Eucharistic presence.

Nothing is more important to the health and future of the church than an authentic understanding of the Eucharist. One of the great achievements of Vatican II was to restore the Eucharist to the center of the church's life. In principle, the Eucharist always occupied that center, while, in practice, a panoply of devotions often displaced it from the hearts and minds of ordinary believers. They went to Mass, but once there often devoted themselves to acts of individual piety. The council changed that, but not without raising new problems. Thirty years later, Catholics are increasingly asking whether their understanding of the Eucharist has been diminished even as attention has been focused on it.

From the start, some Catholics steeped in the Tridentine Latin Mass found the new vernacular rite bewildering, and their complaints have echoed through the succeeding three decades. But most Catholics accepted, even embraced, the new rite, with its theologically dramatic emphasis on the active role of the community. Did the results represent what the liturgical renewal had envisioned? Or did renewal end in a banalization of the sacred mysteries? By all accounts, the liturgical changes were implemented hastily, sometimes by fiat and with little preparation, sometimes in a mood of giddy innovation far from the intention of the reform--a return to the church's earliest traditions. Today, both critics and sympathizers of the conciliar reforms voice concern about the fate of eucharistic piety and understanding.

That concern was given new urgency by a New York Times poll last spring suggesting a dramatic departure among Catholics from the traditional doctrine of transubstantiation (see page 11). Of course, one poll does not establish the extent to which Catholics have ceased to believe in the "real" and "substantial" change that takes place in the Mass. And whatever changes have occurred may reflect practical failures in preaching, catechizing, and celebration of the liturgy as much as any confusion or inadequacies in our theological understanding. Still, the latter have played their part. That is why, with a keen sense that the following articles are far from the last word--that all but saints and mystics must speak haltingly and tentatively about this profound mystery--we have devoted this annual theology issue to "Eucharistic Presence."

Traditionally, Catholic identity has been rehearsed in rituals that reach deeper than dogma--rituals characterized by a palpable, public "otherness." It is precisely this quality of otherness, of distinctive difference, that many observers feel the post-Vatican II liturgy of the Roman rite has forfeited. Critical discontent focuses especially on two points: (1) the reformed rite's presumed failure to provide participants with a sense of mystery; (2) the apparent decline, even among devout churchgoers, of belief in the Real Presence.

This second point was reported recently by Peter Steinfels in the conclusion of a four-part series on Catholics in America ("Future of Faith Worries Catholic Leaders," New York Times, June 1, 1994). A New York Times/CBS News poll conducted in April 1994, found that "almost two-thirds of American Catholics believe that during Mass...the bread and wine can best be understood as 'symbolic reminders of Christ' rather than as actually being changed into Christ's body and blood. Even among...Catholics who said they attended Mass every week or almost every week, 51 percent described the rite as strictly symbolic." As Steinfels notes, complex beliefs cannot be measured very accurately by standard polling procedures; still, such results are disconcerting, if not downright alarming.

Should the postconciliar liturgy be blamed for this decline in traditional belief about Real Presence? The answer may well depend on how one responds to the first point: Are the reformed rites able to "bear the weight of mystery"--or not? Some years ago Aidan Kavanagh warned against an encroaching embourgeoisement of the liturgy, the signs of which are visible everywhere--in the "ministerializing" of the middle-class laity, in the celebration of politically correct values (meeting, joining, speaking out, creating community), in the creation of churches that look like shopping malls. Under such conditions, Kavanagh commented, "the liturgy becomes perceived by many as less an obedient standing in the alarming presence of the living God in Christ than a tiresome dialectical effort at raising the consciousness of middle-class groups concerning ideologically approved ends and means" ("Liturgical Inculturation: Looking to the Future," Studia Liturgica, 20:1 [1990]. Similar fears were voiced by the late Mark Searle, whose research led him to conclude that Roman Catholic worship is in danger of becoming a casualty of cultural assimilation:

American Catholics are in process of becoming more characteristically American than characteristically Catholic. In other words, cultural assimilation appears to be occurring at the expense of a distinctive Catholic identity. In their moral, political, and social attitudes, Catholics are becoming indistinguishable from the rest of the population. Where liturgy is concerned, this means a growing alienation from precisely that sense of collective identity and collective responsibility which the liturgy might be thought to rehearse" ("The Notre Dame Study of Catholic Parish Life," Worship, 60:4 [1986]).

