THE BODY
& THE BLOOD OF CHRIST

Israel's worship was one of blood and bread offered in one place. The last of the prophets announced its transformation: from the rising of the sun to its setting, a pure offering would be offered to the Lord's name in every place (Malachi 1:11). That is precisely what the Church has done since the apostles — the one sacrifice of Christ made present on ten thousand altars, from the rising of the sun to its setting, in a pure offering of bread and wine.

The Temple was destroyed in AD 70. Its sacrifices ended, as the prophets said they would. The offering of the Church did not end, because it was never a second sacrifice: it is the same offering which the Messiah instituted, and He told His apostles to do it until He comes.

Two things are worth noticing before the words themselves. First, the earliest written account is Paul's, written within about twenty-five years of the event, citing a tradition he had received and handed on — so the claim that the Eucharist was a later legend has no room to grow. Second, all four accounts use the same verb: Jesus took bread, gave thanks, broke it, and said of it, this is my body. The covenant language deliberately evokes Sinai, where Moses took the blood and said, behold the blood of the covenant (Exodus 24:8), and Jeremiah's promise of a new covenant (Jeremiah 31:31-34).

The discourse begins where the miracle ended. The crowd wants more bread; He tells them to labour for the food which endures to eternal life (v.27), contrasts the manna that their fathers ate and died with the bread that comes down from heaven (vv.31-35, 49-51), and then says something no teacher of Israel had ever said: the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh (v.51).

The reaction is immediate and hostile. The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, How can this man give us his flesh to eat? (v.52). This is the pivot of the whole chapter, and it is decisive, because of what He does next and what He does not do.

What He does is intensify. Everywhere else in this Gospel, when a hearer misunderstands Him, He corrects the misunderstanding: Nicodemus thinks of a second physical birth and is told of water and the Spirit (John 3:3-8); the Samaritan woman thinks of well water and is told of living water (John 4:10-14); the disciples think Lazarus is merely sleeping and are told plainly that he is dead (John 11:11-14). Here He does the opposite. He does not say, you have misunderstood me; I spoke of faith. He says, 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 (v.53), and He shifts from the ordinary verb for eating to a blunt word meaning to chew or gnaw (trogein, vv.54, 56, 57, 58).

The scandal of this is not the cannibalism of a metaphor. It is the blood. The Law forbade the drinking of blood absolutely (Leviticus 17:10-14), and every Jew in that crowd knew it. If He had meant a figure of speech, the offence would have been His poor phrasing, not His doctrine. Instead, many of His disciples said, this is a hard saying; who can listen to it? (v.60), and many of them drew back and no longer went about with him (v.66).

At that point He turns to the Twelve with the question on which the whole passage turns: will you also go away? (v.67). A teacher whose hearers had taken a metaphor literally would have cleared it up in a sentence to keep them. He did not. Peter answered with the confession of the Church: Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life (v.68).

One verse is usually produced against all of this: it is the Spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life (John 6:63). Read against the two verses immediately before it, the objection collapses. Jesus has just said that His flesh is food indeed and that whoever eats it has eternal life. He cannot mean six verses later that His flesh is worthless — nor could He mean that flesh as such is worthless, since the whole Gospel opens with the Word made flesh (John 1:14) and He has promised to raise the body up on the last day.

What He means is that it is the Spirit who gives life to that flesh, and that His words are not inert description but spirit and life: they accomplish what they announce. That is the Catholic reading, and it is the reading the Church had from the beginning. The alternative asks us to believe that He permitted His disciples to walk away over a misunderstanding He chose not to correct.

Paul never argues for the Real Presence; he assumes it as a fact his readers already accept. The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation (koinonia) in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? (1 Corinthians 10:16). The word is not memory and not symbol. It is communion in the reality itself — which is why he can say in the same breath that we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread (10:17).

Then the warning. Whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord (11:27), and again: any one who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment upon himself (11:29). Paul adds that this is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died (11:30). A man cannot be guilty of profaning a symbol; he cannot be sickened by failing to discern a picture. The realism of 1 Corinthians 11 is the realism of John 6, written earlier and without controversy.

