By DON FIER
Part 6
The miraculous effect of the words pronounced by a validly ordained priest at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass — “This is My Body…This is My Blood” — was not seriously challenged for the first thousand years of the Church’s history. The major heresies of the first millennium were primarily Trinitarian and Christological; with some exceptions, most of them concerned the Eucharist only indirectly.
It was in the 11th century, as we saw last week, that Berengarius of Tours falsely claimed that the presence of Christ in the consecrated bread and wine was only figurative or symbolic, a position that was to resurface periodically in the centuries to follow.
In his comprehensive study on the Eucharist entitled The Hidden Manna: A Theology of the Eucharist (HM-TE), Fr. James T. O’Connor maintains that “the Berengarian conflict could almost be called paradigmatic for the many disputes that would follow” (p. 97).
St. Thomas Aquinas, about two centuries later, referred to Berengarius as “the first deviser of the heresy . . . that Christ’s body and blood are not in this sacrament except as in a sign” (Summa Theologiae III, Q. 75, art. 1). But the heretical stance of Berengarius providentially led to “development of Eucharistic doctrine.”
At the 1079 Council of Rome, he was compelled by Pope St. Gregory VII to recant his position and profess a formula of faith affirming what the Church has always believed. This credo, repeated verbatim in 1965 by Pope Paul VI in paragraph 52 of his encyclical Mysterium Fidei, has become the cornerstone of Catholic eucharistic piety.
Picking up now where we left off last week, it was about five centuries after the Berengarian controversy that the second great crisis in faith concerning the Eucharist arose in the form of the so-called Protestant Reformation. In various ways, Martin Luther and other “reformers” fell back into the errors of Berengarius.
United in their vehement rejection of the Church’s teaching on transubstantiation (and their denial of the existence of a priesthood instituted by Christ at the Last Supper), various Protestant sects held a plethora of opposing views in their beliefs about the Eucharist.
In fact, Fr. John A. Hardon, SJ, notes that St. Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621) counted over 200 interpretations of the words said by our Lord, “This is My Body. . . . This is My Blood,” at the Last Supper (see http://www.therealpresence.org/archives/Eucharist/Eucharist_022.htm).
One such false notion is that of companation (also referred to as consubstantiation), a view held by Martin Luther (1483-1546) and the English philosopher John Wycliffe (1324-1384), who is considered a major forerunner of Protestantism. As defined by Fr. Hardon in his Modern Catholic Dictionary (MCD), this opinion holds that “in the Eucharist the body and blood coexist with the bread and wine after the Consecration of the Mass” (p. 128).
In other words, the bread and wine remain what they were before, but somehow Jesus comes into them through faith and coexists with them. This is like replacing “This is My Body” with “This bread is My Body.”
Simply stated, this would be a contradiction: The consecrated Host cannot be bread and be the Body of Christ at one and the same time — it must be one or the other. This is precisely what transubstantiation means: Christ becomes present in the Eucharist through a substantial change.
This error was condemned by Trent: “If any one shall say, that, in the sacred and holy sacrament of the Eucharist, the substance of the bread and wine remains conjointly with the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, and shall deny that wonderful and singular conversion of the whole substance of the bread into the Body, and of the whole substance of the wine into the Blood, the species only of the bread and wine remaining, which conversion indeed the Catholic Church most aptly calls Transubstantiation; let him be anathema” (Session 13, canon 2).
Although Luther denied transubstantiation, he did not deny the Real Presence. In an attempt to intellectually justify companation, he reluctantly advanced a second companion doctrine which came to be known as ubiquitism.
In essence, this claim holds that “Christ is everywhere present not only as God but also as man,” explains Fr. Hardon. “It was invented by the Reformer in order to account for the real bodily presence of Christ in the Eucharist, without having to admit the priestly power of transubstantiation” (MCD, p. 551).
Fr. O’Connor posits that Luther’s doctrine of ubiquitism “confused the inseparability of the two natures with coextension” (HM-TE, p. 139).
While it is true that Christ’s divinity is omnipresent in giving being to all things, this does not imply that the human Body of Christ is equally present in all things and places.