Responses to the postconciliar liturgy and its impact on American Catholic identity seem increasingly polarized, perhaps because, as Richard Gaillardetz has recently argued, our national quest for transcendence has been privatized (angel-mania, "transcendence without community"), even as our quest for community has been vandalized by ideologies of pseudo-intimacy ("community without transcendence"). Caught in this cultural crossfire, many Catholics feel compelled to choose between rival options: a liturgy characterized by solemnity, awe, and splendor (sustained by a "high" theology of Real Presence) versus a liturgy characterized by human warmth, sentiment, and ritual impoverishment or squalor (sustained by a "low" theology of Eucharist as "commemorative meal") ("North American Culture and the Liturgical Life of the Church," Worship, 86:5 [1994]).

Such options, in my view, are misleading. Liturgical "otherness" should not be mistaken for high-church ritualism, nor should Catholic identity be confused with a retro-ideology that seeks, in Adrian Cunningham's trenchant phrase, to "resacralize reaction." As Catherine Bell has said, "an ethos of timeless continuity based on the exact repetition of unchanging tradition is only one strategy of ritualization." That strategy will inevitably shift when a community's ritual schemes "can no longer effectively interpret and dominate the social milieu." Thus, while the late medieval ritual corpus did effectively acknowledge and advance claims of a transcendent unity between church and society, between priestly mediation and access to God, those claims were largely shattered by the advent of the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution. Moreover, the argument that the unintelligible mumblings, gestures, and silences of the late medieval and Tridentine liturgies provided "ordinary" people with a stable center of "sacred meaning" in a cruel, preindustrial world sheds no real light on the ritual poverty of believers in the late twentieth century. One must remember, too, those medieval rites which promoted such a "powerful sense of community" also championed an ecclesiastical polity that was aggressively authoritarian and (to quote Gaillardetz) "repressive of the rights of many, particularly women."

One cannot help feeling that the call to resacralize worship is sometimes a "code" for recreating a culture in which aging white males of European origin call all the shots, make all the rules, and determine all the parameters of legitimate discussion. The sacral, transcendent character of Christian worship does not, after all, rest upon an arbitrary ensemble of acts and artifacts (incense, orphreys, genuflections, plainchant). It arises from the ability to perceive "heaven in ordinarie," God's abiding presence in a wounded world. In my view, more fruitful avenues for revisiting the doctrine of Real Presence are opened by three areas of recent research: (1) the theology of the body; (2) the prayer of the assembly; and (3) the liturgy of the world.

Body. The human body--its origins and destiny; its control and reproduction; its sexual and political significance--is a lightning rod for Catholics today. Still, contemporary scholars have reached consensus on a surprising number of points about the body's meaning in Christian tradition. They agree, for instance, that the human person is not simply someone who "has" a body, but someone who is a body. The body is not merely an "object" (a machine, a tool, a "husk" or prison) but a subject. In a profound sense (as Caroline Bynum has shown in her studies of medieval Christian women), the body is the self. In a word, the body is the whole human person in relation to God, world, and others. It is the supreme meeting place between God and humanity. Until recently, the hard sciences seemed to treat the body as a liability, a subjective source of feeling and fantasy irrelevant to "objective" standards of research. But today that view has changed. "Any adequate account of meaning and rationality," writes philosopher Mark Johnson, "must give a central place to embodied and imaginative structures of understanding by which we grasp our world." Reason is not purely abstract and transcendent after all. Human understanding is incarnate; hence it is the task of modern science to "put the body back into the mind" (The Body in the Mind, University of Chicago Press, 1987).

Theology takes such speculation a crucial step further by asserting that history's meanings and goals will be achieved only in a transfigured world of glorified bodies. As Karl Rahner wrote in a homily on the Ascension, "The Ascension is a festival of the future of the world...for the Lord has risen for ever. We Christians are, therefore, the most sublime of materialists....We recognize and believe that this matter will last forever, and be glorified forever...[for] God has assumed it as his [sic] own body."

Christian teaching about resurrection thus focuses not on an "immortal soul," but on a human body that forever enacts human existence, personality, and relatedness. Nor is resurrection the exclusive province of Christology, for it also affirms, as James Keenan says, that "through their corporeality, believers are related, and thus can be caught up in Christ, who transforms that corporeality." In short, Christians confess not only a conversion of heart, soul, and mind; they also believe in the body's final transformability. As scholars like Peter Brown have demonstrated, theology's emphasis on the body's intrinsic worth liberated it from the claims of the polis (that is, from utilitarian control by the state, by cultural or sociopolitical forces): "Christian preachers endowed the body with intrinsic, inalienable qualities. It was no longer a neutral indeterminate outcrop of the natural world, whose use and very right to exist was subject to predominantly civic considerations of status and utility" (The Body and Society, Columbia University Press, 1988).

