Among the hardy perennials of American Catholicism are surveys indicating that many Catholics no longer believe in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist as they ought. A recent headline from Pew Research blares: “Only a Third of U.S. Catholics Believe that the Eucharist is the Body and Blood of Christ.”[1] Such bad news is invariably treated with alarm, followed by episcopal reaffirmations, worried essays, and evangelical homilies on the topic. This is, of course, both fitting and proper. Roman Catholicism rightly insists that the Eucharist is the source and summit of the Christian life. Accordingly, it is of great import that the faithful properly understand God’s transformative presence in the mass. Roman Catholicism, moreover, has good reason to be confident in the biblical and traditional basis of its constant teaching that, as Trent states, “after the consecration of the bread and wine, our Lord Jesus Christ is truly, and substantially contained under the appearances of those perceptible realities.” (DS 1636). To discover that Catholic belief is slipping in this most crucial area of doctrine and ecclesial life is indeed cause of urgent concern.
That said, I am always a bit perplexed by the framing. What does the average skeptical respondent think they are saying when they acknowledge doubts regarding ‘the real presence’ of Christ in the Eucharist? Are they like the ex-Catholic novelist Mary McCarthy who sought to placate the shy but feisty Flannery O’Connor at a dinner party by allowing that the Eucharist is a ‘pretty good” symbol? O’Conner’s famous rebuff “then the hell with it” has thrilled traditional Catholics ever since, but it seems to me to miss the more fundamental issue at play: McCarthy’s apostasy. She didn’t believe Christ was present in any serious way in the Church’s Eucharist because she no longer believed in Christ’s divinity or the salvific efficacy of the Church’s sacraments.
For respondents of this sort, to deny the real presence is simply shorthand for denying the whole Christian economy, even if this denial takes the form of being unwilling to affirm it with any real ontological density. Or, do our skeptics suspect that the Catholic idea of ‘transubstantiation” is too literal, too medieval, to swallow without qualm? Perhaps they are haunted by a childhood memory, theirs or someone else’s, of being told that chewing the wafer is like taking a bite out of Jesus and have become convinced them that there must be a better way to think about divine presence, one more credible to modern thinking and experience. Even Saint Paul VI’s Mysterium Fidei, written out of a concern that the changes brought by Vatican II were undermining Eucharistic piety, made clear that Trent’s embrace of transubstantiation did not preclude other conceptual schemes provided they retained and built upon that doctrine’s abiding insights.[2] Doubts about real presence could, therefore, be doubts about the explanatory adequacy of transubstantiation.
Finally, the failure to affirm Catholic orthodoxy might be rooted in the experience of the mass itself. After all, the original disputes between Protestants and Catholics over the Eucharist were only partly conceptual. The alternatives to the Church’s official doctrine proposed by the reformers gained purchase because many found the mass lacking the animation and stimulation of the personal faith they craved. Even in those communities which emphasized the exclusively symbolic character of the bread and wine were not thereby granting a degree of Christ’s real presence amongst the Roman Catholics that they denied themselves. The issue was not, generally speaking, whether Christ was present in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper but rather which account of that presence best engendered the spiritual transformation of the worshippers.
Accordingly, a Catholic might express doubts on the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist out of a sense that the spiritual flaccidity they see at mass is somehow tied to the way the assembled, congregation as well as priest, understand what is happening. They have come to believe that focalizing Christ’s presence in the consecrated objects of the body and blood somehow encourages the ritualism and passivity they find in the Catholic liturgy. In this way, the Church’s emphasis on the objectiveness of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist works against “the full, conscious and active” participation that Vatican II states ought to mark Catholic worship. Of course, a good Catholic theologian could marshal arguments a plenty that subjective presence requires and presupposes objective presence, but there is no denying that belief in God’s real presence in the Eucharist is connected to one’s experience of its celebration in the liturgy: lex orandi, lex credendi.
Stephen Long is quite justified, therefore, to relate Robert Jenson’s description of bodiliness as availability to the particular experience of the Zooming church during the pandemic. He rightly sees the impossibility of prying apart the theological characterization of real presence in the eucharistic body and blood of Christ from the real presence of the flesh and blood members of the body of Christ to each other. Paul could not have made the organic nature of this relationship clearer to his wayward Corinthian parish (I Cor 11:17-34). If they greedily gobble up all the food and suck down all the wine before all the parts of the Body of Christ have arrived, they make a mockery of what it is they are commemorating. To eat the bread and drink the cup worthily means taking into account the availability of the body and blood of the Lord in both of its senses. To consume Christ without honoring all the members of his body, especially those deemed dishonorable, is to bring judgment upon themselves.
