Dear Friends -- September 29, 2019

At our last Priest’s Council Meeting just after Labor Day, Bishop Matano shared with the Council some startling news.

(No, it was not about money.) A recent Pew research study he read commented that the newest crisis in the Catholic Church centers around a fundamental lack of belief in the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. This prompted me to share the following reflection with the Assumption Liturgy Committee just this past Monday evening.

When we speak about the Real Presence of Jesus, I first want you to reflect on what we mean by the word “real.” Certainly, we can perceive someone or something when they are present to us, inasmuch as we sense (either feel, taste, touch or intuit) something within our personal boundary space. But what makes this presence real? Is it just my perception that something is here as opposed to there? (This is the perception involved when your medical professional asks you to rate your pain on a scale of 1 to 10, because there is no way they experience what is real in your own life.) Or is there somehow an objective basis upon which we can, without pause, determine this or that to be truly real?

Philosophers like George Steiner (Real Presences, Univ of Chicago Press, 1991), suggest that language understood both verbally and nonverbally (especially in the arts) is fundamentally our conduit to truth and meaning. We use language to “tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.” While verbal language and non-verbal language (like music and art) are just simple symbol systems, we trust that our language systems provide us with meaning and act as conduits to what is ultimately truly real. At the same time that we all know there are  limits to words and that there are forms of art that are, at least for me, utterly misunderstood; there is still a fundamental belief that every creative act (a beautiful poem or a stirring violin concerto) provides access to something—dare I say, a presence—that exceeds the mere words on a page or the sounds emitted from the musical instrument. In short, language guarantees us that there is truly something real out there.

The ancients understood this perfectly. Consider the opening lines of the Book of Genesis. What happens “in the beginning”? God creates! How does he do this? (You remember the next line: God says, “Let there be light.” There is a fiduciary contract—a contract of trust—between word and object, between sign and what is signified, between language and reality itself. From the opening lines of Genesis, we can be assured that, in the words of Nathan Mitchell, (Real Presence: The Work of the Eucharist, 2007), “…[T]he world—that being itself—is ‘sayable,’ that reality and truth can be expressed and embodied in words.” (p. 87).

Moving to the New Testament and the Prologue to John’s Gospel, is it no wonder then that “the Word became flesh…and dwelt among us”? ( John 1:14). Unlike the modern world, the ancients had absolutely no problem with a trustworthy covenant between word and world, between that which is “real” (in Latin res) and that which is “signified” (in Latin sacramentum). That’s why, for hundreds of years, the Church assumed axiomatically that when Jesus, the very Word made Flesh said, “This is my Body” and “This is my Blood,” that the sign (the language spoken by the very Word of God himself—again in Latin, the sacramentum) could not be anything other than real (again in Latin, res). To use the language of Aquinas, there was a trust that the unity of res et sacramentum (the presence of the sign and object signified) is absolutely real.

Jesus is really present in the bread and wine that constituted (and still constitutes) the foundation of the Eucharist itself.
Next week: how res and sacramentum got torn apart, and our contemporary challenge—How do we put them back together? Stay tuned!