‘My Flesh Is True Food And My Blood Is True Drink’

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops is meeting in Baltimore  on Nov. 15-18.

The main topic on their agenda is a eucharistic revival initiative.   Two years ago in 2019 a Pew Research Center study revealed 70% of Catholics in the United States did not have a correct understanding of the sacrament of the holy Eucharist.  As George Weigel, biographer of St. John Paul II, wrote, “Perhaps a majority of Catholics do not believe that the Eucharist is what the Lord Jesus said he was giving us: himself, fully and unambiguously.”  In the Pew study, 70% checked off “symbol” of the body and blood of Christ in answer to “What is the Catholic understanding of the Eucharist?”  

In 1551 The Council of Trent declared as a dogma of the Catholic Church that “in the most Blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist ‘the body and blood, together with the soul and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ and, therefore, the whole Christ, is truly, really and substantially contained’ ” (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1374). This is far more than simply saying the bread and wine on the altar after the words of consecration in the Mass are only signs or symbols of Christ’s body and blood that were sacrificed on the cross.  A sign with the word “Danger” and a symbol of a deer on a road through a wooded area warns car drivers to be alert, but it is not the deer itself.  As Catholics, we believe that Jesus is truly present in the eucharistic bread and wine.  

Why the present day confusion?  First of all, the survey  question could have been better phrased.  It asked are the bread and wine only symbols of Christ’s body and blood.  I think (my opinion only) that if the question had been, “Do you believe that Jesus is truly present to you when you receive holy Communion?” more than 30% of the respondents would have answered yes.  The word “symbol” caused the respondents to ask themselves is the bread still bread or the wine still wine after the words of consecration. Scientific examination would say yes; and we live in the modern world of science.  But our belief in the eucharistic presence of Christ is not based on what our eyes or microscopes see.

Our belief in Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist is based on the words of Christ in the Bible and the constant belief of Christ’s followers from the very beginning to the present day.  The biblical reasoning begins in St. John’s Gospel, Chapter 6:22-71, where we find the Bread of Life Discourse.  The Jews are murmuring because Jesus had said “I am the bread of life that came down from heaven.”

They answer that their eyes aren’t deceiving them, he is just the son of Joseph the carpenter.  How can he be “bread from heaven?”  Jesus doesn’t back off; he doubles-down:  “I am the living bread come down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.”  This is too much for the Jews, and they ask, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”  Jesus asserts even more firmly, “Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the son of man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day.  For my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink.  Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him.”

This is why we believe that when we receive the bread and the wine in Communion Jesus is truly there and present to us. He told us so. How can this happen?  It is a mystery but, as St. Thomas Aquinas wrote in one of the eucharistic hymns we sing, a “mystery divine.”  Mysteries are not unintelligible; they are truths we can understand but never wholly grasp because we have finite minds and they concern an infinite God.  Nevertheless, the Bible itself helps our belief.

St. John the Evangelist begins his Gospel with an ancient Christian hymn: “In the beginning was the word and the word was with God, and the word was God and the word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.”  The word, of course, is Jesus, and “All things came to be through him.”  This last phrase refers back to the opening of the first book of the Bible, Genesis, where God speaks creation into being, creating the universe and all within it, ending with his most intelligent creation, man and woman.  If Jesus is the word through whom God the Father in the beginning created all things through his word, then he, that word, can change bread and wine into his body and blood.  We can’t explain this by our science because our science is as finite as we are.  Nonetheless it is true, although true on a higher level of existence than our earthly one.  But then, so is heaven, so is the incarnation of Jesus, true God and true man, who died for us and was raised from the dead.  We believe in his eucharistic presence because he, “the way, the truth, and the life,” has spoken it, given it, to us.

This has been the faith of the Catholic Church from its earliest days: from St. Paul who saw the risen Christ and wrote about his eucharistic presence in the first century, about 50 A.D. “Therefore whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily will have to answer for the body and blood of the Lord” (1 Cor 11:23-29); to St. Ambrose in the fourth century: “Could not Christ’s word, which can make from nothing what did not exist, change existing things into what they were not before?” (CCC 1374); to St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century: “Seeing, touching, tasting are in thee deceived; How says trusty hearing? That shall be believed; what God’s son has told me, take for truth I do; truth himself speaks truly or there’s nothing true (CCC 1381); to the 20th century:  Vatican II (1962-65) in its Constitution on the Church calls the Eucharist the “source and summit of the Christian life. For in the blessed Eucharist is contained the whole spiritual good of the church, namely Christ himself, our Pasch” (Lumen Gentium 11).   

This constant belief in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist is our church’s great truth and tradition.  We wait to see the plan of the United States Conference of Bishops to revive Catholic faith in it.

Father Carville is a retired priest in the Diocese of Baton Rouge and writes on current topics for The Catholic Commentator. He can be reached at johnny [email protected].