In time, of course, the church substituted claims of its own for those of the polis (especially in matters pertaining to women). But the basic principle had been established: the body's integrity is strictly God-given and intrinsic; it is not an "entitlement" granted by the state or erected by religious authority.

All these views have a direct bearing on eucharistic theology. The body of Christ offered to Christians in consecrated bread and wine is not something but someone. In the Eucharist, Christ is present not as an "object" to be admired but as a person (a "subject") to be encountered. Thomas Aquinas understood this well, and so insisted that the ultimate intent (the res) of celebrating Eucharist is not to produce the sacred species for purposes of reservation or adoration, but to create that united body of Christ which is the church. Roman Catholic eucharistic tradition thus insists that the Christological cannot be separated from the ecclesiological. The body of Christ is not only "on" the table but "at" the table!

The body of Christ that is at the table (that is, the church, the ecclesia) must be understood as an essential partner in the liturgical act, and not merely as a passive recipient of Christological benefits. Hence Vatican II's insistence on "full, active, and conscious participation" by the people in eucharistic worship. We become one with Christ's body only by joining ourselves to the Spirit-filled body of believers through grace, faith, and the paschal sacraments of initiation. Indeed, as the New Testament shows, it was precisely the early church's empirical experience of Christ's continued presence and activity in the Spirit that made Easter faith possible and plausible. Easter is about both "what happened to Jesus" and "what happened to those who believe in him." Easter meant not only that "Jesus is risen," but that through the Spirit's power the body of Christ has become a people. The implications of this point are vast. As Mary Collins has noted, it means that "we must rethink the familiar grammar for the symbol Body of Christ as its relates to resurrection belief, to the Spirit-filled church, and to the sacrament of the Eucharist" ("Eucharist and Christology Revisited: The Body of Christ," Theology Digest, 39:4 [1992]).

The Prayer of the Assembly. Tensions between Christological and ecclesiological aspects of the Eucharist have dominated Western thinking about Real Presence for centuries. Among medieval theologians, Christology triumphed: the "essential moment" of eucharistic consecration was identified, strictly and exclusively, with the liturgical recitation of Jesus' words (the "words of institution"). In support of their view, medieval glossators were fond of citing patristic authorities, especially Ambrose, who in his sermons to the newly baptized seemed similarly to insist on the consecratory power of Christ's words (the verba Verbi). Theological principle (lex credendi) gradually overruled liturgical praxis (lex orandi). The prayer of the people was thought to have no real role in relation to the Real Presence. (Keep in mind that though a single voice proclaims it, the eucharistic prayer is not an individual's possession but the assembly's act, as articulated by its presiding minister.) Thus, the larger meaning of the whole eucharistic prayer--its acts of praise, remembrance, and intercession; its prayer that the Spirit transform both gifts and people; its character as ritual deed of a faith-filled assembly--was reduced to insignificance.

The contemporary theological effort to recover the consecratory meaning of the whole eucharistic prayer has been significantly advanced by the work of the late Edward Kilmartin, S.J. In a pivotal article published posthumously last summer, Kilmartin argued that the theologians who created

the Western scholastic synthesis...had no grasp of the literary structure and theological dynamic of the Eucharistic Prayer and accompanying symbolic action. They reduced the whole problematic to an imaginary "central space" within the Prayer, with the result that the eucharistic words of Christ were poised in the air without access to the other elements of the structure ("The Catholic Tradition of Eucharistic Theology: Towards the Third Millennium," Theological Studies, 55 [1994]).

A new starting point for the systematic theology of Eucharist is needed, Kilmartin contends, one that begins with the lex orandi and takes seriously the ritual and theological dynamics of the eucharistic prayer. The richness and complexity of Kilmartin's argument cannot easily be summarized, but it may be useful to draw attention to three points:

* Presence. Eucharistic theology in the West has been preoccupied with the question of how Christ becomes present in the elements of bread and wine. Since at least the ninth century, theologians have struggled to explain the exact nature of the change (or "conversion") that the species (the bread and the wine) undergo in order to accommodate this presence. But the very effort to clarify eucharistic conversion raised intractable problems of another sort. For example, if Christ is risen, glorified, and impassible, can his natural body be "located" anywhere else than heaven? Does history repeat itself in sacraments? If Jesus offered himself "once for all," is the language of eucharistic sacrifice meaningless? These are questions that a Buddhist might argue "do not lead to edification," but they have dominated Western theology for more than a millennium.

