This is my body: how to understand the Real Presence.

The church teaches that God is fully and really present in the Communion wafer. But just how that works requires a bit of explanation.

My first experience of public embarrassment came on the day of my first Holy Communion, when, overcome with unexpected hilarity at seeing Craig Case's face distorted in the reflection of the gold ciborium held above our heads as we kneeled at the Communion rail, I laughed out loud. Pious child that I was, I could not help myself--I was so giddily nervous in anticipation of digesting God, that the sight of Craig's tonsils at the sacred moment was simply too much for me to bear. I lost it--even as I was about to gain it. This outburst prompted a vigorous tongue-lashing by the presiding priest, who lectured me beyond the point of prudence, I thought, on the solemnity of the occasion.

The occasion was solemn, of course, because it introduced me to perhaps the greatest mystery of the church. It also incorporated me into that mystery, that is, it grafted my body onto the Mystical Body. Somehow, I was about to receive not a wafer of bread but the actual Body of Christ. (Presumably, I did not need Christ's Blood, which in 1963 was not offered to me in the consecrated wine.) Of course, it still looked and tasted like a wafer--fairly nondescript, on both counts--even after Father had prayed the words of Consecration over it. This was the case, I had been taught by Sister, because the accidents of the bread and wine remained--their texture, appearance, taste, and other nonessential qualities--even as their substance--their defining essence--was replaced by the substance of the Body and Blood of Christ. (Destined to be a theologian type, I grasped the basic concept, and so I was not afraid, as were some of my fellow first communicants, of hurting Jesus by chewing or swallowing him.

The fancy word for this process, transubstantiation, in all its Aristotelian pseudo-precision, could not diminish the mysterious, mystical, metaphysical, magical character of the event. No matter how patiently Sister presented this teaching, no matter how reasonable it was made to sound, we--Craig Case, myself, and hundreds of thousands of other wondrous innocents across the land--had no idea how this transformation actually happened. We simply believed. And simply believing seemed to be what was most important about receiving the sacrament at an age when we were beginning to be a bit less credulous about magical things such as Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny. The church demanded that we believe an equally extraordinary claim about this little wafer and insisted that we might literally die if we did not believe. In such circumstances, and out of genuine love for Jesus, we were eager to believe, and we approached the event with more gravity than a 7-year-old's sensibility could withstand.

Our closest encounter

The fact that God would be fully and really present in the wafer was of great significance. Receiving Holy Communion was, accordingly, a big moment because it was our first palpable encounter with the Lord, about whom we had heard and read and to whom we had been praying. Yes, we had been baptized, but we did not remember. In consuming the Host (what a term!), we were fully aware that we were ingesting God. How much more intimately related to the Lord could we be? Unlike some Protestant denominations, we Catholics believed that the Eucharist was not just a memorial of the Last Supper, but it communicated saving grace. What a tremendous church we belonged to, a church that could guarantee such a deal. How appropriate that it was called Eucharist, from the Greek word meaning "to give thanks."

Our parents and other relatives seemed to believe this, too, and it was important to us that they took this occasion seriously--even more seriously than could be symbolized by their doting over our glistening Communion dresses and suits or by the big, boisterous party and the ample rewards that came our way as a result of being in full communion with grown Catholics. We were meeting Jesus, directly, for the first time. Without this direct contact, all else we had learned about God and our religion would be small talk. Communion confirmed our faith, even before we received the formal sacrament of Confirmation, for now we knew where we could find the Lord, any day, at almost any time. Now Christ was real to us.

God was also real to the former Augustinian monk Martin Luther in the 16th century, who insisted in the face of opposition from fellow Protestant reformers that when Jesus said, "This is my Body," at the Last Supper, he wasn't mincing words. Arguing forcefully that the reformers should retain the scriptural doctrine of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, Luther pounded his fist on the table and repeated in Latin the famous words of institution: Hoc est corpus meum.

French peasants in medieval times, hearing these words intoned during the prayer of Consecration at Mass, had garbled the formula and coined the term hocus pocus to summarize their rather imprecise understanding of Latin and liturgical theology. The fine distinctions of scholastic metaphysics gave way in the popular religious imagination to the powerful appeal of magical incantations. In too many cases, superstitious interpretations of the sacred mysteries were exploited, if not openly promoted, by entrepreneurs within the church who were concerned more with enriching institutional coffers than with deepening popular piety.

