The Eucharist Explained: Catholic Reflections on the Eucharist for Protestants

By Richard Divozzo

Perhaps the doctrine of the Catholic Church most baffling to Protestants and the hardest to accept is her teaching on the Eucharist as both a sacrament and (especially) as the actual Body and Blood of Christ as he offered it on the Cross. But what does the Catholic Church really mean by what she teaches about the Eucharist as opposed to what many have supposed her to mean by it? Does the Catholic teaching have any foundation in the Bible? Did Christ himself say anything about the Eucharist? Is the Eucharist only a symbol; or is it, in the Sacrifice of the Mass, the actual Body and Blood of Christ for our salvation? These questions and others are answered for the Protestant inquirer in this book, which the author hopes will at the very least help the reader to understand that what the Catholic Church believes about the Eucharist is not an invention but is rooted in a profound understanding of the Scriptures.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Oct 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666779226

Richard Divozzo

R. Divozzo is a retired law librarian and was an Evangelical Christian before entering the Catholic Church over thirty years ago. A former college instructor, he writes and lives with his wife in Grand Rapids. He is the author of two books, Mary for Protestants (Wipf & Stock, 2019) and The Church and the Culture of Modernity (2011).

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Introduction

This book is not about my experience of nor my own appreciation of the Eucharist, but rather about the nature and meaning of the Eucharist itself according to the teaching of the Catholic Church. But I will nevertheless begin with a personal note. As a convert from Evangelical Protestantism to the Catholic Faith, my own long journey towards the Catholic faith began with a nascent belief in the Eucharist. In the Protestant tradition in which I was raised, it was not called the Eucharist, but rather, in keeping as strictly as possible to what we believed to be biblical language, simply (and appropriately) the Lord’s Supper. We did not even regard it as a rite of communion with Christ, but only as a remembrance of His Sacrifice in obedience to Christ’s words Do this in remembrance of Me. As an adult, my reading outside of the narrow tradition I was brought up in set me to thinking about what precisely this is that our Lord asked us to do by which to remember Him. I was struck by the apparent literalness of His words This is My Body . . . . Of course, without even the scantiest knowledge of the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist, I could not begin to understand what the literal meaning of His words might suggest. At the time, my basic acceptance of the literalness of Christ’s words did not yet involve the question of the truth of Catholicism. For I did not strictly associate the idea with Catholicism specifically, but simply (and in a certain sense simple-mindedly) accepted it as true because the plain sense of the Scriptures seemed to make it unavoidable.

It must be admitted that I wanted to believe in the Eucharist as the real Body and Blood of Christ. This was in part because believing it was at that time in my life uncomplicated by any sense of a need to belong to the Catholic Church, not knowing that the Eucharist (as I now believe it to be) could be available to me only through the Catholic Mass. Once a Catholic, the Holy Eucharist became for me the one Thing I was most grateful to God for. Of all that I was aware of what God had given me through His Holy Church, the fullness of the truth and the fulness of grace through the Sacraments, the communion of saints, and the Sacred Liturgy, it was the Real Presence of our Lord Jesus Christ in the Eucharist and communion with Him by its reception that I esteem to be His greatest gift.

My appreciation of the gift of the Eucharist has grown with an understanding of its meaning not only to its relationship to Christ’s work of redemption as a whole, but especially in relation to the Christian’s participation in that work and the consequent progress of his or her transformation in Christ. My former Protestant understanding of the Christian’s transformation in Christ supposed it to be a process of becoming a better Christian. The Protestant notion renders transformation in Christ to be the steady improvement in conducting his or her Christian life according to a particular set of moral principles by which one can attain to a kind of spiritual excellence. But such an understanding of transformation in Christ has little to do with the idea of transformation involved in the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist. In the Catholic understanding, it is not only or fundamentally the moral will and faith of the Christian who receives the Eucharist that makes it transformational, but the objective reality of receiving Christ Himself, His Body and Blood. This, in the Catholic understanding, is what the Eucharist a sacrament, as opposed to a mere symbol used to prompt the Christian to think about Christ and motivate him to live more devotedly to the Christian ideal as he understands it.

I try in this book to answer the questions of what our Lord could have meant by all that He said about what came to be known as the Eucharist in His teaching and at the Last Supper when He instituted it; how He would have been understood by His disciples; and what that teaching, by a development of doctrine Apostolic teaching and practice, came eventually to mean to the Catholic Church.

The Eucharist is a great and beautiful mystery. As such, there can be no arguing anyone into accepting it who is as strongly disinclined to believe it as is the Protestant Christian, even though he or she may otherwise adhere explicitly to the Christian Creed. This is especially true because their disbelief in the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist is founded primarily on the firm conviction that it is not to be found in Sacred Scripture. That the Catholic Church’s doctrine of the Eucharist is not found to be fully and explicitly stated in Sacred Scripture is admitted at the outset. But then that is to be expected of the most important doctrines of the Christian Faith which orthodox Protestants as well as Catholics believe. For if the Christian Faith were reduced to only those doctrines found fully explicit in the Scriptures, it would be theologically incoherent. With all that is said in these pages, the Protestant reader is asked to bear in mind the great unlikelihood that whatever our Lord had meant by what He said about the Eucharist, He was misunderstood for at least 1,500 years. It is very unlikely, that is, if there is such a thing as in the inspiration of the Holy Spirit: When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.¹

It is because the Protestant believer supposes that any reasonable understanding of the Scriptures to be the chief impediment (there are doubtless others) to his or her belief in the Eucharist, that I intend in this book to treat the subject primarily as it is found in the Scriptures. Admittedly, the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist, as all other doctrines, has been a matter of development over time, but at the heart of the Church’s teaching and from its inception is our Lord’s own words that instituted it and the teachings of His Apostles who transmitted it for the faith and practice of the Church.

The Protestant Reformers advanced various doctrines of the Eucharist, Luther’s being the closest to the Catholic doctrine. Reformers, such as Calvin and Zwingli, offered variations on the fundamental premise that the bread and wine presented in the Eucharist are merely symbolic of the Body and Blood of Christ. The Reformers condemned the Catholic doctrine as superstitious corruption of Christ’s true teaching. But their attempts to understand Christ’s teaching are surely themselves only theories, possible interpretations of the words of Jesus, since it must be admitted that no doctrine of the Eucharist that explains the meaning of the Eucharist has any explicit mention in Scripture. Any doctrine is necessarily a reflection on the meaning of Christ’s words and therefore a development of doctrine. This is why the New Testament writings have so little explicitly to say about the Eucharist; the early Church had yet to think long and carefully about the meaning of what the Lord at the Last Supper had commanded them to do and its relation to other truths of the Faith as received. In those earliest days, the Apostles could little more than simply to obey His command as they understood it.

But this is not to suggest that one interpretation is as sure as another. The Catholic Church has always readily understood and admitted that her doctrine has developed over time, because it must necessarily be the case and because it was originally under her own authority that the doctrine developed as it did. The Reformers’ claim that their doctrines are true and the Catholic doctrine false by the authority of Scripture alone is necessarily inadmissible in so far as they, by explaining what they understood Christ had meant by His difficult teaching, were doing precisely what the Church had done long before them. In this respect there is little practical difference between how the Protestant Reformers arrived at their doctrines and how the Catholic Church arrived at her own.

There is at least one essential difference: the Church acted on her given authority to make binding doctrine—Verily I say to you, What things soever you shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and what things soever you shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven (Matt 18:18). This she has faithfully carried out over the centuries according to definite protocols (ecumenical councils, etc.). The Reformers, on the other hand, presumed that the authority of their doctrine was Scripture itself as confirmed by the mind and conscience of the individual Christian. The Catholic Church’s authority to determine the formal truths of the Christian Faith received by the Lord Himself through the Apostles and their successors. And it has been by that means that she has received the Deposit of Faith which she has preserved for millennia as a sacred tradition.

If the Reformers were right that the Scriptures are the sole authority for the determination of Christian doctrine, we would be hard put to account for the explosive fission into the flotsam and jetsam of ten thousand sects or denominations as has happened in the Protestant world over the centuries. While the Catholic Church in its historical mode of existence has hardly been an example of perfect unity, it has, for all its imperfections, preserved over a very long time through many external and internal changes a clear, essential identity of belief and practice—a Sacred Tradition.

