I’ve had a look in the Catholic Encyclopaedia about this subject, and the description is very hard to understand, using terms like: the *substance *of bread, the *accidents *of bread, the *matter *of bread, changes to the *form *of bread, the subject of bread and so on.
Can someone please explain in simple terms what exactly Catholic belief is. Do you believe that the host literally changes into flesh? Or is it that Christ’s body is made of bread? Or something else? I’m trying to understand the concept, here.
Please, people, let’s keep this GQ material. Restrict your answers to factual statements about what Catholic doctrine actually is, and what it means. If you wish to disagree with that belief, feel free to start your own thread in the appropriate forum.
IANAC, but the idea is that the bread becomes Jesus’s body. It stops being bread. It still looks like bread, smells like bread, tastes like bread, has the same chemical formula as bread, but it’s no longer bread…it’s Jesus.
Broadly speaking there are two beliefs on what “happens” during the sacrament of communion: the belief that the ritual is purely figurative (is there a technical term for this?) and that the bread and wine merely represent Christ’s body and blood, and belief in the “real presence”": that the bread and wine actually are Christ’s body and blood.
Belief in the “real presence” can further be divided into two beliefs, transubstantiation and consubstantiation. Consubstantiation holds that the bread and wine coexist with the body and blood; that is, the bread is simultaneously bread and body and the wine is simultaneously wine and blood. Transubstantiation, which is Roman Catholic dogma, holds that the bread and wine become body and blood. That is, the bread is no longer bread but body (that looks and tastes like bread), and the wine is no longer wine but blood (that looks and tastes like wine).
IANAC, and I’m sure Bricker, tomndebb, or one of the other practicing, theologically-knowledgable Roman Catholics will be along with a better explanation any moment…
I don’t know if you’ll find these paragraphs from the Catechism of the Catholic Church helpful or not:
1376 The Council of Trent summarises the Catholic faith by declaring: “Because Christ our Redeemer said that it was truly his body that he was offering under the species of bread, it has always been the conviction of the Church of God, and this holy Council now declares again, that by the consecration of the bread and wine there takes place a change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood. This change the holy Catholic Church has fittingly and properly called transubstantiation.”
More importantly, transubstantiation is a mystery of the faith. It can’t be proven and has to be accepted on faith:
1381 "That in this sacrament are the true Body of Christ and his true Blood is something that ‘cannot be apprehended by the senses,’ says St. Thomas, ‘but only by faith, which relies on divine authority.’
I won’t go into the whole philosophical argument about the difference between the substance and the accidents of any object. I’m sure there are others better qualified to undertake that task.
Consubstantiation is the belief that the bread and wine coexist with the body and blood, that is, the bread becomes both bread and body and the wine becomes both wine and blood. It’s still a belief in the real presence.
The language used comes from the Latin versions of terms used in Greek philosophy, particularly the philosophy of Aristotle as “baptized” by Thomas Aquinas*.
In basic terms:
Substance is what something “really” is. Regardless how anyone perceives it, the underlying “reality” is its substance.
Accidents are the ways that something is perceived.
Orthodox, Catholics, Anglicans, a number of Lutherans, and a few other Christian groups all belive that Jesus is truly, physically present in the Eucharist. The Roman church has tended to try to nail down definitions of how things occur to a greater degree than most of the other groups. To do this for the Eucharist, they turned to Greek metaphysics, borrowing its language (translated to Latin) and its concepts.
It is the doctrine of the RCC that the bread and wine that are presented at mass are brought to the table/altar with the substance (reality) of bread and wine and the accidents (appearance) of bread and wine. At the consecration, however, the substance or reality changes from that of bread and wine to that of the body and blood of Jesus. However, the outward manifestations (the accidents) remain that of bread and wine. Since the substance is perceived to change, the word used is the one that means a movement or change in substance trans - substantiation.
The other Christians who accept the physical presence of Jesus in the Eucharist also believe that that Presence is made manifest at the climactic point of the liturgy, but they either do not attempt to describe it in “technical” language or they see the event in a different way. (Consubstantiation says that Jesus is present with (con) the substance of the bread and wine. (This may have had as much to do with Luther being an Augustinian monk as anything else. (The Augustinians preferred the philosophical constructs of Plato as carried forward by Augustine rather than the constructs of Aristotle who had been adopted by the Dominicans.)
*Aquinas wrote the “definitive” treatment, but the attepts to use Greek philosophy in this way predated him by a couple of hundred years.
Maybe I’m just too much of a materialist, but it seems to me that the Catholic dogma is testable. If it becomes the flesh and blood, could we put a little microscope in someone’s esophagus to see if they are red blood cells etc.? Do typical Catholics believe that transubstantiation would predict that the blood cells are there?
I ask this because some things they say seem to indicate yes, some no. But if the answer is “no,” they sure do seem to be going to a lot of trouble to say that basically “we believe that this is not just symbolic, that it really does change, but this change does not hold up to any analysis.”
As far as Catholic dogma goes, you are too much of a materialist. Putting it under a microscope is still perceiving it, and as such can only observe the accidents – the sensory appearance of bread and wine.
Then again, I can’t believe you’d get tripped up at this point without first balking at the existence of an unobservable soul.
Catholics go to these lengths because the actual words of Christ during the last supper are that “This is my body” and “This is my blood”, e.g. Matthew 26:26-28, Mark 14:24-26, Luke 22:19, 1 Cor 11:24). Luke and Paul give slightly different phrasing than Mark and Matthew (an interesting point in itself, perhaps revealing different traditions), but all use the Greek word “'esti”, which means “is” (sorry, don’t know how to type Greek characters).
Catholics believe this word can only be taken literally: The bread and wine are the same as body and blood. But from outward appearances they clearly are not body and blood. St. Thomas solved the problem by grafting Aristotelian metaphysical concepts onto the apparent contradiction, as explained above. Such is the assumed inerrant power of scripture–particularly the recorded words of Christ himself–that reality itself bends to its will.
Some Protestant denominations (I believe) get around the problem by allowing a more metaphorical (some would say enigmatic) meaning to Christ’s words, i.e. the phrase really means “This represents my body/blood”; much like when speaking about someone we love we say “She is a sweetheart”, we don’t really mean she’s a candy-filled internal organ.
To paraphrase former President Clinton, I guess it all depends on what the meaning of “is” is.
As an Anglican I was never taught it this way, though of course that doesn’t mean Anglican doctorine isn’t that Jesus is truly, physically present in the Eucharist. I was taught that transubstantiation was a Catholic and not a Church of England idea, the Eucharist is indeed special and very holy but represents the body and blood of Christ and isn’t actually the body and blood of Christ. Maybe Polycarp will come allong with a much more learned description of the Episcapalean and Anglican point of view.