Dear Friends -- October 13, 2019

I’ve been writing about the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist for the past couple of weeks because there is a serious crisis of faith among some Catholics. By this, I mean that some Catholics really believe in Jesus, as well as the Church, God, heaven and hell, eternal life, judgment and the joy of heaven, but they can’t adequately articulate what we mean by the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. And, if the Eucharist is indeed the “summit and source” of our life as Catholics (as affirmed by the Second Vatican Council), then doesn’t it demand that we have a reasonable understanding of the Eucharist as the Real Presence of Jesus?

Some will say it’s just a matter of faith. You need faith to believe in the Real Presence of Jesus. OK, but what is faith? Is it merely trusting what we were taught while growing up in a Catholic household? Not a bad start by any means--But can we say anything more? In my estimation, the reason many young and not-so-young people are fleeing their Catholic roots today lies specifically in my generation’s (the baby boomers) failure to show any depth of understanding in the reasonable nature of Catholic Christian faith today. And we DO have really good reasons for why we believe what we believe. It is, in fact, a matter of faith, but the Catholic faith in the Real Presence of the Eucharistic Lord is reasonable. My sincere prayer is that you will be able to explain this to others in a cogent, calm, rational and well-thought-out manner. In short, I’m advocating a new wave of adult faith formation, especially with regard to the central understanding of our life as a Eucharistic people.

As Catholics, we are not offering the world the newest widget which people simply have to have, nor are we going to have the most technologically savvy, musically stunning, emotionally appealing program each and every Sunday morning. Nor are we simply a community of wonderfully warm and inviting people who have such tremendous outreach to the disenfranchised people in our area. While all of these are good, what we are as Catholics is a people who celebrate Eucharist–the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in which our God is really present. And this is not simply a “holy communion” (a special gathering of people) either. It is the very self-offering, the sacrifice of Jesus, body, soul, and divinity, his Real Presence on an altar of sacrifice each time Mass is celebrated.

Eastern Orthodoxy shares a similar theology of the Eucharist with us. For the first 1500 years of the Church’s history, Christianity was defined by this real presence of Christ. For 1500 years, humanity was able to hold symbols as efficacious conduits of reality. Things were real because symbols possessed a power to make that reality present. Here I ask you to remember last week’s discussion about marriage: The very moment the words (remember, words are symbols), “I take you to be my wedded wife/husband, to have and to hold…..etc,” are spoken aloud in the front of witnesses IS the moment when two people are really married. No one at a wedding ever doubts that two people are really married if they hear these words. The rings don’t marry a couple, neither does the officiant. It is the very words themselves that cause the reality of marriage. It is this same bond between symbol (bread and wine) and reality (Jesus) that is brought about at Mass.

Beginning in the 16 ^th century the bond between symbol and reality was brought into question. This was the age of the Renaissance, a renewed thinking into the very nature of what made things “real.” It was the dawn of science when symbols were deprived of their efficacious power in favor of a rigorous methodological framework as the only way through which truth could be known. The old ordering of reality was seen as “primitive,” “magical,” and “backward.” How could Jesus be really present in bread and wine? (If it looks like bread and tastes like bread, it must BE bread). You can’t test for the presence of Jesus, can you? It was in this period that some Christians began to worship with Bread and Wine as simply a holy communion–a sort of nostalgic look back at what Jesus did at his last supper with a special (ie. holy) gathering here and now. Mass was abandoned because even the language of sacrifice sounded so archaic, how could this “holy communion meal” BE the sacrifice of Jesus? Such thinking led to much of Western Europe’s Protestant Reformation. In the Catholic Church (and Eastern Orthodoxy), we never abandoned the rootedness of our worship as the Eucharistic sacrifice of Jesus, where he IS really present.

Next week: How do we engage our modern culture, recapturing a true sense of the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. Stay tuned.