We should take a more catholic view of the Eucharist.

WHEN JESUS, AFTER HIS resurrection, sat down with the two from Emmaus--Cleopas and probably his wife--"he took their bread, said a, blessing, broke it and gave each a piece" (Luke 24:30).

Before I left for East Africa, I had been having in the Netherlands. I often celebrated the Eucharist in an institution run by religious sisters for hearing-impaired people at a village called Sint Michielsgestel. It was a huge place with a bakery of hosts attached to it. The sisters sent those hosts in sealed, round, white plastic boxes all over the world. When I prepared for one of my first Masses in Tanzania, I saw one of them in the sacristy. I checked the box, because I hardly could believe my eyes, but there it was: the name Sint Michielsgestel imprinted on the box.

The words "made by human hands" that I said over the bread and wine at the offertory during that Mass struck me in a way they had never done before. Why did the Hosts we offered in that African community come from the Netherlands and (as I found out later) the wine from Cyprus? Did this imply that African food and drink disqualified as eucharistic matter? Did it discriminate the work of African hands?

It was my introduction to a discussion that has been going on in the church for centuries. It was recently revived in the West by a letter from Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Prefect of Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, dated June 19, 1995. In that letter he wrote about the composition of the bread and wine we use for the Eucharist. The bread should contain gluten (plant proteins) and the wine alcohol (except for those who get permission to use grape juice, but who are then not allowed to concelebrate except by special permission).

"What about those communities, like those in Africa, that have neither bread made of wheat, nor wine made of grapes? Can they only use imported matter for their eucharistic celebrations? Can they not use their produce, representing their sweat and blood, to bring their eucharistic offering to God? Should they not be allowed to bring their own lives and life struggles to the table in the food and drink that their earth and their hands provide?," asks David N. Power, in his magisterial book The Eucharistic Mystery (Crossroad, 1992). These questions not only arise in Africa, but also elsewhere in the world church. In Asia, liturgists have been asking whether they can use a bowl of rice with green bamboo leaf wine as the food at the Lord's meal.

THE CHURCH HAS ALWAYS TAUGHT AND believed that the Eucharist has its origin in the life and mission of Jesus. Jesus invited us at the Last Supper to do the same as he did when he took bread and wine. The bread Jesus used was probably unleavened, though scriptural expert Father Edward Foley, O.F.M. Cap. believes that Jesus might have used the flat barley cakes of the Passover festival.

According to Foley's research, the Christian communities in the first centuries used their ordinary table fare. The faithful brought their bread and wine, together with other gifts, to the altar during the Offertory procession. It is only in the ninth century that unleavened bread, made out of wheat, became customary in the Christian West. In 804, theologian and educator Alcuin wrote about this change: "The bread which is consecrated in the Body of Christ ought to be most pure without any other additive."

The round white Hosts we are now accustomed to in our churches originate from that time, though they were originally thicker than ours. Distributing the Hosts on the tongue and not in the hands of the faithful dates also from that time.

By the year 1000 unleavened Hosts had replaced ordinary bread. Monks and clerks began to bake them in two sizes, the larger one for the priest and the smaller one for the lay communicants. The gifts brought in by the faithful were no longer used directly in the Mass. By the year 1300 the baking of the Hosts could only be done with a special ecclesiastical approval in many places. By that time the bread used in the Eucharist was no longer the daily bread one prayed for in the Our Father. It had become a special type of bread, hardly recognizable as such, and different from the bread in ordinary life. It had become an out-of-this-world kind of bread, prepared by out-of-this-world people: monks and nuns.

The story of the wine is, on one hand, less dramatic, though here, too, they gradually stopped using ordinary table wine, replacing it by specially approved Mass wine. The Holy Office later set the alcohol limits at 12 percent for dry wines and at 18 percent for sweet ones. On the other hand, the story of the wine is even more dramatic, in that, up until recently, the cup wasn't offered to the community.

These developments caused problems in our Western context. One sometimes hears that children have more difficulty believing that consecrated hosts are bread or even food than that they are Jesus. Liturgists noted that the bread of the host seemed to have become so "out-of-this-world" and alien that even adults had difficulties seeing how it relates to the world of their work and life and, consequently, how they themselves relate to the celebration of the Eucharist.