As in the case of indulgences, for example, some priests accepted money for saying Mass and consecrating the Eucharist with the special intentions of the benefactor in mind. An angry Luther characterized the "preaching and selling of the Mass as a sacrifice or good work as the greatest of all abominations" in his Confession Concerning Christ's Supper. Luther rejected the notion of the Mass as a perpetual sacrifice, for he believed that Christ offered himself once and for all on Calvary. John Calvin, another great continental reformer, agreed with Luther on this point, but he regarded any attempt to identify the elements of bread and wine with the actual flesh and blood of Christ as a debasement of Christ's glorified body in heaven. Both men retained a belief in Christ's Real Presence in the Eucharist, however, and this belief set them apart from the radical reformers, such as the Swiss theologian Ulrich Zwingli, who taught that the Eucharist is a memorial rather than a grace-communicating sacrament administered by the Roman, or any other, Church.

Despite the differences in the reformers' criticisms of the Mass, all of them felt, with some warrant, that late-medieval Catholicism had vulgarized the Eucharist by adopting a scholastic, unscriptural, and therefore inadequate theology of atonement--one that relied heavily on perpetual sacrifices and priestly mediation to communicate the benefits of Christ's death for sinners. The Council of Trent (1545-63) and the Catholic counter-reform in general responded defiantly by reaffirming the "Holy Sacrifice of the Mass" as a continual reenactment of Christ's sacrifice of his Body and Blood on the cross. The graces accruing from that original sacrifice, the council fathers insisted, are bestowed upon the communicant through the mediation of the church and its priests.

Catholic ecclesiology after the Council of Trent also endorsed the medieval notion that the sacramentis efficacious ex opere operato, that is,by means of its own operation, through the rite itself, rather than as a result of the intention or sincerity of either the celebrant or the recipient. The priest as a private individual might be a terrible sinner, but it is Holy Mother Church, not any individual, that guarantees that Christ is present in the Eucharist once the canonical prayers are repeated properly by a duly ordained priest. The Council of Trent elaborated these rubrics of the Mass, which naturally came to bear the name Tridentine.

Ever since, Roman Catholics have been somewhat set apart from other Christians by their fervid devotion to the Eucharist. Twentieth-century popes, beginning with Pope Pius X in 1903, encouraged the frequent reception of the sacrament by all of the faithful, a departure from the traditional custom of the laity receiving only at Christmas and Easter. The neo-Thomist revival of medieval thought and practice, which swept across Catholic America from the 1920s through the '50s, was centered on eucharistic piety, with prominent Catholic figures such as Dorothy Day and Bishop Sheen heralding the teaching of Pope Pius XII in 1947 that the church is the Mystical Body of Christ and that frequent reception of the Body of Christ is absolutely essential to this identity.

In this climate, Catholic eucharistic devotionalism intensified, and people identified their own daily sacrifices with the perpetual sacrifice of Christ on the cross. Encased in an ornate receptacle called a monstrance and elevated on the altar, the consecrated Host was venerated as the Blessed Sacrament, the source of eternal salvation, and the source of all temporal good as well. In 1948 the American Trappist monk Thomas Merton expressed this dramatic sensibility in his spiritual autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain:

I did not even know who Christ was, that He was

God. I had not the faintest idea that there existed

such a thing as the Blessed Sacrament. I thought

churches were simply places where people got

together and sang a few hymns. And yet now I tell

you, you who are now

what I once was, unbelievers,

it is that Sacrament,

and that alone, the

Christ living in our midst,

and sacrificed by us, and

for us and with us, in the

clean and perpetual Sacrifice,

it is He alone Who

holds our world together,

and keeps us all from being

poured headlong and

immediately into the pit

of our eternal destruction.

And I tell you there is a

power that goes forth

from that Sacrament, a

power of light and truth,

even into the hearts of

those who have heard

nothing of Him and seem

to be incapable of belief.

Merton's engaging supernaturalism, bolstering the popular conviction that the full reality of the universe somehow resided in the Communion wafer, reflected triumphalist attitude toward other Christians and certainly toward other religions: we Catholics alone have the Truth, literally on the tips of our tongues. As liturgical reform gained momentum in the decades leading to the Second Vatican Council, however, Catholic historians and theologians retrieved the apostolic practice of the Eucharist as communal meal. In so doing, they brought eucharistic piety back to earth--for good and for ill, it turns out.

The leaders of the liturgical movement in the 1940s, '50s, and '60s discovered from their historical researches that the first Christians had not concerned themselves with speculative questions of substance and accidents. Unburdened by the cool metaphysics of 13th-century Christian Aristotelianism, a la Saint Thomas, these first followers of Jesus experienced the Lord's Real Presence in the communal gathering itself, in the breaking of the bread, the sharing of wine, the forgiving of offenses done by brother to brother, in the reading of the scriptural word. They did not wonder about the precise moment at which the transformation from bread to body occurred, and presumably they did not panic if even a crumb of the eucharistic loaf dribbled down someone's chin. Rather, they experienced God's saving love in their own love for God and for one another, at table, over a sacramental meal.

By reading ancient documents, such as Justin Martyr's First Apology (c. 150), with a critical eye, the liturgical reformers gained revealing glimpses of this early eucharistic practice, and they came to regard the Tridentine Mass in a new and less favorable light. If the Eucharist is the celebration of Christ among us, if we are brothers and sisters in Christ called to Christ's table, why is the priest speaking a language we do not understand, Latin, and with his back to us? The hosts of the ancient eucharistic meals did not greet God's guests in a foreign tongue. Turn the altar around, make it a table, greet your neighbor in peace before you approach the table. Reemphasize the Word in scripture as well as the Word in Eucharist, venerate the community rather than the wafer itself as the host of Jesus' presence.

A sign of things to come

In these ruminations and reforms a paradigm shift was taking place. Catholics, accustomed to thinking of God as utterly transcendent, as above and beyond ordinary life and as answering liturgically only to approved formulas recited by ordained males speaking in the ancient tongue, were being asked to perceive the divine among us in the breaking of the bread, as did the disciples who encountered the Lord on the road to Emmaus. In the passage from the Tridentine Latin Mass to the Novus ordo vernacular Mass, instituted in 1971, Catholics underwent a profound transformation in their understanding of how and why Jesus is present to the believing community.

The new understandings and explanations of Christ's Real Presence in the consecrated bread and wine reflected a growing scholarly interest in symbols and in the way they function to convey ineffable realities and build human communities. From the innovative work of cultural anthropologists and semioticians (theorists of signs and symbols) Catholic liturgists and theologians learned about the complex ways that deceptively simple signs taken from everyday experience can disclose the hidden but defining realities that bind together a people of faith. This insight occurs when ordinary signs are seen in an extraordinary light. An otherwise unrecognized dimension of reality is revealed to us--a door to the sacred is opened.

Bread, for example, functions on many levels. When we eat bread as part of a regular meal, we experience it as satisfying our natural hunger and providing needed physical nourishment. When we consider the bread and the act of eating it in a different context (in the context, say, of our identity as creatures who require constant nourishment to stay alive), we perceive a deeper reality to our physical situations. We see ourselves for what we are: utterly dependent creatures who regularly require sustenance.

In yet another context, the liturgy of the Eucharist, we gather as a community of faith to experience Jesus' self-sacrifice on the cross as the source of our spiritual nourishment. In that setting, enhanced by the sacramental sign, the full reality of our situation comes clear: our need for spiritual as well as physical bread, our utter dependence on God, and our happy reliance on Jesus, whose broken body is the Bread of Life. The bread of the Eucharist is seen for what it really is: the source of our eternal life. In this mode of Real Presence, the emphasis is not on the unseen essence of the bread itself but on the new significance it assumes when set in the context of a communal feast of Christians who are suffering daily in service to others and who link their suffering to Christ's own brokenness. In this context the very act of eating and drinking, of having hunger sated and thirst slaked, is experienced in its deepest spiritual reality. The act betokens a redeemed people. We experience the reality of our dependence on the Lord and the reality of the Lord's presence nourishing us.

Note that in each of these three contexts I have mentioned, the ordinary meal, the philosophical reflection, and the liturgical celebration, the bread is a sign pointing to and communicating something other than its own material qualities of taste, shape, size, and so on (its own "accidents," to use the old scholastic language).

After Vatican II, therefore, transubstantiation made room for a new way of understanding the Real Presence. Called transignification, this theological concept placed emphasis on symbolics and human interaction rather than metaphysics. The supporters of transignification included Vatican II-era theologians Edward Schillebeeckx, Karl Rahner, and Bernard Cooke. The basic philosophical idea behind transignification, writes the sacramental theologian Joseph Martos, was that "significance or meaning is a constitutive element of reality as it is known to human beings ... this is especially true of human realities like attitudes and relationships."

Such human realities are embodied in symbolic actions such as speech and gestures, but symbolic actions can mean different things in different contexts (a father's slap on his son's cheek, for example, may signify anger or affection). According to Martos in Doors to the Sacred: A Historical Introduction to the Sacraments in the Catholic Church (Doubleday, 1982), if symbolic actions express unseen realities, then sacraments, by this logic, can be understood as "symbolic actions, ritual action of words and gestures, which embody and reveal not only human realities but also divine realities."

