Interesting
Sacrament:
a : a Christian rite (as baptism or the Eucharist) that is believed to have been ordained by Christ and that is held to be a means of divine grace or to be a sign or symbol of a spiritual reality
That's what we've been saying all along...It's a spiritual operation, symbolic of a physical one...
Nothing you have quoted is negated in the Catholic Church’s understanding of the Eucharist as a sacrament.
The Eucharist IS a sign. The Catholic belief is that the Eucharist differs from the other sacraments in that it is a real thing as well as a sign. St. Thomas Aquinas says that the body and blood of the Lord are really present in the sacrament—but that they are present IN THE MANNER OF A SYMBOL. That is not the same as being a “mere” symbol.
One way to make this a little clearer is to note that when the Host is broken into pieces, the whole Christ is present in each of the resulting pieces, precisely as each piece would be a symbol of Christ if the original whole Host had been a symbol.
Some careless people try to express the reality of the Real Presence by saying that Christ is “physically present” in the Eucharist. That is precisely what he is not. If Christ were physically present in the Eucharist, he would be about 5’10”, weigh about 180 lbs., etc., etc., and he would be visible to our eyes.
The “Real Presence” means that Christ is present in an objective way, independent of our minds. A mere symbol is nothing without a mind to interpret it, actively drawing some meaning from it. The presence of Christ in the Eucharist is real, even if the tabernacle is locked for 1000 years, and no one even knows it is there.
This insistence on the “real presence” in the Eucharist, and that the bread and wine cease to exist at the consecration, being changed into the body and blood of the Lord, is the Church’s way of being faithful to the Lord’s command that we are to eat his body and drink his blood.