own life. David wrote: “The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit” (Psalm 51:17). The ancient rabbis believed that when the Messiah came, all sacrifices except the Todah would cease — and the Todah would continue for all eternity. In 70 AD the Temple fell and the bloody sacrifices stopped. Only the Todah remains: the eucharistia, the Final Sacrifice, whose last words are Todah l’Adonai — “Thanks be to God.”
The Passover. God commanded that the Passover lamb be “without blemish” and that its flesh be eaten (Exodus 12:5–8). When Jesus instituted the Eucharist at the Last Supper, he was transforming and fulfilling the Passover — replacing the blood of an animal with His own.
The Bread of Life Discourse — John 6
The most explicit teaching of Christ on the Eucharist is found in the sixth chapter of St. John’s Gospel. After feeding five thousand with bread and fish, Jesus declared himself the Bread of Life — and when the crowds murmured and turned away, he did not soften or withdraw a single word:
“Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink.”
John 6:53–55
This discourse cost Jesus most of his followers. The multitudes who had wanted to make him king turned away, calling the teaching intolerable. The seventy-two disciples largely abandoned him. Jesus turned to the Twelve and asked: “Do you also wish to go away?” (John 6:67). He did not qualify or retract. The Real Presence is not a later doctrinal invention — it is the teaching of Christ himself, accepted at cost by those who remained with him.
For the Franciscan Friars of the Forsaken, the Holy Eucharist is the center of our liturgical life. Everything we do — our poverty, our prayer, our service to the poor — flows from and returns to the altar. The forsaken of El Paso are served by brothers who have themselves been fed on the Body and Blood of the Lord. We go out from the altar into the world, and we carry the world back to the altar in prayer.