Kilmartin suggests that these are precisely the wrong questions. The central issue of eucharistic theology is not "how does Christ become present to us?" but "how do we become present to Christ?" "The movement," Kilmartin notes, "is not from the historical event of the cross to us; the event is not withdrawn from its historical context and made to come to us. Rather, we go to the event, are made present to it. The movement by which we meet a 'passed' event is called memory. It is by remembrance that we meet the sacrifice of the cross." Liturgical activity does not so much "render present" Christ and his saving work; it is rather the ritual, cultic means by which we enter newly into Christ's presence and work. In short, the basic eucharistic question is not "who is on the table?" but "who is at the table, and how did we get there?" In the Eucharist, two bodies meet: The risen body of Jesus (present now "sacramentally" and "substantially") and the "corpus Christi quod est ecclesia." Indeed, as Aquinas knew, the presence of the former is precisely for the sake of the latter. That is why Aquinas understood that the final meaning and ultimate intent of the Eucharist is precisely "the unity of that body which is the church."

* The Eucharistic Prayer. The significance of this prayer is precisely ecclesiological, for in it, the church comes to be, enacts and defines itself. That is why the liturgist Aidan Kavanagh has described the celebrating church as "the body-of-Christ-become-a-people," and why Karl Rahner argued that the Eucharist creates church. In the eucharistic prayer, we become present to Christ in his paschal mystery, in his historical saving work. Kilmartin summarizes the point this way:

The transitus ["paschal passage"] of the assembled community to the Father is expressed liturgically through the Eucharistic Prayer. The transitus of Christ himself is recalled and affirmed as the single transitus in which the believing assembly participates through the medium of the eucharistic celebration. At the same time the Holy Spirit is identified as the mediation of the presence of Christ to the church and the church to Christ.

The conclusion is inescapable. Eucharistic Real Presence cannot be adequately described or defended unless the right questions are asked. And the most basic of these is not "how does Christ get to the bread?" but "how do we get to the table, and what happens to us once we're there?"

* In Persona Ecclesiae. Reclaiming the doctrine of Real Presence thus requires that ecclesiology be restored to a eucharistic synthesis that for centuries has been almost exclusively Christological. Nowhere is the need for such restoration more evident than in the relation between the ministry of the ordained priest and the eucharistic celebration. It has become fashionable over the past few years to insist loudly that the presiding priest acts "in persona Christi." This insistence may be valid, but it misses an equally important aspect of ministry, viz., that the priest acts "in persona Christi." This insistence may be valid, but it misses an equally important aspect of ministry, viz., that the priest acts "in persona ecclesiae," a point long recognized by our best theologians. Thus, for example, Thomas Aquinas could write that the priest "performs a deed of the entire church in consecrating the Eucharist, because it is a sacrament that belongs to the whole church" (Commentary on the Sentences, Bk. IV, d. 24; q. 2, art. 2, ad 2). Aquinas unambiguously recognized that the very nature of Eucharist (hence of ministry, hence of Real Presence) is ecclesiological. "It is by reason of the ecclesiological nature of the Eucharist that the priest offers for the whole church," concludes Kilmartin, "not immediately because he offers in the person of Christ...." In a word, the priest can "offer Mass" in the first instance because he is a member of the believing assembly.

The Liturgy of the World. Karl Rahner argued that the "first" or "primary" liturgy that a church assembly celebrates is what he called "the liturgy of the world." By that he meant the fact that the world itself is always and everywhere grasped at its roots by God's presence or grace. In fact, for believers "sacraments" are humble landmarks, "small signs" of the fact "that this entire world belongs to God." And God causes this "liturgy of the world" to be celebrated throughout the length and breadth of the world's history.

Catholic sacramental tradition operates on the principle that we can encounter God by encountering the human. Thus Aquinas wrote that through the humble material realities of daily life, through the simple staples of bread and wine, through the concrete particularities of human life, you arrive, through sacrament, at the mystery of God which is the goal of faith, of grace, and of the whole sacramental economy.

