The Eucharist is Not a Symbol

You know, there's a story about Flannery O'Connor that every Catholic should know by heart. She was a young writer at a dinner party in New York in the 1950s, surrounded by people from literary circles, most of them ex-Catholics or outright atheists. One of them was the novelist Mary McCarthy. She had given up on going to church, but she made some nice comments about the Eucharist. She said she had come to think of it as a beautiful symbol.

A pretty good one, she said. Now, as you know, Flannery O'Connor was born and bred Catholic. She had been quiet most of the night. She finally spoke up, and what she said is one of the great sentences in history of Catholicism in America. She said, well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it.

That's the whole thing. That's the entire Catholic faith in nine words. Because either the Eucharist is what the Church has said it is for two thousand years, the actual, literal, substantial body and blood of Jesus Christ, the same Christ who walked out of the tomb on Easter morning, or the whole thing is an elaborate hoax dressed up in pretty vestments. There is no middle ground. A symbol of God is not God.

A reminder of Christ is not Christ. And if all we have on the altar on Sunday is a really meaningful piece of bread, then Flannery is right. There's no reason to go to church. The reason this matters so much is that the church has been crystal clear about this from the beginning, not since the Middle Ages, not since the Council of Trent, from the beginning. St.

Ignatius of Antioch, writing around the year 107, that's a bishop who was personally taught by the apostle John, warned his people about heretics who abstain from the Eucharist because they do not confess that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ. That's a hundred years after the resurrection. The earliest Christians were already dying for this doctrine. They were not dying for a symbol. Jesus himself made it impossible to misunderstand.

In the sixth chapter of John's Gospel, he says, My flesh is real food, and my blood is real drink. The crowd is scandalized. They start to leave. And here's the thing nobody likes to notice. He doesn't chase after them and explain.

He doesn't say, Wait, you misunderstood. I meant it as a metaphor. He turns to the twelve and says, Do you also want to leave? He was willing to lose every disciple he had rather than soften that teaching. Peter answers for all of us.

Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. The Catholic word for what happens at Mass is transubstantiation. St. Thomas Aquinas worked out the metaphysics of it in the 13th century, drawing on Aristotle.

But the reality long predates the vocabulary. The substance of the bread becomes the substance of the body. The substance of the wine becomes the substance of the blood. What our senses perceive, the appearance, the taste, the texture, stays the same. What it actually is has changed completely.

The miracle is total. And it is hidden. Which is exactly the kind of miracle a God who was born in a stable and died on a cross would choose. The truth is true. Now here's where this affects us.

A few years ago, a study found that only about a third of Catholics in the United States actually believe what the church teaches about the real presence. The other two-thirds think the Eucharist is in some way a symbol. Exactly what Mary McCarthy thought at that dinner party. And if they're right, then they have no good reason to come to Mass.

They might as well sleep in. Flannery saw this seventy years ago. But if the church is right, and the church is right, then everything changes. Then the tabernacle in our parish, that little box behind the altar with the candle burning beside it, contains the same Christ who calmed the storm and raised Lazarus and walked on water. Then genuflecting is not a quaint custom.

It is the only sane response. Then receiving communion is not a snack and not a community-building exercise. It is quite literally, God placed on your tongue. This is why the saints couldn't stay away from the Mass. This is why St.

John Vianney would spend hours in front of the tabernacle. And why a peasant told him, I look at him and he looks at me. This is why missionaries crossed oceans to bring this one specific thing to people who had never heard of it. Not a teaching. Not a book.

Him.