Catholic Ping and chuckle of the day.
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Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread – By praying this one petition on behalf of the entire human race, we are placing our trust in God’s providence. We pray that all of the starving people will obtain food, we pray that all atheists will come to know and love the Lord, we pray that the unemployed will find jobs and we pray that everyone will receive and accept the grace they need to get to Heaven. By concentrating on “this day” (and not tomorrow), we put our faith in God’s providence and follow Jesus’ command to avoid worrying about tomorrow (Matthew 6:34).
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Give us this day our daily bread does not only mean food. It is about the Eucharist.
http://www.adoremus.org/0707SupersubstantialBread.html
Our “Daily Bread?”
But is the Holy Eucharist of the Eucharistic banquet also the daily bread of the “Our Father”? If the “Our Father” is the perfect prayer, which is most perfectly prayed in the context of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, then does it not make sense that the daily bread that we most need and so ask for is the supersubstantial bread of the Holy Eucharist?
It may surprise many Catholics to learn that this indeed is the teaching of the Catholic Church as expressed by the Council of Trent and as re-proposed in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Furthermore, many Protestants who say this prayer daily may be shocked to learn that they are truly praying to receive Holy Communion daily and that this interpretation goes back to very words of Our Lord in the “Our Father”: “Give us this day our daily bread”.
The Greek word here is epiousion, which is a hapax — a word that is only used here and nowhere else in the Greek language — and so presumed to be the Greek equivalent of whatever word Our Lord may have used in Aramaic or Hebrew. Most translate the word as “daily”, and this goes back to the Latin of Saint Jerome, who renders “arton epiousion” as “panis quotidianum”, daily bread, in the Gospel of Luke. However, in the Gospel of Saint Matthew, Jerome translates the same words as “panis supersubstantialem”. In other words, Jerome, who realized that this Greek hapax could not be expressed in Latin with both meanings at once, chose to give it one meaning in Matthew — “daily”; and another in Luke — “supersubstantial”, so as to preserve both senses of the word for Latin speaking Christians, albeit in two distinct biblical locations.
We have mostly lost this second original meaning — supersubstantial — and so are usually unaware of this lost Eucharistic connotation in our recitation of the Our Father.