It is probably too soon to assess the effect COVID has had on Catholic belief in the real presence, but it is hard to imagine that the lasting impact will be positive. Since absence makes the heart grow fonder, one might expect a slight initial bump. Since the idea of ‘Zoom communion’ in Catholicism is an impossibility of which none greater can be conceived, many Catholics gained from privation a new appreciation of Christ’s two bodies. Nonetheless, one shudders to consider the significance to Eucharistic belief of the acquiescence by the Church’s bishops to the shuttering of Churches at the command of a regime that insisted liquor stores and abortion mills remain open. The slightest evidence of agreement on the part of our leaders that worshipping the Lord around his altar, partaking of his real presence, during a health crisis was anything less than absolutely ‘essential’ could turn out, once its full meaning sinks in, to be a scandal on par with the sexual abuse crisis only a decade past. Ironically, one saw evangelical communities, with their ‘to hell with it’ symbolic view of Lord’s presence at his Supper, doing whatever they could come together, holding outdoor services, even to the point of confronting armed police. If a Catholic bishop did the like in the United States, I missed it.
Once the government allowed us again to assemble, we find the cup casually withheld and the handshakes of reconciliation prior to the communion, a profound expression of the unity of the two bodies, were replaced by tepid peace signs held close to the body. Even today, families treat one another like so many Typhoid Mary’s and Larry’s when inside the Church, withholding bodily intimacy until safely outside. Whatever one thinks of the efficacy of masks, there is no denying that they serve to separate us from one other. For a Church which speaks of the fulfillment of human existence as a face-to-face encounter with God, the downside of worshipping behind a blue barrier ought to be obvious. My point is not to render judgment upon those who were responsible for the Catholic Church during the pandemic, many bishops and priest acted in good faith, have done the best they could within limited options. My point is simply to agree with Long on the inescapable nexus between understanding the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist and the actual presence of the community in the church. Indeed, one could argue that the higher the claims for the Eucharistic presence, the greater the potential damage created by a response to the pandemic that failed to hold the two presences together.
Jenson argues that Christ’s body should be understood as availability in three distinct but interrelated modalities: Jesus’ historical body, the Church as the body of the risen Christ, and the Eucharistic body. As Long puts it: “a personal body is most essentially that person’s availability, the church is the risen Jesus’s availability, and the bread and the wine on the table are the availability of the risen Jesus to the Church.” Is such an undeniably beautiful way of thinking Christ’s bodily presence acceptable to a Catholic? If the answer could be determined by the presence or absence of the Aristotelian categories of substance and accident that undergird transubstantiation, it is a quick and hard ‘no.’ Jenson was no fan of this way of thinking about reality and spent a career arguing that a truly baptized metaphysics must be informed by the triune nature of God and his determination to reveal himself in historical time. Happily, this is not the place to assess the relative adequacy of Jenson’s metaphysics because it is not necessary to adjudicate the above question.
An honest consideration of the various magisterial statements on the Eucharist, most prominently that of Trent, most recently, Saint John Paul II’s encyclical Ecclesia de Eucharistia (2003), finds no equation of Eucharist orthodoxy and the philosophical account of transubstantiation. Even in the heat of the Reformation, Trent acknowledged the difficulty in conceiving how Christ could be both at the “right hand of the Father” and present bodily upon the altar: “We can hardly find words to express this way of existing” [“qua etis verbis exprimere vix possumus”]. All that is claimed regarding the reasonableness of the belief is that there exists “no contradiction” [Neque enim haec inter se pugnant]. With respect to transubstantiation itself, Trent simply states that it a fitting and proper name for the mode of real presence. Of no small significance, Trent issued no canon damning those who fail to employ the term.