Every sacrament launches a search, a process of discovery through which we reconnect with something absent, something missing, something unknown, something (in short) transcendent. That, of course, is the great paradox of symbols. They simultaneously give and take away; they call us to the threshold of presence by first leading us through an abyss of absence. Thus for Aquinas (and for the theological tradition he represented) every symbol is an invitation to self-transcendence. Symbols cannot lead us "per nota ad ignota" unless we first consent to an absence, an irreducible "otherness," a mystery we cannot control or evade. So in the Eucharist, the known material quantities of bread and wine draw us into the paschal mystery of Christ's body and blood--yes. But at the same time, that mystery of Christ's-body-become-a-people redefines matter and reconfigures our perception. The reality of sacrament forces us to recognize that matter itself must bear the weight of glory. For if bread and wine can trigger access to a risen life, then the whole world must have burst into flame. The root of all matter has been transfigured. The sacramental principle thus affirms what Catholic poets have always known: as Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, "The world is charged with the grandeur of God." And Edith Sitwell wrote in "The Bee-Keeper":

This Earth is the honey of all Beings, and all Beings

Are the honey of this Earth...O bright immortal Lover

That is incarnate in the body's earth--

O bright immortal Lover Who is All!

The primary liturgy through which Christians experience the Real Presence of God in Christ is nothing more or less than "the liturgy of the world." It is to this liturgy, "smelling of death and sacrifice," that all the church's ritual actions return. There, God is met in the confused impurity of the human condition--in the weight of mineral; the light of honey; the sound of the words "night" and "good-by"; the heaping abundance of wheat, ivory, and tears; lifted objects of leather, wood, and food; faded photos that gather our lives like walls; the red noise of bones; the thunder of flesh; the smack of kisses, gasps, and sobs; the roar of water passing across bone; muffled snow; garlic and sapphires in the mud. There, God is met as One who suffers with us, as One who forgives a thief on the cross. All this is what the liturgy of the world celebrates; all this is what the liturgy of the church points to. We arrive at mystery, at Real Presence, at God, only by embracing the human with all its poignancy and terror.

Real Presence is an essential aspect of eucharistic theology in the Catholic tradition--but "resacralizing reaction" will not reclaim it. We can experience Real Presence anew only by renewing the covenant between Word and World. Catholic sacramentalism can be recovered only if we recognize afresh that human history is a history of meaning; that those meaning are celebrated through rituals of civility; that language is not only revelation, but responsibility and grace as well; that God is celebrating the liturgy of the world--in us--through the length and breadth of creation.

Sings & numbers

On April 21-23, 1994, a New York Times/CBS News poll queried a national sample of Americans by telephone. About thirty-five questions were asked specifically to those responding that their religious preference was Catholic. A question about the Eucharist was included because previous polling had given little attention to matters of worship and spiritual life. Unlike most other opinions recorded in the poll (on sexual morality, ordination of women, etc.), the responses concerning the Eucharist were new and striking.

Considerable thought went into the wording of the question. The goal was not to spell out exact theological understandings of the Mass but simply to identify the general direction of Catholics' belief by posing distinct alternatives that would be brief and clear over the telephone. The actual question asked on the phone was:

"Which of the following comes closest to what you believe takes place at Mass: (1) The bread and wine are changed into the body and blood of Christ, or (2) The bread and wine are symbolic reminders of Christ?"

The results for all self-identified Catholics were:

Body and blood: 34% Symbolic reminders: 63%.

Among Catholics aged 65 and older:

Body and blood: 51%. Symbolic reminders: 45%.

Among Catholics betwen ages 18 and 29: Body and blood: 29%. Symbolic reminders: 70%.

Among Catholics who reported going to Mass every week or almost every week (50% of the Catholics polled):

Body and blood: 44%. Symbolic reminders: 51%.

Among Catholics aged 18-45 who attend Mass weekly or almost weekly:

Body and blood: 34%. Symbolic reminders: 63%.

Undoubtedly further polling with some variations on the wording would be valuable. Would the result have been different if the first choice had included "under the appearances of bread and wine," like the formulation in the old Baltimore Catechism?

Another point for reflection: there is no empirical baseline against which these findings can be compared. Did all Catholics in, say, 1930 or 1950 really grasp Catholic teaching on transubstantiation? No one knows. At least some Catholics, despite pious devotional lives, may have been hazier about the Eucharist than commonly supposed. Still, given practices such as fasting from midnight, First Communion preparations, and Benediction, could general belief have been anything like the recent findings?