Eucharist, also called Holy Communion or Lord’s Supper, in Christianity, ritual commemoration of Jesus’ Last Supper with his disciples, at which (according to tradition) he gave them bread with the words, “This is my body,” and wine with the words, “This is my blood.” The story of the institution of the Eucharist by Jesus on the night before his Crucifixion is reported in four books of the New Testament (Matthew 26:26–28; Mark 14:22–24; Luke 22:17–20; and I Corinthians 11:23–25). The letters of the Apostle Paul and the Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament demonstrate that early Christians believed that this institution included a mandate to continue the celebration as an anticipation in this life of the joys of the banquet that was to come in the Kingdom of God.  The Eucharist has formed a central rite of Christian worship. All Christians would agree that it is a memorial action in which, by eating bread and drinking wine (or, for some Protestants, grape juice or water), the church recalls what Jesus Christ was, said, and did. They would also agree that participation in the Eucharist enhances and deepens the communion of believers not only with Christ but also with one another.
Because of variations in both doctrine and practice, however, the Eucharist, which was intended as both a symbol of and a means of fostering unity within the church, has been a source of disunity and even contention. Many Christian traditions teach that Jesus is present in the Eucharist in some special way, though they disagree about the nature, locus, and time of that presence. In many other Christian traditions the Eucharist is symbolic or commemorative. One example of a Christian tradition that does not practice the Eucharist is Quakerism, whose adherents see the ritual as too formal and thus as constraining the experience of the Holy Spirit. Furthermore, different denominations disagree on whether access to the Eucharist should be open to all Christians or restricted to members who have fulfilled initiation requirements and thus are in full communion with a particular church. Among Baptists, for example, the practice of “close communion” has restricted the ordinance to those who are baptized properly—i.e., as adults upon a profession of faith. As a result of such variations, the Eucharist has been a central issue in the discussions and deliberations of the ecumenical movement.
