Be Our Guest / Claudia Pfeiffer

A symbolic Eucharist? No, it is truly the body and blood of Jesus

Symbols? Really? Is that what the bread and wine of the holy Eucharist are? Is that all they are? Aren’t they, instead, the reality of transubstantiation?

Perhaps that belief has been discarded by so many because it’s difficult to explain—and next to impossible to understand with our finite minds.

Transubstantiation is the miraculous event wherein bread baked by man’s hands and wine extracted from grapes tended by man are transformed into the real body and blood of Jesus Christ.

It seems today that many people believe the bread of the Eucharist is only a symbol of our Lord’s body. And that the wine simply stands for Christ’s blood. This is not so. In fact, the bread is transformed into his sacred body, and the wine into his precious blood.

If it is only symbols, the holy Eucharist is a hollow promise. This certainly was not Jesus’ intention. He did not suffer immense pain in trading his life for our sins for a symbol. Was it a facsimile of our Lord that died on the cross? What would be the value in that?

The Catholic Church teaches the reality of transubstantiation. It is a hard teaching to grasp. Rather than turning from this reality, or making it a symbol, as Catholics we must trust in our faith.

We are not expected to understand all things spiritual. That’s where our faith comes in. That’s how we are able to accept that the bread and wine are actually transformed into Christ’s real body and blood.

And not just once. Not just something that happened once thousands of years ago and since then is displayed as a symbol of Jesus’ institution of the Eucharist. Not just a one-time miracle, but an event that occurs every time the Catholic Mass is celebrated.

As followers of Jesus Christ, when we receive the holy Eucharist, we receive his real body and blood. This is difficult to comprehend. It is much easier to accept the bread and wine as symbols of Christ’s body and blood.

But if we accept the Church’s teaching about transubstantiation, we realize the incredible value of the real presence of Christ today. Here we receive the strength to believe, the love to sustain us, the guarantee that Christ is ever with us through no merit of our own, but through his merciful and unconditional love.

When Christ instituted the eucharistic feast, he passed the bread and wine to his disciples and spoke. He did not say: “This bread is a symbol of my body, this wine a symbol of my blood.” No. Instead, he stated, “This is my body. … This is my blood” (Lk 22:19-20; Mt 26: 26, 28; Mk 14: 22, 24; 1 Cor 11:24-25).

If we truly believe these words, how can we possibly stay away from Mass, from participating in Christ’s feast, from receiving the divine reality of our Lord and Savior into our very being? If we received news that Jesus was sitting in the third pew of our church, we would hasten there to be in his presence. What a shame that we sometimes fail to hasten there where he is always present in his sanctuary.

The Catholic teaching regarding the holy Eucharist does not give credence to the present-day belief of many that the bread and wine are simply symbols of Christ’s presence.

Instead, Catholicism states that the body and blood present in the Eucharist are as real today as they were when Jesus broke the bread and shared the wine with his disciples. Truly and surely real. Not just symbols.
 

(Claudia Pfeiffer is a member of Christ the King Parish in Indianapolis.) †