In instituting the Eucharist as a sacrament, Jesus changed the significance of the actions of the Jewish Passover meal he was celebrating as his Last Supper. When he commanded his disciples to eat his Body and drink his Blood in memory of his passion and death, Jesus was indicating that he was now the Passover lamb: his Blood would be shed so that the "Angel of Death" would "pass over" Christians; his Body would be broken so that his followers might taste eternal life.

Jesus' followers would be acting in their lives as Jesus acted in his, that is, they would be spending their physical lives in self-sacrificing service of one another. The hidden meaning of this daily service to others--its full reality and thus its full significance--would be conveyed and communicated in the sacrament of the Eucharist. Thus the focus shifted from where and how Jesus was really present in the elements of transformed bread and wine to the fact of his presence in every aspect of the communal meal. Citing Vatican 11's Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Catholic theologian Richard P. McBrien summarizes the postconciliar theology on this point: "Christ is present, first, in the community which has assembled for worship. Secondly, he is present in the person of the minister who presides in his name. Thirdly, he is present in the biblical word which is proclaimed. Finally, he is present in the sacred species themselves."

Since meaning is an intrinsic dimension of reality as it is known to human beings, by changing the meaning of the ritual and the elements Jesus thereby transformed their reality, making them objectively, and for all times, signs through which he would be present in the church and through which Christians could personally encounter him. "In parallel fashion the reality of the bread and wine is changed during the Mass not in any physical way but in a way which is nonetheless real," Martos explains, "for as soon as they signify the body and blood of Christ, they become sacramental, embodying and revealing Christ's presence in a way which is experienceably real."

Pope Paul VI did not jump on the theological bandwagon, however, and in 1965 he cautioned against these views in his encyclical Mysterium fidei. Transignification was not sufficient to explain the Real Presence, the pope wrote, for the consecrated elements bear not only a new meaning (transignification) but also a new substantial, or ontic, reality as well (transubstantiation). Mysterium fidei reaffirmed for the faithful that the Real Presence continues after Mass is over, and it defended eucharistic adoration and private Masses.

In all of this discussion, one thing seemed certain: Catholics would retain a firm belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, however that presence was to be understood.

What's the big deal?

In 1993 a Gallup poll found that only 30 percent of Catholics believed that when they receive Communion they were actually receiving the Body and Blood of Christ. Worse, only 21 percent of Catholics under the age of 50 believe in the Real Presence. More troubling still, 24 percent believe that Christ becomes present in the bread and wine only if the recipient believes this to be so. Such an error could be attributed to an inaccurate understanding of transignification--if Catholics had ever heard of transignification, which most have not.

Rather, the new skepticism is more likely attributed to "Catholic drift," the 1980s and '90s phenomenon whereby most American Catholics, shipwrecked in the postconciliar era, drift along in the sea of contemporary culture, clinging to a bit of the bark of the barque of Peter but drinking heavily from the roiling sea that engulfs them. This is a semi-poetic way of saying that we seem to be making it up as we go along, taking our cues from U.S. society rather than from Christian tradition.

Such a cavalier attitude toward the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist is cause for alarm, for this belief is absolutely essential to Roman Catholic self-understanding through the ages. Without an assurance that we are in a direct and intimate relationship with the Lord on a daily basis, it would be easy to dismiss so much of our common faith, teaching, and pastoral service as the well-intended efforts of good people. This description applies to any number of benevolent societies in the world.

But the church is much more: it is the continuous embodiment of God in human history. "If Christ is the sacrament of God, the Church is for us the sacrament of Christ; she represents him, in the full and ancient meaning of the term, she really makes him present," writes Henri de Lubac, an architect of Vatican II-era theology. "She not only carries on his work, but she is his very continuation, in a sense far more real than any human institution is its founder's continuation." The Eucharist is the mystical foundation of the church's sacramental identity. This belief sets Catholics apart from the world even as it prepares them for a distinctive role within the world. By withholding devotion to the Real Presence in the Eucharist, therefore, Catholics risk trivializing their history and identity. They call into question the other sacraments as well, including their own Baptism into death and new life in Christ.

The decline in devotion to the Eucharist is troubling for another reason: it underscores a catechetical crisis in Catholicism, a widespread crisis of belief that is sapping meaning and resonance from traditional Catholic rituals, symbols, and doctrines.

