ORDO WEEK 16 FRIDAY MORNING CONGRESS
Theological Foundations of Eucharistic Beliefs
One of the reasons evoked for the USCCB’s Eucharistic Revival is the data from the 2019 Pew Research Center survey around Catholic faith in the Eucharist. The poll, according to Pew, has found that 69% of Catholics believe bread and wine are symbols, while only 31% of Catholics believe the Church’s teaching around transubstantiation.
This poll has been done several times before, and each publication leads to headlines about decline in Eucharistic belief among ordinary Catholics. The pastoral implication seems clear from all of this: Catholics do not go to Mass because they do not believe in the doctrines of the real presence and transubstantiation.
The problem with the Pew Report is that it does not quite reveal what it claims to, namely, what the belief of ordinary Catholics around the Eucharist is. The poll suffers from two major theological deficiencies (it should be noted that we leave the sociological fallacies to experts at CARA to address).
First, the poll gets Catholic teaching about the Eucharist wrong in the composition of the questions.
Second, the poll presumes that the capacity to articulate the particulars of belief is the best measure for assessing faith.
The question the Pew report asked reads:
“Regardless of the official teaching of the Catholic Church, what do you personally believe about the bread and wine used for Communion? During Catholic Mass, the bread and wine…”
The following options were given:
1. The bread and wine “…actually become the body and blood of Jesus Christ.”
2. And the bread and wine “…are symbols of the body and blood of Jesus Christ.”
It is clear that the poll writers wanted to draw a distinction between real presence and what might be understood as mere symbolism. But, in drawing this distinction in the way they did, they get the doctrine of transubstantiation wrong.
Transubstantiation states that the substance of bread and wine (what bread and wine really are) are transformed into the substantial presence of Jesus Christ. Bread and wine, at the level of substance, become Christ’s Body and Blood. But that is only the first part of the teaching.
Concurrently, the species of bread and wine remain after the consecration. In Aristotelean physics, this kind of thing does not happen. If a substance changes, the accidents or species change. But in the Eucharist, Christ is substantially present, while the materiality of bread and wine remain as signs.
So, the important follow-up is: do the bread and wine actually become the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ?
Sort of. It all depends on what you mean by actually. If you mean that the bread and wine are now nothing more than phantasms, that Jesus Christ has become present in the Eucharist in the same way that I am present to my children, then, no, the bread and wine do not actually become the Body and Blood of Christ.
Eucharistic presence is weirder than that. This little piece of matter has become the personal presence of Christ. As St. Thomas Aquinas notes, this transformation does not involve the movement of Christ from heaven toward all the altars of the world. Rather, as the resurrected and ascended Lord, this piece of matter becomes his total, self-giving presence to the Church through the power of the Spirit. We often say that we believe in Christ’s presence, Body and Blood, soul and divinity. That is because Christ, in giving himself substantially in the Eucharist, gives everything. Nothing is held back. It is the total and personal presence of the resurrected and ascended Lord.
But it is still a strange presence. After all, St. Thomas Aquinas in every one of his Eucharistic hymns concludes with a desire for a greater presence, one that is even more “actual” than this presence. In Hopkins’ brilliant translation of St. Thomas’ Adoro te, devote, we read in the final stanza:
Jesus whom I look at shrouded here below, / I beseech thee, send me what I thirst for so, / Some day to gaze on thee face to face in light / And be blest forever with thy glory’s sight.
Jesus Christ becomes present in the Eucharist through the signs of the Eucharist. Our Lord is there, and this is why worship of the Eucharistic elements is right and just. But he is present under the form of a sign. Therefore, it is possible that some of those Catholics who answered the first response (the bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Jesus Christ) may also have misunderstood the technicalities of this doctrine. They may imagine that Jesus leaves heaven for a bit after every Mass. They may see the Eucharist as cannibalism. From the survey question, we cannot make an assessment of the clarity of Eucharistic belief among Catholics
This is the real miracle of the Eucharist. The transformation of bread and wine is not a material but a sacramental transformation. That God feeds us with what appears to be bread and wine (despite the substantial change) is miraculous. But it also reveals the pedagogical importance of those signs and symbols. Bread is used in the Passover, it is bestowed by God as manna from heaven, and it was given and broken by our Lord on the night before he died. Wine in Sacred Scripture is a symbol of the advent of the kingdom, Jesus Christ transforms water into wine at the wedding at Cana (the moment he reveals himself to be the Bridegroom), and again, he blesses and gives a chalice of wine in that first Eucharist. While we receive the full Christ under each species, the clergy or extraordinary minister still presents each species by saying, “the Body of Christ” and “the Blood of Christ.” The sign of bread is linked to body, the sign of wine to blood. The symbolism matters.
Many have likely passed on the richness of “symbolism” to assemblies, often in ways that were less precise than Langer, Rahner, or Chauvet intended. And therefore, it is indeed probable that many who answered the Pew survey, are answering precisely what and how they were taught. The bread and wine are symbols of Jesus Christ. They know that symbolism is important, but they are not sure how it relates to real presence. Or they think that symbolism is the proper expression of real presence. Or they are using the word symbolism in the way that most Americans would. A gesture that is merely symbolic, not really concerned with anything meaningful. A symbol that recalls something but is not that thing itself in any substantial way.
CARA found that 95% of weekly Mass-goers and 80% of those who attend Mass once per month believe in Christ’s true presence. If you attend a few times per year, the number drops to 51% Not surprisingly, millennials have the lowest belief among the various generations (since they are also the least likely to go to Mass).
In reality, most Catholics throughout history have not possessed such notional assents. I am a Catholic who was initiated into the faith by my grandparents. Both did not graduate from high school. I rarely heard them express precise doctrines to me. And when they did, I later learned (when in college) that they had not gotten these doctrines totally correct. But if you asked my grandmother to express why Jesus, Mary, or the Eucharist was important to her, you would get a lived sense of those doctrines.
But one cannot assess Catholic belief on anything if you do not let people express in their own words what they believe. As we learned in the CARA survey, there are those who said that the Eucharist was symbolic but who also said that they receive Jesus at Mass. Which more truly expresses their belief in the Lord’s presence?
Dr. Mark Gray made a decision to take into account the free-form response over the survey questions that we gave in such instances. The theological rationale for this is wise: Catholics often know more than they can say or articulate. And the language of the heart can reveal belief where a survey question cannot.
As the survey shows, going to Mass is the way that most Catholics develop a rich Eucharistic faith—one that is both cognitive and personal. But we must remember that most Catholics do not go to Mass. Most Catholics do not attend Catholic schools or go through initiation programs—two other markers that tend to reveal a high capacity to both articulate and personally believe in the Church’s teaching around the Eucharist.
Concurrently, as has been clear throughout, this data is not intended to function as a gadfly to the Eucharistic Revival but to invite the Church to develop pastoral strategy out of the best data that is available. We need to be careful about the use of any data, even when it is rhetorically effective to do so.
That ecclesial renewal should be grounded in the Eucharist is such a fundamental claim that—survey or not—we support the Eucharistic renewal unfolding in dioceses throughout the United States. We hope this data provides clergy and pastoral workers alike fresh insights for taking up this Eucharistic renewal in their own context. But let us be careful about evoking the Pew survey to do so.
The good news is that we know from this CARA survey that some things are already working: weekly Mass attendance, a robust Catholic education, and the faith of parents. Many Catholics have faith in the Eucharistic Lord, and this is likely why they are showing up even when music and preaching are so abysmal.