Centuries later, Paul VI’s defense of the doctrine focused not on the particulars of transubstantiation but rather on its fundamental insight that the change affected by consecration is “ontological.” Any legitimate alternative account must in no way compromise the whole and complete change at the level of being of the bread into the body of Christ and the wine into his blood. In other words, Catholic theologians are free to explore other ways to express Christ’s Eucharistic presence provided that they attain the same ontological density one finds in transubstantiation. For example, Pope Paul faulted “transfinalization” and “transignification” not for their novelty, but for their failure to secure the objective transformation of the eucharistic elements. To return to O’Conner, if Christ’s presence is merely symbolic, dependent on this or that human subject finding in the bread and wine the body and blood, it fails Paul’s test. The symbolic value must be consequent of what the elements have become in reality.[3]
It is obvious that Jenson’s notion of ‘availability’ operates at the level of being rather than confined to the subjective experience of believers. It is Christ, as divine subject, who decides to make his eucharistic body and blood available to the Church in the bread and wine. Catholics might wonder whether his approach can make sense of a ‘private mass’ (priests consecrating the bread and wine for their own consummation) or eucharistic adoration. I suspect Jenson had the typical Protestant concerns about these activities, concerns shared by many Catholics as well. That said, Long correctly discovers in Jenson a resource for explaining how essential it is that the bodies that make up the body of Christ be available to one another whenever Christ makes his eucharistic body available to the Church. Paul the Apostle long ago warned the Corinthians against tearing the two bodies asunder, and Long, with the help of Robert Jenson, rightly alerts the Zooming Church of the judgment that awaits.
James Keating is Associate Professor of Theology at Providence College.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/05/transubstantiation-eucharist-u-s-catholics/
[2] Paul VI broke with common practice by issuing an encyclical during an Ecumenical Council. Promulgated on the Feast of St. Pius X, who championed frequent reception of the Eucharist and the celebration of First Communion with boys in suits and girls in white dresses, Paul was clearly reacting to the fact that the Council did not reaffirm explicitly Trent’s statement that the change of bread and wine into the body and blood “the holy Catholic Church has fittingly and properly named transubstantiation.” (DS 1642, 1652)
[3] “As a result of transubstantiation, the species of bread and wine undoubtedly take on a new signification and a new finality, for they are no longer ordinary bread and wine but instead a sign of something sacred and a sign of spiritual food; but they take on this new signification, this new finality, precisely because they contain a new ‘reality’ that we can rightly call ontological.” DS 4413.
Among the hardy perennials of American Catholicism are surveys indicating that many Catholics no longer believe in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist as they ought. A recent headline from Pew Research blares: “Only a Third of U.S. Catholics Believe that the Eucharist is the Body and Blood of Christ.”[1] Such bad news is invariably treated with alarm, followed by episcopal reaffirmations, worried essays, and evangelical homilies on the topic. This is, of course, both fitting and proper. Roman Catholicism rightly insists that the Eucharist is the source and summit of the Christian life. Accordingly, it is of great import that the faithful properly understand God’s transformative presence in the mass. Roman Catholicism, moreover, has good reason to be confident in the biblical and traditional basis of its constant teaching that, as Trent states, “after the consecration of the bread and wine, our Lord Jesus Christ is truly, and substantially contained under the appearances of those perceptible realities.” (DS 1636). To discover that Catholic belief is slipping in this most crucial area of doctrine and ecclesial life is indeed cause of urgent concern.
That said, I am always a bit perplexed by the framing. What does the average skeptical respondent think they are saying when they acknowledge doubts regarding ‘the real presence’ of Christ in the Eucharist? Are they like the ex-Catholic novelist Mary McCarthy who sought to placate the shy but feisty Flannery O’Connor at a dinner party by allowing that the Eucharist is a ‘pretty good” symbol? O’Conner’s famous rebuff “then the hell with it” has thrilled traditional Catholics ever since, but it seems to me to miss the more fundamental issue at play: McCarthy’s apostasy. She didn’t believe Christ was present in any serious way in the Church’s Eucharist because she no longer believed in Christ’s divinity or the salvific efficacy of the Church’s sacraments.
For respondents of this sort, to deny the real presence is simply shorthand for denying the whole Christian economy, even if this denial takes the form of being unwilling to affirm it with any real ontological density. Or, do our skeptics suspect that the Catholic idea of ‘transubstantiation” is too literal, too medieval, to swallow without qualm? Perhaps they are haunted by a childhood memory, theirs or someone else’s, of being told that chewing the wafer is like taking a bite out of Jesus and have become convinced them that there must be a better way to think about divine presence, one more credible to modern thinking and experience. Even Saint Paul VI’s Mysterium Fidei, written out of a concern that the changes brought by Vatican II were undermining Eucharistic piety, made clear that Trent’s embrace of transubstantiation did not preclude other conceptual schemes provided they retained and built upon that doctrine’s abiding insights.[2] Doubts about real presence could, therefore, be doubts about the explanatory adequacy of transubstantiation.