What has happened to the generation that has come of age since Merton penned his encomium to the Eucharist? Three answers suggest themselves.

First, we must consider the deleterious side effects of professionalizing public ministry and deemphasizing the supernatural or transcendent character of the Eucharist. A good in itself, the increased theological sophistication of the clergy and the lay directors of religious education has not always translated into clear, authoritative teaching on the core issues of Catholic identity. An appreciation of the ambiguous nature of experience, and of the multiple (and subtle) Real Presences of Christ beyond the official sacraments, is laudable in a trained theologian. But it does not rivet the imagination of the young or not-so-young person who wishes to encounter the Lord directly here and now. It may be no mere coincidence that Protestant Bible fellowships, which offer their own brand of direct experience of Jesus, have proliferated and attracted young Catholics during these recent years of decline in devotion to the Eucharist.

Transubstantiation may in retrospect seem a leaden or overly metaphysical approach to the gripping mystery of bread-become-Body, but it is no less cumbersome than transignification. More important, the promoters of transubstantiation were supported by a disciplined phalanx of sisters and other religious--not concerned to be credentialed as professionals, but no less effective as teachers--who conveyed basically the same message and explanation to audiences across the country. They did so in a direct presentation and spoke in a popular idiom. Moreover, the message had teeth; that is, it came with the promise of dire consequences for disregarding it. In the cynical '90s such sanctions may seem to be manipulative psychological ploys, but one might also view them as ways of conveying the gravity of the subject.

Theologians are doing their jobs, but they lack the institutional support they once enjoyed. Lawrence Cunningham, dean of the theology department of the University of Notre Dame, for example, in his book The Catholic Faith: An Introduction (Paulist Press, 1987), provides a balanced and useful definition of the Eucharist as a "communal ritual meal that testifies to and signifies the bond of unity between Jesus and the believing community; in that common celebration of faith, the presence of Jesus is affirmed as real, his presence celebrated, his power over sin acknowledged, and the hope for the future expressed." Yet that definition must be translated into an idiom that speaks to the religious imagination of the current generation of incredulous elementary and high-school students. Otherwise, its power is lost.

Second, we find ourselves in a climate in which religious authority--especially clerical and episcopal authority--is at a low ebb, just at a time when it is most needed. Given the professionalization and dedication of clergy, women religious, and a new generation of lay leaders, why should there be Catholic drift? Theological educators point not only to shrinking institutional and human resources but also to the penchant for experimentation and the uncritical embrace of pluralism in American culture, tendencies that serve to fragment rather than unify the believing community. In this kind of situation, when people are moving in several different directions and creating their own personal realities, the prudent exercise of authority is necessary to set limits to experimentation and define mainstream teaching.

Third, there remains a general confusion about the "New Mass," which is now not so new but still misunderstood. The reforms introduced in the liturgy were meant to increase active participation by the laity. But they were accompanied by a surprisingly casual attitude toward the sacred mysteries. It was as if the faithful interpreted their new role in the spirit of Groucho Marx: if they let me in this club, this club cannot be too important. Many lay Catholics, not adequately instructed in the meaning of the changes, seemed to believe that the Mass had been downgraded by its vernacularization, by its sign of peace, and its air of familiarity. They failed to realize their new role as the People of God, in which context it made perfect sense to participate fully and reverently in the sacred meal.

When the focus of the eucharistic celebration shifted from the supernatural Host to various human hosts greeting and embracing one another at Mass, the Real Presence of the sacred was somehow diminished. Or so it seemed to many.

Lest readers misinterpret my concerns as indicating disrespect for the Catholic educators who are trying valiantly to pick up the pieces after the Second Vatican Council, I must allow that the world is a far different place now than it was when Craig Case and I giggled over our reflected images in the chalice. Among other things, it is a world less congenial to belief in things unseen, especially when the unseen spiritual reality is signified by a broken Body and shed Blood. Our culture wants its spirituality packaged brightly, promising uplifting rewards. The cross was always a scandal to the world, but now the world, with its alluring promise of physical security and its self-sufficient individualism, invades even the sanctuary. It does not respect subtle presences and whispered prayers.

In such a cultural environment it may be high time to reaffirm the ancient teaching that Christ's death conquered the world by displaying the hollowness of its promises and by communicating a new life. This new life is born in suffering and realized in the scandalous belief that its bearer is really and truly present among us when we gather in Christ's name. To mumble this truth meekly, or to let it slip away in an avalanche of qualifications, would be to abandon our most precious heritage.

By R. Scott Appleby, who is a professor of history and director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame.