The Eucharist: Sacramental Sacrifice

By DON FIER

Part 5

Vatican Council II concisely describes why the Holy Eucharist is so fundamentally important in the Church’s life, why it is the sacrament toward which the other sacraments, every Church ministry, and all works of the apostolate are directed.
“The Most Blessed Eucharist,” affirm the council fathers, “contains the entire spiritual boon of the Church, that is, Christ himself, our Pasch and Living Bread” (Presbyterorum Ordinis, n. 5).
In her infallible teaching known as the doctrine of the Real Presence, the Church teaches that as Catholics we must firmly hold that the Holy Eucharist is Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Son of God, continued in space and time. As defined by the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC), the Real Presence is “the unique, true presence of Christ in the Eucharist under the species or appearances of bread and wine” (Glossary).
As we saw last week, the expression “Real Presence” refers to the substantial presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Our Lord is present with His whole being, His whole essence.
Fr. John A. Hardon, SJ, provides a superb explanation of precisely what is being taught by this doctrine in an online article — it deserves to be quoted at length:
“The simplest way to express what Christ asks us to believe about the Real Presence is that the Eucharist is really He. The Real Presence is the real Jesus. We are to believe that…the flesh which the Son of God received from His Mother at the Incarnation is the same flesh into which He changed bread at the Last Supper; that the blood He received from His Mother is the same blood into which He changed wine at the Last Supper. Had she not given Him His flesh and blood there could not be a Eucharist.
“We are to believe that the Eucharist is Jesus Christ — simply, without qualification. It is God become man in the fullness of His divine nature, in the fullness of His human nature, in the fullness of His body and soul, in the fullness of everything that makes Jesus Jesus. He is in the Eucharist with His human mind and will united with the Divinity, with His hands and feet, His face and features, with His eyes and lips and ears and nostrils, with His affections and emotions and, with emphasis, with His living, pulsating, physical Sacred Heart. That is what our Catholic Faith demands of us that we believe. If we believe this, we are Catholic. If we do not, we are not, no matter what people may think we are” (see “The Eucharist and Christ’s Real Presence,” http://www.therealpresence.org/eucharst/realpres/a12.html).
“The Eucharistic presence of Christ begins at the moment of the consecration and endures as long as the Eucharistic species subsist” (CCC, n. 1377). This marvelous conversion of bread and wine into the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Christ is fittingly referred to by the Church as transubstantiation. Moreover, a unique property of this conversion is that “Christ is present whole and entire in each of the species and…each of their parts” (ibid.).
In other words, if a consecrated Host is broken into pieces, Christ remains whole and entire in each piece. Every tiny particle that remains on the paten is the whole and entire Christ; likewise, every drop of consecrated wine that remains in the chalice is the whole and entire Christ.
Hence, it is an infallible magisterial teaching that each Eucharistic Species contains the whole Christ. After His Resurrection, the physical body and blood of Jesus were reunited to one another and to His soul — and all three are inseparably united to His divinity.
According to the doctrine of concomitance, “Christ is indivisible, so that his body cannot be separated from his blood, his human soul, his divine nature, and his divine personality,” explains Fr. Hardon. “Consequently he is wholly present in the Eucharist” (Modern Catholic Dictionary [MCD], p. 119).
St. Thomas Aquinas elaborates in his Summa Theologiae (see III, Q. 76, art. 1), and the Church’s teaching was expressed in negative form by the Council of Trent: “If any one shall deny, that, in the venerable sacrament of the Eucharist, the whole Christ is contained under each species, and under every part of each species, when separated; let him be anathema” (session 13, canon 3).
The Catechism now emphasizes the importance of our ardent worship of the Holy Eucharist. The Blessed Sacrament is Christ, truly and substantially present, and so our adoration should be that of latria, that is, “the veneration due to God alone for his supreme excellence and to show people’s complete submission to him” (MCD, p. 310).