A third error of Luther and other Protestants is a position advanced by his disciple Philip Melancthon, who held that the Real Presence of our Lord exists only at the instant when the sacrament is received with personal faith. As such, he denied the abiding presence of Christ in the tabernacle.
Trent also condemned this error: “If any one shall say, that, after the consecration is completed, the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ are not in the admirable sacrament of the Eucharist, but [are there] only during the use, whilst it is being taken, and not either before or after; and that, in the hosts, or consecrated particles, which after communion are reserved or remain, the true body of the Lord remaineth not; let him be anathema” (Session 13, canon 4).
The Swiss reformer Ulrich Zwingli held perhaps the most radical Protestant position, that Christ’s presence in the Eucharist is merely symbolic. He interpreted the “is” in Christ’s words at the Last Supper to mean “signifies,” which would render their meaning to be: “Take, eat, this bread signifies My Body.” This view closely follows that held centuries earlier by Berengarius.
The position of the French theologian John Calvin was similar to that of Zwingli in that he denied the doctrine of the Real Presence as being incompatible with the physical state of Christ’s glorified body in Heaven. He differed from Zwingli, however, in that he allowed for a mysterious “dynamic” spiritual presence and power of Christ in the Eucharist when received in faith. He vehemently denied Christ’s substantial and corporeal presence in the Eucharist.
The positions of Zwingli, Calvin, and other like-minded “reformers” were likewise rejected by Trent: “If anyone denies that in the sacrament of the most holy Eucharist there are truly, really, and substantially contained the body and blood together with the soul and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, and therefore the whole Christ, but shall say that He is in it as by a sign or figure, or force, let him be anathema” (Denzinger, Enchiridion Symbolorum, n. 1651).
As mentioned two weeks ago (see volume 149, n. 25; June 23, 2016), similar errors with newfangled theological names (e.g., transfinalization and transignification) have resurfaced in recent decades which tend to undermine belief in the Church’s greatest treasure, the Real Presence.
These false teachings can weaken the People of God’s faith that “in his Eucharistic presence, [Jesus] remains mysteriously in our midst as the one who loved us and gave himself up for us (cf. Gal. 2:20), and he remains under signs that express and communicate this love” (Catechism of the Catholic Church [CCC], n. 1380).
In his 1980 apostolic exhortation Dominicae Cenae, Pope St. John Paul II underscores how important devotion to the Blessed Sacrament is in the life of the Church, in all its various forms: “personal prayer before the Blessed Sacrament, Hours of Adoration, periods of exposition — short, prolonged, and annual (Forty Hours), eucharistic benediction, eucharistic processions, eucharistic congresses” (n. 3).
The Holy Father expounds: “The Church and the world have a great need for Eucharistic worship. Jesus awaits us in this sacrament of love. Let us not refuse the time to go to meet him in adoration, in contemplation full of faith, and open to making amends for the serious offenses and crimes of the world. Let our adoration never cease” (ibid.).
First Adore It
Pope Benedict XVI amplified the intrinsic relationship between celebration of the Eucharist and eucharistic adoration in his 2007 post-synodal apostolic exhortation Sacramentum Caritatis. “In the Eucharist, the Son of God comes to meet us and desires to become one with us,” said the Roman Pontiff. “Eucharistic adoration is simply the natural consequence of the eucharistic celebration” (n. 66). In answer to those who objected that the eucharistic bread was given to us not to be looked at, but to be eaten, he cited St. Augustine who so expressively stated: “No one eats that flesh without first adoring it; we should sin were we not to adore it” (Enarrationes in Psalmos 98:9).
Here, it would be good for us to recall the response of an elderly peasant when asked by the holy Curé of Ars about all the time he spent in prayer before the tabernacle: “I look at Him and He looks at me” (CCC, n. 2715).
To close our consideration of eucharistic devotion, let us reflect prayerfully on the first stanza of St. Thomas Aquinas’ beautiful eucharistic hymn, Adoro te devote: “Godhead here in hiding, whom I do adore/ Masked by these bare shadows, shape and nothing more,/ See, Lord, at thy service low lies here a heart/ Lost, all lost in wonder at the God thou art” (as cited in CCC, n. 1381).
+ + +
(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.)
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress