“Last summer the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, with the full agreement of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Congregations for the Oriental Churches, issued a series of guidelines for Eucharistic sharing between the Chaldean church (which is in communion with Rome) and the Assyrian church of the East (which is not). The guidelines are revolutionary in character. For the first time in modern history, the Catholic church has recognized the validity of a eucharistic prayer (the Anaphora of Addai and Mari) without the words of institution (“This is my body. ...This is my blood”), more commonly referred to as the words of consecration. In the popular Catholic mind, especially before Vatican II, these words have had an almost magical quality. Whenever a validly ordained priest utters them over a large host (often times over a ciborium full of smaller hosts as well) and then over a chalice containing wine, Christ immediately “comes down” from heaven, taking the form of bread and wine to be received by the faithful as holy Communion, that is, His very “body and blood, soul and divinity.”