The Reformers’ claim that Scripture is the sole authority for all doctrine is troubled by the irresolvable problem that Scripture cannot be at once the sole authority for doctrine and the thing which the doctrine intends to explain. How can we know with certitude what an authority is telling us if we have first to interpret what that authority means? And, if so, by what authority, other than one’s own, can one have any certitude of the rightness of one’s interpretation? The Protestant claimant has also to consider that what their reforming predecessors were interpreting, the determined canon of Sacred Scripture, was authoritatively selected and approved by the very church whose authority the Reformers denied.

While it is always important for the Protestant Christian to bear this fact in mind when opposing the authority of the Scriptures against that of the church, it is not the aim of this book to argue the authority of the Catholic Church, but only to show that what Church believes about the Eucharist is both true and a great mystery of the Christian Faith.

It might be asked that if the Eucharist is a profound mystery, how then is one supposed to come to a rational acceptance of it? The simple answer is that one may not come to a rational acceptance of the Eucharist. The first thing to understand about it is that even for the Catholic the Eucharist is not a rational object of belief. One must accept it for what it is—a great and beautiful mystery like the Trinity or the Incarnation. But accepting it need not be an unreasoned or irrational acceptance, given certain necessary premises such as belief in the divine inspiration of the Scriptures, which must be reasonably interpreted, and the infinite power of God, to Whom nothing is impossible. Both premises any orthodox Christian shares with Catholic belief.

Protestantism is often characterized as opposed to the mystical in religion, especially Catholicism; and thus mysticism has long been a kind of bugbear in modern Protestantism, at least since the nineteenth century. Yet at the heart of Calvinism is the fundamental religious intuition of Calvin’s original insight into Christianity and the source of much of his thinking regarding his first principle of solus Deo gloria, which has been described as a radical mysticism.² Calvin himself would likely have disapproved of the expression, but his fundamental notion of God as sovereign and holy, and thus wholly Other and inaccessible to any rational apprehension, His utter incomprehensibility, is profoundly mystical in the strictest sense of the word.³ As we will see later when we consider Calvin’s view of the Eucharist, it is a somewhat incoherent sort of mysticism, but mysticism nonetheless. The same can be said of Luther’s original insights into religious faith, who had clearly acknowledged his debt to the mystical theology of the Theologica germanica which he translated into German, and who had a strong attraction to the thought of the Greek Father, St. John Chrysostom, especially his On the Incomprehensibility of God.

⁴

For Luther too, there is in the Gospel, at the heart of which is Christ, that which is beyond reason, the inscrutable mystery of God’s love.⁵ It has been only by a long history of growing prejudice and misunderstanding that the Catholic critics of Protestantism as much as Protestants themselves have failed to see or at least fully appreciate this fact about its historical origins and in the original instincts of its first progenitors.

Any understanding of the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist must consider its meaning not only in its relationship to Christ’s work of redemption as a whole, but especially in relation to the Christian’s participation in that work and the consequent progress of his or her transformation in Christ. My own former Protestant understanding of the Christian’s transformation in Christ supposed it to be simply a process of becoming a better, more moral, Christian. For many if not most Protestants, transformation in Christ is understood to be the steady improvement in conducting his or her Christian life according to a particular set of moral principles by which one can attain to a kind of spiritual excellence. But, although moral improvement is in no way irrelevant to the Catholic understanding of transformation in Christ, it is thought to be primarily a work of continuing grace received through the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, without which progress in moral virtue is impossible. It is only by the living, objective, and transforming reality of communing with Christ Himself through the reception His Body and Blood in the Eucharist that the moral will and faith of the Christian makes genuine transformation (the aim of any progress in moral virtue) possible. The Protestant notion of the Eucharist as a mere symbol of Christ’s redemption meant only to induce a profound inner conviction of the reality of God’s grace and thus prompt the Christian to think about Christ and motivate him to live more devotedly to the Christian ideal as he understands is far from what Christ offered His Apostles at the Last Supper.

The idea that the Christian’s participation in Christ’s sacrificial act