The word “eucharist” comes from the Greek verb eucharistein meaning “to give thanks.” At Jesus’ Last Supper, he gave thanks, giving special significance to the bread and wine he passed to the men and women who were his disciples. Bread and wine had long been used in Hebrew religious practices. When Jesus said the bread and wine were his body and blood, he was speaking about giving his life for his followers.
Paul refers to the Christian practice of the Lord’s Supper in 1 Corinthians 11. Acts of Apostles mentions three occasions, when the early followers of Jesus gathered to give thanks and break bread together: Acts 2, Acts 20 and Acts 27.
The early eucharistic services were presided over by the men and women who were leaders of the local Christian communities. Ordination was not yet a requirement for eucharistic leaders, because it did not even exist at that time.
Early Christians understood, much better than the medieval Christians who came centuries after them, that social realities can be powerful spiritual realities. The Body of Christ, as Paul stressed, was the Christian community. The Gospel According to Matthew is very clear: Jesus says: “Where two or three gather together in my name, there I am, with them.” (Matthew 18:20)
Interestingly, when the Gospel According to John describes the Last Supper, it mentions the washing of feet but not Jesus’ actions with bread and wine. But the sixth chapter of John’s gospel does quote Jesus as saying, “I am the bread of life. . . This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.”
Nevertheless, John is very strong in his affirmation of the presence of Christ in the community. In chapter 17 we read Jesus saying: “Father, just as you are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one – I in them and you in me – so that they may be brought to complete unity.” (John 17:20-26)
By the late first and early second century, the weekly ceremonial meal of the Christian communities was called a “Thanksgiving” (eucharistia). The Palestinian Christian leader Justin (100 – c. 165 CE) argued that the Christian Eucharist had replaced Hebrew sacrifices. Justin took a text from Malachi, the last book of the Hebrew Bible, and applied it to Christians in his own days: “Everywhere a pure sacrifice is offered to my name because my name is great among the nations, says the Lord almighty.” (Malachi 1:11)
A “pure sacrifice” in the ancient world was a religious meal, shared by individuals who were ritually “pure.”
Centuries later, in the the eighth and ninth centuries, the ritual changed from a community celebration to a priestly action and worship arrangements in churches changed significantly. The presider became the “celebrant” and no longer faced the people but faced the apse: standing before the altar with his back to the congregation.
The new priestly practice was first adopted in the basilicas of Rome and then became common practice across Europe. What was lost was the sense that the congregation was the Body of Christ. What had been a community ritual became the celebrant’s ritual. The celebrant “said Mass.” The congregation watched everything from some distance. The word “Mass” was derived from the concluding words of the ritual in Latin: Ite, missa est, “Go, it is the dismissal.”
By the eleventh century, the ritual performed by priests was no longer understood as a sacred meal but as a priestly sacrifice: a sacrificial offering of God’s Son to God his Father. Medieval theologians misinterpreted Justin’s quotation from Malachi. Key among them was Anselm (1033 – 1109) the Archbishop of Canterbury with his “satisfaction theory of atonement.” Anselm created a theological distortion with his understanding of God not as a loving Father but as a hard-nosed and vengeful judge, demanding the death of his own son. Quite a departure from “God is love.”
Not long after Anselm, the influential Dominican philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274) introduced another important change in eucharistic understanding. He noted significantly that the Eucharist was different from the other sacraments because it was not just a sacred ritual, but Eucharist was a sacred object. Popular piety shifted to adoration of that sacred object: the eucharistic bread, called the “host,” from the Latin word “hostis,” meaning victim.
The changed understanding became official when the Fourth Lateran Council (1215 CE) decided that it was not necessary for Christians to receive communion regularly. The Blessed Sacrament (the name given to the consecrated bread), however, was to be adored. As a natural development of the changed focus to adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, the feast of Corpus Christi (eucharistic Body of Christ), was established in 1264 by Pope Urban IV (1195 – 1264) shortly before his death. The worship of the consecrated host greatly expanded into the public adoration of the host exposed on the altar. Monstrances, ornate display cases, were created to display the consecrated host. Stories about bleeding hosts and apparitions of Christ in the consecrated host were widespread.
