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the same bread? You can find many such explanations. This will not do. The faith of the Church is very clear. Under the externals of bread and wine, it is Jesus Christ, true God and true man – really, truly and substantially present with His Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity. That is what it is. I am not saying that it is easy to understand. What I am saying is, firstly, that it is true. Secondly, it is a gift. It is given to us by God, not in order to make our lives difficult as believers, but to feed us and inspire us. And thirdly, if we profess ourselves to be Catholics, then we have a duty to relearn this truth, to live accordingly and share it. There are several aspects in the dogmas of the Holy Eucharist. The first is transubstantiation. The fact that God’s power allows for a change of the inside while the outside remains. Before the words of Consecration it is bread and looks like bread. After the words of Consecration, it is God and looks like bread. The externals have remained – those of bread, or of wine for the chalice – but the inside has changed. This, as I said earlier, is only possible through the enacting of the divine powers as embedded in the soul of the priest by virtue of his priestly ordination. Another important aspect is the gradation of the modes of presence. You sometimes hear put on the same level the presence of Christ ‘in His people gathered together’ and the presence of Christ ‘in His Gospel proclaimed’ and – on the same level – the presence of Christ in the Sacred Host. This is a mistake. It is wrong, because there is a hierarchy in the ways of being present. If you listen on your telephone to a voice message left by your wife, it is a way of her being present, which is real, but obviously in a 54
lesser degree. If she comes to meet you and you hear her voice in the corridor but you do not see her yet, that is a higher degree of presence. When she comes into the room and you see each other, this is obviously an even higher degree of presence. The word “presence” allows for a range of degrees. It is not enough to say: Christ is present here or there. We need to qualify that presence. The way God is present in the Sacred Host and in the chalice is supreme and unsurpassed. There will never be a way or means offered to us until the Last Judgement, whereby God will make Himself more present than He is in the Holy Eucharist. It cannot be surpassed and it surpasses every other mode of presence of God.
PHOTO CREDIT: JOHN ARON
Another aspect is concomitance. This is much ignored. It is the simple fact that in the Holy Eucharist it is the Lord Jesus with His Body, His Blood, His Soul, His Divinity. That is, the entirety of Who He is. Although when He died, His Body and Soul were separated, they were reunited at the Resurrection and indeed, in the Holy Eucharist the Lord is as risen. Certainly He still bears the stigmata of His Passion, endured to save us from sin. But He is present as risen. For that motive, in the Holy Host the change is essentially from the substance of the bread to that of the Body of Jesus. But for the Body
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of Jesus to be a risen body, a body that is alive, it needs – just like your body and mine – blood to circulate in the body, to irrigate it. This is why, in the Host, we also have the Sacred Blood with the flesh of Jesus. But how do flesh and blood keep together? The soul is what keeps the physical components of our person – the liquid blood and the solid flesh – together. For the same reason, in the Host we need the spiritual form or principle to keep together the Body and Blood, and this is the third component we have in the Host – His human Soul, because the Lord Jesus Christ had a human Soul. However, the body, blood and soul of a very holy person would not be enough to save us. Imagine that transubstantiation was to the body of St John the Baptist, who was a very holy man! Imagine if we were to receive him in Holy Communion. It would be wonderful and bring many graces to be sure, but he is not God. For our salvation, we need to surrender ourselves to God made man, the only Saviour. This is why, together with the Body, Blood and Soul, we also have the fourth component – the Divinity of Our Lord Jesus, which has been called in, so to speak, at the moment of transubstantiation of the bread into the Body. The same applies to the transubstantiation of the wine to the Precious Blood. What is transubstantiated, literally, is the substance of the wine into that of the Precious Blood, but for the same reasons the Blood calls to itself at the same moment, so to speak, the Body, the Soul and the Divinity. Twenty or thirty years ago, every child age seven preparing for First Holy Communion would have known these truths and would have been able to explain them to the parish priest exCAL X M A R IA E
amining him or her before First Holy Communion. And now? With all due respect, I would not be surprised if a lot of what I have explained just now were news to some of us here. And it is not your fault. You have not been taught. And if you have read it somewhere, you probably have been exposed to a handling of the Blessed Sacrament which contradicts – day in, day out – this truth. The doctrine of the presence of the components in the Host and also in the chalice is called “concomitance”. It means “to come together with”. One of the practical applications of this important doctrine is that even though one may receive Holy Communion possibly only under the externals of bread, and not from the chalice, one has still received the Precious Blood. One has received everything in the Host. I repeat, because I know that many people do not know that: when you receive the Sacred Host, you have received in it the Precious Blood of Jesus with His Soul and Divinity. And the other way around. If somebody is intolerant to gluten, for instance, and suppose he cannot receive the Host itself and would only be able to consume the Precious Blood from the chalice, he or she would have also received the Body of Jesus. This is the doctrine of concomitance, which is very important for its practical applications. The other practical consequence of the Real Presence is how we handle the Eucharistic fragments. The Host, by its nature, is friable. It can easily break into pieces. In fact, the Holy Mass in the Acts of the Apostles was called ‘fractio panis’, the breaking of bread. The fact that the Host has fragments is normal. However, what we believe about these fragments will determine how we handle them. In a word, regardless of size, it is God, as long as WINTER 2018
the bare human eye can identify this whitish fragment on the corporal, on the finger or wherever it is. It is the Lord Jesus Christ. The Magisterium of the Church has constantly reaffirmed that from the consecration Our Lord is really present in the Host and its size does not matter. The Eucharist occurs in Holy Mass. This is the context in which God has given it to us and this is why, of course, it is a sacrifice. The Sacrifice of the Mass is the unbloody re-enactment of the Sacrifice of Our Lord on the Cross, when He died on Golgotha, on Good Friday, to redeem us from sin. We are children of wrath. We had turned away from God as children of fallen Adam and Eve, and so we need, first of all, to be reconciled with God vertically, so that, as a consequence we may be reconciled with our brethren horizontally. The reason why more and more priests are becoming interested in the traditional form of the Mass is that this verticality is more explicit. There is a risk in the way the new Mass is very often offered that the vertical dimension is not so obvious. What seems to be prevailing is horizontality, that is, to be a friend to one another. This is also true: Mass is very much about reconciliation and being united in love. But it would be a big mistake if we were to forget that horizontal, that is, brotherly reconciliation is only a consequence and a fruit of the vertical reconciliation, that is, with God first. And this, is only achieved through the Sacrifice of the Lord Jesus on the Cross. I encourage you to support your pastors in the ever more reverent celebrating of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and to make sure that the true definition of the Holy Eucharist enshrined in that Eucharistic Sacrifice is taught and shared among yourselves,
among your friends and among your children. After all, it is very telling to see that in Fatima, Our Blessed Lady, when she warned us about the crisis to come, had us prepared for this when the Angel gave the Eucharistic catechism to the Children. If you meditate on the apparition of the angel to the children that speak of the Holy Eucharist, you will see that this is the means for recovery, and for victory in Our Lord. Fr Armand de Malleray, FSSP is the author of “Ego Eimi – It is I. Falling in Eucharistic Love”, published by and available from the Lumen Fidei Institute, with a foreword by Bishop Athanasius Schneider. He is currently the rector of St Mary’s Shrine, Warrington. He is also the editor of Dowry, the magazine of the Priestly Fraternity of St Peter in the United Kingdom.
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