Finally, the failure to affirm Catholic orthodoxy might be rooted in the experience of the mass itself. After all, the original disputes between Protestants and Catholics over the Eucharist were only partly conceptual. The alternatives to the Church’s official doctrine proposed by the reformers gained purchase because many found the mass lacking the animation and stimulation of the personal faith they craved. Even in those communities which emphasized the exclusively symbolic character of the bread and wine were not thereby granting a degree of Christ’s real presence amongst the Roman Catholics that they denied themselves. The issue was not, generally speaking, whether Christ was present in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper but rather which account of that presence best engendered the spiritual transformation of the worshippers.
Accordingly, a Catholic might express doubts on the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist out of a sense that the spiritual flaccidity they see at mass is somehow tied to the way the assembled, congregation as well as priest, understand what is happening. They have come to believe that focalizing Christ’s presence in the consecrated objects of the body and blood somehow encourages the ritualism and passivity they find in the Catholic liturgy. In this way, the Church’s emphasis on the objectiveness of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist works against “the full, conscious and active” participation that Vatican II states ought to mark Catholic worship. Of course, a good Catholic theologian could marshal arguments a plenty that subjective presence requires and presupposes objective presence, but there is no denying that belief in God’s real presence in the Eucharist is connected to one’s experience of its celebration in the liturgy: lex orandi, lex credendi.
Stephen Long is quite justified, therefore, to relate Robert Jenson’s description of bodiliness as availability to the particular experience of the Zooming church during the pandemic. He rightly sees the impossibility of prying apart the theological characterization of real presence in the eucharistic body and blood of Christ from the real presence of the flesh and blood members of the body of Christ to each other. Paul could not have made the organic nature of this relationship clearer to his wayward Corinthian parish (I Cor 11:17-34). If they greedily gobble up all the food and suck down all the wine before all the parts of the Body of Christ have arrived, they make a mockery of what it is they are commemorating. To eat the bread and drink the cup worthily means taking into account the availability of the body and blood of the Lord in both of its senses. To consume Christ without honoring all the members of his body, especially those deemed dishonorable, is to bring judgment upon themselves.
It is probably too soon to assess the effect COVID has had on Catholic belief in the real presence, but it is hard to imagine that the lasting impact will be positive. Since absence makes the heart grow fonder, one might expect a slight initial bump. Since the idea of ‘Zoom communion’ in Catholicism is an impossibility of which none greater can be conceived, many Catholics gained from privation a new appreciation of Christ’s two bodies. Nonetheless, one shudders to consider the significance to Eucharistic belief of the acquiescence by the Church’s bishops to the shuttering of Churches at the command of a regime that insisted liquor stores and abortion mills remain open. The slightest evidence of agreement on the part of our leaders that worshipping the Lord around his altar, partaking of his real presence, during a health crisis was anything less than absolutely ‘essential’ could turn out, once its full meaning sinks in, to be a scandal on par with the sexual abuse crisis only a decade past. Ironically, one saw evangelical communities, with their ‘to hell with it’ symbolic view of Lord’s presence at his Supper, doing whatever they could come together, holding outdoor services, even to the point of confronting armed police. If a Catholic bishop did the like in the United States, I missed it.
Once the government allowed us again to assemble, we find the cup casually withheld and the handshakes of reconciliation prior to the communion, a profound expression of the unity of the two bodies, were replaced by tepid peace signs held close to the body. Even today, families treat one another like so many Typhoid Mary’s and Larry’s when inside the Church, withholding bodily intimacy until safely outside. Whatever one thinks of the efficacy of masks, there is no denying that they serve to separate us from one other. For a Church which speaks of the fulfillment of human existence as a face-to-face encounter with God, the downside of worshipping behind a blue barrier ought to be obvious. My point is not to render judgment upon those who were responsible for the Catholic Church during the pandemic, many bishops and priest acted in good faith, have done the best they could within limited options. My point is simply to agree with Long on the inescapable nexus between understanding the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist and the actual presence of the community in the church. Indeed, one could argue that the higher the claims for the Eucharistic presence, the greater the potential damage created by a response to the pandemic that failed to hold the two presences together.
