Replies

This is a Catholic/Orthodox Caucus. That is that only Catholics/Orthodox may post. Mention is made only of our beliefs not in contradistinction to others.

Catholics believe in a corporeal, substantial presence of Christ in the Eucharist. It is not just a spiritual presence. The whole Christ is present—body, blood, soul, and divinity. Furthermore, Catholics believe in an objective presence, not one that is available only to those who receive in faith.

Ever since Irenaeus the Catholic Church has been insistent that the Incarnation really was a supernatural union of the spiritual and the physical. Irenaeus was countering Gnosticism which, as Stone writes, "interposed an insuperable barrier between spiritual beings and material things, between the true God of the universe and the universe of matter." And it is one of the great heresies of our age that Christians attempt to "spirit away" the physicalness of the gospel. In this way the Resurrection, the miracles, and the Incarnation itself become mere "spiritual events."

So likewise the Church has always insisted—despite the difficulties—that the presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament is not simply spiritual and subjective. It is objective and corporeal. The Fourth Lateran Council explained that belief with the term "transubstantiation." As the Oxford Dominican Fr. Herbert McCabe has said, "Transubstantiation is not a complete explanation of the mystery, but it is the best description of what we believe happens at the consecration."

In Aramaic, there are over three dozen words that mean represent or symbolize, but Jesus used none of them in his statement, "This is my body." In fact, a literal translation in the Aramaic is simply, "This my body."

In 1 Corinthians 11:27, Paul says that if one eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner he will be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord. In a Semitic culture, to be guilty of another’s body and blood is to be guilty of murder. Paul goes on to say that some are dying because of this.

The bread of life discourse begins in John 6:22, and the first point to address is the discussion of the heavenly bread. Jesus makes the point that as the Father sent manna from heaven for the physical nourishment of the Israelites, he has sent Jesus for the spiritual nourishment of the world. When Jesus announced this (6:41), the Jews murmured because he said that he had come down from heaven, not because he said that he was like bread. They understood his symbolic statement regarding the origin of the manna, and were scandalized by what it implied: "Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How does he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven?’" (6:42).

Beginning in verse 43, Jesus replies to these objections. At the completion of his answer (6:51), he speaks of a bread that he is yet to give. The Jews’ understand that he is now speaking in a literal sense, and so they object, "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?" So the Jews first objected because of what Jesus’ initial words meant symbolically, and now they object to what his second statement means literally. Had Jesus been speaking in a metaphorical sense here, this would be the perfect point to clarify his intentions.

Matthew 16:5–12 is one such example where Jesus’ listeners thought that he was speaking in a literal sense, and he had to correct them. In this passage, Christ was warning the disciples of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees. The disciples concluded that he was speaking of the bread they had forgotten to bring for their journey. In seeing their confusion, Jesus had to reiterate that he was not speaking literally of bread

Keeping this in mind, look how Jesus answers the Jews’ objections in John 6:53–58: "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. . . . For my flesh is food indeed, and my flesh is drink indeed." These words would hardly quell the Jew’s fear that Jesus spoke literally. Following this, many of his disciples said, "This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?"(6:60). At this point, we witness the only place in Scripture where anyone leaves Jesus for a doctrinal reason

One last passage worth considering is John 10:9, where Jesus says, "I am the door." None of those present understood Jesus to be speaking literally when he said that he was a door. The narrative does not continue, "And his disciples murmured about this, saying, ‘How can he be a door? Where are his hinges? We do not see a doorknob.’ Jesus answered them, ‘Amen, Amen, I say to you, I am a door, and my chest is real wood, and my hips are real hinges.’" This is absurd, but it illustrates how shocking Jesus’ words were when he said that his flesh was real food and his blood real drink.