Beyond Transubstantiation: New Theory of the Real Presence

The questioning spirit of aggiornamento begun by Pope John, having opened up discussion on such long-settled issues as clerical celibacy and birth control, is now turning toward another and even more central teaching of the Roman Catholic Church: the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. In England, Germany, and especially The Netherlands, a number of speculative theologians are independently reconsidering transubstantiation--the Catholic teaching that at the consecration of the Mass, the bread and wine on the altar miraculously but truly become the body and blood of Christ. They propose instead what they call "transignification" --that is, the change does not take place in the substance of the bread and wine but in its meaning.

Both Protestants and Roman Catholics accept Christ's teaching that "he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life," and most churches celebrate some form of Communion service. There is a wide spectrum of belief about what Christ meant exactly by his words to the Apostles at the Last Supper: "Take, eat; this is my body." Luther taught that the body and blood of Christ are truly present in the consecrated elements but in, with and under rather than in place of the bread and wine.* The 39 Articles of Anglicanism specifically reject transubstantiation as a term, but the church otherwise has not tried to define its faith in the Real Presence. Methodists, Baptists and Presbyterians believe that Christ is only spiritually or symbolically present.

Roman teaching was slow in taking final form. Early Christians gave little thought as to precisely how Christ was present in the bread and wine they consecrated and consumed at their simple Communion rites. By the 11th century, theologians had begun to use the term transubstantiation, which was eventually defined in the terminology of Aristotelian metaphysics. The medieval Scholastics proposed that at the consecration, the "substance" of the bread and wine became Christ's body; what remained, visible to the senses, were merely "accidents"--the shape and texture of the host, the taste and color of the wine. In reaction to the dissenting views of the Protestant reformers, the 16th century Council of Trent made this teaching an article of faith.

Too Much Magic. What has driven Catholic thinkers to a new way of looking at the Real Presence is dissatisfaction with the medieval way of stating the doctrine. Dutch Jesuit Piet Schoonenberg argues that transubstantiation overemphasizes a magical change in the bread and wine while ignoring an essential element in the mystery: the faith of the Believing Church, in which the action takes place. Concentration on what happens to the bread itself, says Dutch Capuchin Luchesius Smits, leads to such distortions of piety as the little girl's fear that eating ice cream right after her first Communion would "make Jesus' head cold." Belgian Dominican Edward Schillebeeckx points out that the Aristotelian distinction between sub stance and accident "has been philosophically untenable since Kant."

In rethinking eucharistic doctrine, the theologians speak of the "signchange" that takes place in the elements in existential categories rather than sticking to the static, mechanistic terms of the Scholastics. Their basic point is that the change takes place amid what they call an "inter-person activity": the encounter of man and God at the Mass. There Christ gives himself, makes himself present, to his people. Father Smits compares Christ's giving himself to the gesture of a Dutch housewife who offers her guests tea and cookies. Just as the housewife offers not food itself but her welcome "incarnated" in the gift, Christ also offers himself, incarnated in the bread and wine. Adds Jesuit Schoonenberg: "I kneel not for a Christ who is supposed to be condensed in the host, but for the Lord who through the host offers me his reality, his body."

Ecumenical Consequences. While this new way of eucharistic thinking is intended primarily to express the faith of the church in modern terms, the theologians admit that their approach has ecumenical consequences. Capuchin Smits, whose own thinking owes much to Protestant Theologian F. J. Leenhardt, points out that "the possibility is open for a new sort of ecumenical conversation with Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans and Orthodox."

Until recently confined to footnote-marbled pages of scholarly journals, the new eucharistic thinking has just recently seeped out into the open--and led to predictable whispers of heresy. In May, the Dutch bishops issued a joint pastoral letter warning Catholic conservatives to distinguish between the unchangeable truths of eucharistic doctrine and the theologians' right to interpret them. Last month, at Italy's National Eucharistic Congress in Pisa, Paul VI warned against "elusive interpretations" of the traditional doctrine. While willing to heed the edicts of the Pope and the criticism of other theologians, the eucharistic innovators are confident that they have found a way to escape the inadequacies of Scholastic teaching. "With transubstantiation we can't go forward," says Smits. But transignification? "Now it is possible to be a Catholic in the modern world."

* Which are both received by the laity in Protestant and Anglican churches. Since the Middle Ages, the consecrated wine is consumed only by the priest in Roman Catholicism, although the liturgical reforms of the Vatican Council now allow it to the laity on special occasions such as nuptial masses.

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