Jenson argues that Christ’s body should be understood as availability in three distinct but interrelated modalities: Jesus’ historical body, the Church as the body of the risen Christ, and the Eucharistic body. As Long puts it: “a personal body is most essentially that person’s availability, the church is the risen Jesus’s availability, and the bread and the wine on the table are the availability of the risen Jesus to the Church.” Is such an undeniably beautiful way of thinking Christ’s bodily presence acceptable to a Catholic? If the answer could be determined by the presence or absence of the Aristotelian categories of substance and accident that undergird transubstantiation, it is a quick and hard ‘no.’ Jenson was no fan of this way of thinking about reality and spent a career arguing that a truly baptized metaphysics must be informed by the triune nature of God and his determination to reveal himself in historical time. Happily, this is not the place to assess the relative adequacy of Jenson’s metaphysics because it is not necessary to adjudicate the above question.
An honest consideration of the various magisterial statements on the Eucharist, most prominently that of Trent, most recently, Saint John Paul II’s encyclical Ecclesia de Eucharistia (2003), finds no equation of Eucharist orthodoxy and the philosophical account of transubstantiation. Even in the heat of the Reformation, Trent acknowledged the difficulty in conceiving how Christ could be both at the “right hand of the Father” and present bodily upon the altar: “We can hardly find words to express this way of existing” [“qua etis verbis exprimere vix possumus”]. All that is claimed regarding the reasonableness of the belief is that there exists “no contradiction” [Neque enim haec inter se pugnant]. With respect to transubstantiation itself, Trent simply states that it a fitting and proper name for the mode of real presence. Of no small significance, Trent issued no canon damning those who fail to employ the term.
Centuries later, Paul VI’s defense of the doctrine focused not on the particulars of transubstantiation but rather on its fundamental insight that the change affected by consecration is “ontological.” Any legitimate alternative account must in no way compromise the whole and complete change at the level of being of the bread into the body of Christ and the wine into his blood. In other words, Catholic theologians are free to explore other ways to express Christ’s Eucharistic presence provided that they attain the same ontological density one finds in transubstantiation. For example, Pope Paul faulted “transfinalization” and “transignification” not for their novelty, but for their failure to secure the objective transformation of the eucharistic elements. To return to O’Conner, if Christ’s presence is merely symbolic, dependent on this or that human subject finding in the bread and wine the body and blood, it fails Paul’s test. The symbolic value must be consequent of what the elements have become in reality.[3]
It is obvious that Jenson’s notion of ‘availability’ operates at the level of being rather than confined to the subjective experience of believers. It is Christ, as divine subject, who decides to make his eucharistic body and blood available to the Church in the bread and wine. Catholics might wonder whether his approach can make sense of a ‘private mass’ (priests consecrating the bread and wine for their own consummation) or eucharistic adoration. I suspect Jenson had the typical Protestant concerns about these activities, concerns shared by many Catholics as well. That said, Long correctly discovers in Jenson a resource for explaining how essential it is that the bodies that make up the body of Christ be available to one another whenever Christ makes his eucharistic body available to the Church. Paul the Apostle long ago warned the Corinthians against tearing the two bodies asunder, and Long, with the help of Robert Jenson, rightly alerts the Zooming Church of the judgment that awaits.
James Keating is Associate Professor of Theology at Providence College.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/05/transubstantiation-eucharist-u-s-catholics/
[2] Paul VI broke with common practice by issuing an encyclical during an Ecumenical Council. Promulgated on the Feast of St. Pius X, who championed frequent reception of the Eucharist and the celebration of First Communion with boys in suits and girls in white dresses, Paul was clearly reacting to the fact that the Council did not reaffirm explicitly Trent’s statement that the change of bread and wine into the body and blood “the holy Catholic Church has fittingly and properly named transubstantiation.” (DS 1642, 1652)
[3] “As a result of transubstantiation, the species of bread and wine undoubtedly take on a new signification and a new finality, for they are no longer ordinary bread and wine but instead a sign of something sacred and a sign of spiritual food; but they take on this new signification, this new finality, precisely because they contain a new ‘reality’ that we can rightly call ontological.” DS 4413.
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