The Eucharist and Celiac Disease
A Reflection on Reality, Healing, and Life in the Eucharist, Part 1: Reality
Photo by Josh Applegate on Unsplash
What Is the Eucharist?
“Sacrificium eucharisticum, totius vitae christianae fontem et culmen.” In Lumen gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Vatican Council II called “the Eucharistic sacrifice, the source and summit of Christian life” (no. 11, Flannery translation), “the fount and apex of the whole Christian life.” (no. 11, Vatican translation). In 2004, Pope John Paul II announced the Year of the Eucharist. And recently at the end of the 2022 liturgical year, the USCCB launched the Eucharistic Revival (https://www.usccb.org/resources/welcome-national-eucharistic-revival). One could spend a lifetime reflecting upon the Eucharist in all its splendor and mystery and still not fully comprehend it. With that in mind it seems appropriate that my first post for Catholic365 should be on the Eucharist.
Three themes in particular come to my mind when thinking about the Eucharist: (1) the Eucharist is real, it is really the body and blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ (CCC, no. 1374); (2) the Eucharist is healing and health, it heals our sins and our ills and feeds our body and our soul; and (3) the Eucharist is life, it transforms us into the Body of Christ and brings us eternal life. Reality, healing, and life flow from this “source and summit of Christian life.”
We know that the Eucharist goes all the way back to Jesus and the Last Supper. And in the intervening 2,000 years, the Fathers of the Church and the saints have had much to say on this topic. Pope John Paul II instructs us, “Let us take our place, dear brothers and sisters, at the school of the saints, who are the great interpreters of true Eucharistic piety. In them the theology of the Eucharist takes on all the splendor of a lived reality; it becomes ‘contagious’ and, in a manner of speaking, it ‘warms our hearts’” (Ecclesia de Eucharistia, no. 62). And so let us go back to the beginning.
In the Gospel of John, chapter 6, we read
I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread which comes down from heaven, that a man may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live for ever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh.… Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me. This is the bread which came down from heaven, not such as the fathers ate and died; he who eats this bread will live for ever. (Jn 6:48–51, 53–58)
The Eucharist is Jesus Christ; the Eucharist is food and drink; the Eucharist is life. This is the way it has been for two thousand years. This is Scripture, and it is tradition, handed down by word of mouth and writing and teaching since the beginning. And it will be carried into the future until the end of time.
I found out an interesting thing when I went searching for the themes of reality, healing, and life in the writings of the saints and teachers of the Church. These themes are so intertwined that it is hard to separate them into distinct topics. For example, in the encyclical Ecclesia de Eucharistia, Pope John Paul II said
The Church constantly draws her life from the redeeming sacrifice; she approaches it not only through faith-filled remembrance, but also through a real contact, since this sacrifice is made present ever anew, sacramentally perpetuated, in every community which offers it at the hands of the consecrated minister. The Eucharist thus applies to men and women today the reconciliation [i.e., healing] won once for all by Christ for mankind in every age. (no. 12, emphasis added)
While I speak separately of the themes of reality, healing, and life, they are intimately connected. While you read, meditation on what the reality, healing, and life that come from the Eucharist mean for you and your life.
Virtual Reality?
The Eucharist is Jesus Christ—body, blood, soul, and divinity. But this reality is being threatened today by virtual reality. If the virtual can be real, then maybe the real is only virtual. Role-playing computer games, chat rooms, e-mail, and even the telephone bring virtual reality into our everyday lives. “Reach out and touch someone” no longer means a handshake or a hug. Now it is a birthday card, an e-mail, or a two-handed, magical long sword with which you’ve just “touched” your opponent spilling his blood and guts all over the virtual combat field in 3-D living color. With special goggles, suits, and gloves we can even bodily enter into the computer environment. Think of Tom Cruise in the movie Minority Report who’s character interacts with computers by moving his hands through the air or the novels of William Gibson in which the characters project their consciousness into the computer world. Where does virtual reality end and reality begin? Is the Eucharist really reality or virtual reality? Sr. Mary Timothy Prokes warns in her book At the Interface: Theology and Virtual Reality, “virtual reality impacts not only upon our understanding of Divine Persons, but upon an understanding of creation and what it means to be a human person created in the image and likeness of God” (p. 4).