POPE PAUL VI TOOK THEIR CRITICISM INTO account when he introduced a new missal after the Second Vatican Council. He wrote in its guidelines that the material used for the celebration of the Eucharist should "truly have the appearance of food." The priest should be able "to break the host into parts" and share it with some others. He also changed the offering prayers over the bread and wine, adding the words "gift of the earth," "fruit of the vine," and "work of human hands," hoping to bring the bread and wine back from their otherworldliness and into the reality of everyday life. God, nature, and the work of women and men were again linked together in the creation of a world that is changed in the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ. The bread and the wine are not just produced by wheat and grapes as created by God; they are also our own human work!

This development might sound fine in our Western ecosystem, where we know what we are talking about when speaking about bread and wine because we grow wheat and grapes, bake bread and press wine. What about those regions where wheat and vines are traditionally unknown--in regions where the Eucharist has to be celebrated with items grown on another continent, and with fruits of outlandish plants produced by strangers? Are the produce of their land and the work of their hands not fit to be changed to the Body and Blood of Christ?

When the Twi-speaking people in Ghana pray in the Our Father and say "give us today our daily bread," they use another word for bread during the Mass. The eucharistic bread is called paano, a word borrowed from the Portuguese (and the wine is called waen, transliterated from the English wine). For the bread they pray for in the Our Father, they use the Twi word aduane.

For them, as for so many all over the world, the Host made of wheat and the wine made of grapes remain the sign of a foreign presence, not of a familiar meal. One can wonder whether it is in accord with Christ's intention to employ bread and wine that are so foreign to those who remember him. Did Jesus not say to those he sent out: "Eat and drink whatever they set in front. of you" (Luke 10:7)?

No wonder several African countries' Christian communities began to use their own produce for Mass. The bishops in Chad and Cameroon allowed the use of millet bread and millet beer to celebrate the Eucharist in their dioceses until Rome ordered the end of such experiments. The Zairian bishops asked if they could use other wine than grape wine when that was not available. Rome gave a negative answer.

THERE IS A REASON FOR THOSE ANSWERS, as many theologians have explained. The church is afraid of losing the connecting link between our celebrations of the Eucharist and the Last Supper of Jesus. Power wrote, in his above mentioned study, that the insistence on the use of wheaten bread and grape wine "seems to be a matter of institutional ideology."

He adds that the "provision can hardly be based on a plea for historical continuity with what Jesus blessed at the Last Supper. If what he used was leavened bread, this has already been broken in Western churches. If what he used was unleavened bread, it has been broken in Eastern churches."

When Cardinal Ratzinger wrote his letter last June, he did not only write about bread and wine, but he also determined their composition. He wrote that "given the centrality of the celebration of the Eucharist in the life of the priest, candidates who are affected by celiac disease," a disease that makes people allergic to the use of gluten, "may not be admitted to holy orders."

As all wine used during the Mass must contain alcohol, he added that the same is true of those who suffer from alcoholism--they may not be ordained. These are decisions that are difficult to understand in a time of scarcity of priests and a greater inclusivity of people with disabilities in our communities.

Are they the last words about the mandatory use of bread and wine? Let us hope that they are not. There are good reasons to believe so. African scholars often point out that the words we use during a eucharistic celebration are at least, if not more important, than the matter we use. We do not use the same language Jesus used at the Last Supper, as we have translated those words. Could what happened to those words not happen to the matter?

In some cases our liturgical code already allows that kind of "translation" of the "matter" we use. The sacred oil we use for other sacraments no longer has to be exclusively olive oil. It can be replaced by any vegetal oil.

The difficulty is maybe that we in our church do not realize what it really means to be a worldwide, catholic church: a church that is a transient home on our pilgrimage here on earth, a workplace and shelter where we should feel united and at the same time at home, especially at the eucharistic table.

By Joseph G. Donders, M.Afr., the Finian Kerwin O.F.M. Chair of Mission Studies at Washington Theological Union in Washington, D.C.