As Blessed Paul VI reminds the faithful in his 1965 encyclical Mysterium Fidei (MF), “The Catholic Church has always displayed and still displays this latria that ought to be paid to the Sacrament of the Eucharist, both during Mass and outside of it, by taking the greatest possible care of consecrated Hosts, by exposing them to the solemn veneration of the faithful, and by carrying them about in processions to the joy of great numbers of the people” (n. 56; as cited in CCC, n. 1378).
Growth of devotion to the Real Presence over the centuries is a classic example of a reality in the life of the Church that was discussed very early in this series: the “development of doctrine” (see volume 145, n. 23; June 7, 2012).
As Fr. Hardon explains in his 40-page work entitled The History of Eucharistic Adoration (HEA), growth in devotion to the Blessed Sacrament is the result of a deeper understanding of the revealed truth which, objectively, remains constant and unchanged. However, “through the light of the Holy Spirit, the subjective understanding of the truth becomes more clear, its meaning becomes more certain, and its grasp by the believing mind becomes increasingly more firm” (HEA, p. vii).
We can see in this a magnificent example of the fulfillment of Christ’s promise that the Father will send the Holy Spirit to “teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you” (John 14:26).
Where and when did belief in the real, physical Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist originate? It grew primarily from the teaching of the four Gospel evangelists and St. Paul — John and Paul were especially clear in their inspired writings (e.g., John 6:66-68; 1 Cor. 11:23-26).
Similarly, in the early second century and on his way to martyrdom, St. Ignatius of Antioch was plainspoken in his teaching that “in the Eucharist is the same Jesus Christ who lived and died and rose from the dead for our salvation” (HEA, p. 1). The hermits of the early Church reserved the Eucharist in their cells, and as early as the Council of Nicea (AD 325), the Eucharist was reserved in the churches of monasteries and convents. In fact, Fr. Hardon notes that belief in the Real Presence was taken for granted until late in the eleventh century (cf. HEA, p. 4).
It was at this juncture in the Church’s history when Berengarius (999-1088), archdeacon of Angers in France, publicly denied Christ’s Presence in the Eucharistic Species and gained many followers. The situation became so serious that Pope St. Gregory VII compelled Berengarius to sign a retraction in the form of a credo that made theological history as being “the Church’s first definitive statement of what had always been believed and never seriously challenged” (ibid).
The teaching of Gregory is repeated verbatim by Blessed Paul VI in Mysterium Fidei to meet a similar challenge to the Eucharist that exists in contemporary times (see MF, n. 52).
It was in the mid-13th century that Pope Urban IV instituted the great feast day that we recently celebrated, the Solemnity of Corpus Christi. The Holy Father commissioned St. Thomas Aquinas to compose the Liturgy of the Hours for Corpus Christi (to be celebrated on the Thursday following Trinity Sunday), and it was the Angelic Doctor who also composed some of the most beautiful hymns in the Church’s treasury, including two that are sung or chanted at exposition and benediction of the Blessed Sacrament (O Salutaris Hostia and Tantum Ergo Sacramentum) and Panis Angelicus (Latin for “Bread of Angels”).

A New Era Of Devotion

A theoretical question with serious implications arose in the 14th century with regard to whether Christ remains in the Blessed Sacrament if the Sacred Species is desecrated. Among the statements condemned in 1371 by Pope Gregory XI is the following:
“That if a consecrated host fall or is cast into a sewer, into mud, or some disgraceful place, that, while the species remain, the body of Christ ceases to be under them and the substance of bread returns” (Denzinger, Enchiridion Symbolorum, n. 1101).
Stated in positive form, it is the infallible teaching of the Church that the bodily Presence of Christ in His physical reality (i.e., His sacramental presence) remains as long as the Eucharistic Species (accidents of bread and wine) subsist.
With the advent of the so-called Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, many Catholic beliefs about the Real Presence were openly and publicly challenged. Resultantly, the Council of Trent defined and clarified every aspect of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the Real Presence, and Holy Communion. A new era of devotion to the Holy Eucharist began, and it is here that we will pick up next week.

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(Don Fier serves on the board of directors for The Catholic Servant, a Minneapolis-based monthly publication. He and his wife are the parents of seven children. Fier is a 2009 graduate of Ave Maria University’s Institute for Pastoral Theology. He is doing research for writing a definitive biography of Fr. John A. Hardon, SJ.)