Jesus Christ is the true reality, the spit in the face, crown of thorns, nails in the hands, bloody reality, the loving, merciful, life-giving, divinizing, over-flowing reality. This is true reality. Virtual reality, in computer games, is supposed to transform you into a new person, the person you really want to be, a self-made person. But we are not self-made virtual persons, we are real human beings made in the image of God. The Eucharist is the true transforming reality. It transforms us into the God-made persons we really are. Listen to the words of Justin Martyr from his First Apology written in the year 150:
This food we call Eucharist, of which no one is allowed to partake except one who believes that the things we teach are true, and who has received the washing for forgiveness of sins and for rebirth, and who lives as Christ has handed down to us. For we do not receive these things as common bread or common drink; but as Jesus Christ our Savior being incarnate by God’s word took flesh and blood for our salvation, so also we have been taught that the food consecrated by the word of prayer which comes from him, from which our flesh and blood are nourished by transformation, is the flesh and blood of that incarnate Jesus. (no. 66)
There is nothing virtual about this reality. When we reach out and touch Jesus Christ in the Eucharist, when we receive him on our tongues or in our hands, we are touching his real presence. Christ is present in our lives in other ways, certainly, but this is the finest way, the summit. As Pope John Paul II said in Mane nobiscum Domine,
This presence … is called “real” not in an exclusive way, as if to suggest that other forms of Christ’s presence are not real, but par excellence, because Christ thereby becomes substantially present, whole and entire, in the reality of his body and blood. Faith demands that we approach the Eucharist fully aware that we are approaching Christ himself. It is precisely his presence which gives the other aspects of the Eucharist—as meal, as memorial of the Paschal Mystery, as eschatological anticipation—a significance which goes far beyond mere symbolism. The Eucharist is a mystery of presence, the perfect fulfillment of Jesus’ promise to remain with us until the end of the world. (no. 16)
Not only is Christ’s presence real, but “when the Church celebrates the Eucharist, the memorial of her Lord’s Death and Resurrection, this central event of salvation becomes really present and ‘the work of our redemption is carried out.’” Through it, “Jesus Christ … [has] left us a means of sharing in [his Death and Resurrection] as if we had been present there” (John Paul II, Ecclesia de Eucharistia, no. 11, paraphrasing Pope Paul VI). As the Catechism of the Catholic Church says “All that Christ is—all that he did and suffered for all men—participates in the divine eternity, and so transcends all times” (no. 1085). In this way, history enters into the present, and eternity enters into time. The events of Christ’s dying on the Cross and rising on the third day are made real and presence to us in the sacrifice of the Mass in a way that virtual reality can never duplicate. And think of this, Mary, the Mother of God, did two thousand years ago what we do today. Pope John Paul II tells us,
At the Annunciation Mary conceived the Son of God in the physical reality of his body and blood, thus anticipating within herself what to some degree happens sacramentally in every believer who receives, under the signs of bread and wine, the Lord’s body and blood.
As a result, there is a profound analogy between the Fiat which Mary said in reply to the angel, and the Amen which every believer says when receiving the body of the Lord. Mary was asked to believe that the One whom she conceived “through the Holy Spirit” was “the Son of God” (Lk 1:30–35). In continuity with the Virgin’s faith, in the Eucharistic mystery we are asked to believe that the same Jesus Christ, Son of God and Son of Mary, becomes present in his full humanity and divinity under the signs of bread and wine. (Ecclesia de Eucharistia, no. 55)
The Eucharist is reality, it is the body and blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ.
Recommended Stories
More Stories By :