Protestant reformers reacted to many eucharistic aberrations. The variety of Protestant teachings about the eucharist forced the bishops at the Council of Trent (meeting in twenty-five sessions between 13 December 1545 and 4 December 1563) to restate the meaning of the sacrament.
The Council of Trent produced three documents on the Eucharist, based on Aristotelian scholastic theology. The bishops declared that “Our Lord Jesus Christ, true God and man, is truly, really and substantially contained under the appearances of bread and wine.” This presence, due to “transubstantiation,” was based on medieval Aristotelian metaphysics. It was understood as “the real presence,” localized in the sacramental bread, and not just a spiritual presence. The bishops at Trent said nothing about the earlier ceremonial meal and nothing about the real presence of Christ in the Christian community, the Body of Christ.
As sacramental theologian Joseph Martos so often observed, the Catholic Church officially still recognizes the doctrines of the Council of Trent, but contemporary Catholics and Catholic theologians are quietly laying them aside.
Most contemporary theologians no longer speak about the Mass as a sacrifice. The term “transubstantiation” is virtually unknown to younger Catholics. Even the word “mass,” though still in popular use, is disappearing from the vocabulary of theologians and liturgists. Today more prefer to speak of the Mass as the “Eucharistic Liturgy.” (The English word “liturgy” is derived from the ancient Greek leitourgia, which means “a work or service for the people.”)
I remember when my former professor Edward Schillebeeckx (1914 – 2009) said we should stop talking about “transubstantiation.” He stressed that in the eucharistic celebration the bread and wine take on a new significance and proposed the term “transignification.”
In 2019 a Pew Research Center survey found that most self-described U.S. Catholics did not believe in transubstantiation. Nearly 69% said they personally believed that the bread and wine used in Communion “are symbols of the body and blood of Jesus Christ.” U.S. Catholic bishops were greatly dismayed – some even angry — and said something had to be done.
During their November 2021 annual meeting, The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) voted overwhelmingly (201 – 17) to launch a three-year Eucharistic revival initiative – to teach Catholics about the Eucharist — that will culminate this year, 2024, in a National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Most Catholics who reject the idea of Christ’s “real presence” in the Eucharist think it means that Christ is physically present in the Eucharist. In fact, Christ’s presence is not a physical presence.
But we do perceive spiritual realities, however, through physical realities. When one looks, for example, at the physical words on a page, one perceives things that are not physical, namely meanings or ideas. Our eyes look at black marks on a white background, but the mind perceives what the words mean.
Contemporary theologians understand all of the sacraments as ritual actions of words and gestures, which embody and reveal not only human realities but also divine realities. At his Last Supper, Jesus changed the meaning of a common Hebrew ritual to a memorial of his own death and resurrection. He changed the meaning of the bread and wine from what they signified for the Hebrew people to a sacrament of his body and blood.
Today we better understand that just as the Word of God is present in the reading of Sacred Scripture at each liturgy, so also Christ is present sacramentally in the bread and wine celebration shared in the Christian community as signs of spiritual communion with him. As Paul the Apostle stressed, Christians are the Body of Christ.
The worshiping Christian community, the Body of Christ, makes it possible for Christ to be present in the proclaiming of God’s word in the Scriptures, in the thanksgiving that it offers to God in remembrance of Jesus’ Last Supper, and in the giving and receiving of the eucharistic bread and wine.
If we believe the Christian community gathered for Eucharist is the Body of Christ, it is not enough to just believe it. We must also live it, practicing love of God and love of neighbor as outlined in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew chapters 5, 6, and 7).
Our Christian faith is not a relic of the past. It is a life-giving program for today and for tomorrow. We are called to be in dialogue with the times and the world in which we live, faithful to the Word of God, and striving to harmonize life and faith.
Jack