The Eucharist: Christ in the Eucharist

Not a symbol

Jesus is substantially present, body, blood, soul and divinity, in the Eucharist. At the consecration the substance of bread and wine becomes Christ's body and blood, while the accidents, such as appearance and taste, remain. This is transubstantiation. "Eucharist" comes from the Greek eucharistia, "thanksgiving." The Council of Trent reaffirmed the Real Presence.

Who may receive

By this sacrament we are united to Christ, who makes us sharers in his body and blood to form a single body, as the Catechism says (1331). Communion is for practicing Catholics in a state of grace who believe in the Real Presence and are in union with the Church's teaching, even if struggling with a belief (see Mark 9:21-29). The Church does not practice intercommunion. Saying "Amen" professes faith in Christ, his Church and all he teaches through her. We who are many are one body because we share one bread (1 Corinthians 10:17; see 10:14-22; 12:12-30).

The sacrifice

The priest, acting in the person of Christ, re-presents the sacrifice of the cross under the forms of bread and wine (CCC 1366); he images Christ, the high priest of the New Covenant (CCC 1348). Christ's sacrifice is not repeated, but it is made present and offered anew. Jesus instituted it at the Last Supper (Matthew 26:26-28). The power of Christ's words and of the Holy Spirit makes his body and blood and his sacrifice sacramentally present (CCC 1353). We believe it because of Christ's own words (John 6:47-58). Eucharistic miracles point to this mystery, though Church teaching does not depend on them. Communion anticipates the wedding feast of heaven (Revelation 19:9).

John 6

Protestant attacks often focus on the Eucharist, and show that Fundamentalists are not always literalists. In the synagogue at Capernaum the crowd recalled the manna (John 6:30), and Jesus said he is the bread of life. When he said the bread he would give is his flesh, they asked how he could give his flesh to eat (John 6:51-52). He did not soften it but insisted that unless they eat his flesh and drink his blood they have no life, for his flesh is true food and his blood true drink (John 6:53-56). Many disciples called it a hard saying (John 6:60), Judas fell away (John 6:64), and many left him (John 6:66), the only time followers left him over doctrine. He did not call them back to explain a metaphor. Twelve times he said he is the bread from heaven, and four times that they must eat his flesh and drink his blood.

The objections

• "Eating" means believing (John 6:35). As Fr. John A. O'Brien notes, among the Jews "to eat the flesh and drink the blood" figuratively meant to slander or injure someone (see Micah 3:3). Read figuratively, Jesus would promise eternal life for slandering him.
• "I am the door" (John 10:9), "I am the vine" (John 15:1). These make sense as metaphors, but Jesus went beyond metaphor: his flesh is true food (John 6:55), and whoever eats him will live because of him (John 6:57). The verb trogon means to chew or gnaw.
• "The flesh is of no avail" (John 6:63). Christ's flesh avails much; without it our faith is futile (1 Corinthians 15:17-18). "Flesh" here means natural human judgment unaided by grace (see John 8:15-16), and "spirit" never means "symbolic" in the Bible. His words are understood only by faith, by the Spirit and the Father's drawing (cf. John 6:37, 44-45, 65).

Paul confirms it

The cup is a participation in Christ's blood and the bread a participation in his body (1 Corinthians 10:16). Whoever eats unworthily will answer for the body and blood of the Lord and eats judgment on himself (1 Corinthians 11:27, 29), a charge as serious as homicide, which makes sense only if the bread and wine are truly his body and blood.

The early Church

• Ignatius of Antioch (c. 110): heretics abstain from the Eucharist because they do not confess it is the flesh of our Savior.
• Justin Martyr (c. 150): the Eucharist is not common bread but the flesh and blood of the incarnate Jesus.
• Origen (c. 244): the faithful take care that no particle of the Lord's Body falls.
• Cyril of Jerusalem (mid-300s): do not regard them as simple bread and wine; they are the body and blood of Christ, even if the senses suggest otherwise.
• Theodore of Mopsuestia (fifth century): Christ did not say "This is the symbol of my body" but "This is my body."

There is no early record in which the literal interpretation is opposed and only the metaphorical accepted.