The remaining witnesses confirm the pattern. On the road to Emmaus the risen Christ is known in the breaking of the bread (Luke 24:30-35) — a scene with the shape of the Mass, word first and then sacrament. The first believers devote themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers (Acts 2:42). Hebrews insists that the sacrifice of Christ was offered once for all, and that no further sacrifice for sin remains (Hebrews 9:26-28; 10:10-14) — which is precisely why the Church calls the Mass the same sacrifice, not a new one: it makes present the one offering, it does not repeat it.

The earliest Christian art agrees with the earliest Christian writing. In the Catacomb of Priscilla in Rome, a second-century fresco known as the Fractio Panis shows a bishop or priest breaking a single large loaf before a chalice at a table of seven — the Eucharist as it was actually performed underground, drawn centuries before any council defined its terminology. Other catacombs paint baskets of loaves and fish, and chalices, beside the tombs of the martyrs.

Rome was a city of house churches, not of written theology, and what survives from its walls is not an argument about symbols. It is a meal.

The prayers of the earliest liturgies are equally explicit. The ancient anaphoras ask the Father to send the Holy Spirit upon the offering so that the bread may be shown to be the body of Christ; the Roman Canon speaks of the offering of a holy, spotless sacrifice. By the twelfth century the Church had settled on a word to protect the doctrine: the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) teaches that the bread is transubstantiated into the body and the wine into the blood. The word was new, because a new kind of denial had appeared; the faith it protects is the faith of Ignatius and Justin.

The decree opens by rejecting the reinterpretation of the words as metaphor, and it says so in terms of deliberate force. Chapter I teaches that after the consecration our Lord Jesus Christ, true God and man, is truly, really and substantially contained under the appearances of bread and wine, and it calls it a crime most unworthy that His own words, recorded by the evangelists and repeated by Paul, should be wrested to fictitious and imaginary tropes contrary to the universal sense of the Church.

Chapter II names the fruits of the sacrament: spiritual food, the antidote by which we are freed from daily faults and preserved from mortal sins, and the pledge of our glory to come. Chapter III makes the distinction that answers the Reformers' picture of a mere remembrance — in the other sacraments the power to sanctify is present when they are used, but in the Eucharist the Author of holiness Himself is present before it is received. Chapter IV defines the change: by the consecration of the bread and of the wine, a conversion is made of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord, and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of His blood, which conversion the Catholic Church suitably and properly calls transubstantiation.

Chapter V is the chapter most often forgotten. Because the same God is present who is adored by the angels, the faithful may and must render to the sacrament the worship of latria, the worship due to God alone. From this follows the reservation of the Blessed Sacrament, the feast of Corpus Christi and the processions through the streets, all of which the Council commends as pious and religious customs.

The canons attached to the decree name each position in turn: that the substance of bread and wine remains (canon 2, against consubstantiation); that the Eucharist contains nothing more than a sign or figure (canon 3); that it is not to be adored with latria (canon 4); that it is not to be reserved or carried in procession (canon 5); that the change is not real (canon 2, again). Each canon answers a claim that people were actually making, and each ends with the same formula, because the Church was not inventing doctrine but protecting the faith she had received.

Eleven years later the Council turned to the second denial. Its doctrine is one sentence long and it has been misquoted ever since: the sacrifice of the Mass is one and the same sacrifice as the sacrifice of the cross, because the victim is the same, Christ our Lord, and the priest who offers is the same, differing only in the manner of the offering. What was offered once in blood on the cross is offered now unbloodily under the signs. The Mass does not repeat Calvary; it makes present what happened once. That is why the Council could anathematise the claim that the Mass is a blasphemy or an idolatry: what is on the altar is not a new victim, but the one Victim, truly present.

The Council also defined the sacrificial priesthood as instituted by Christ at the Last Supper when He said, do this in remembrance of me, and it spoke of the fruits of the Mass, applied both for the living and for those who have died in Christ.

Trent was not the end of the argument. Paul VI's encyclical Mysterium Fidei (1965) defended the reality of the change against new theories that reduced the words to symbols and the presence to a significance, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church gathers the whole doctrine in numbers 1322 to 1419: the mode of Christ's presence is unique, it surpasses understanding, and the celebration makes present the one sacrifice of the cross. John Paul II's Ecclesia de Eucharistia (2003) and Benedict XVI's Sacramentum Caritatis (2007) draw out its consequences for a Church that lives from the Eucharist — and warns that liturgical practice must never be separated from the truth of what is on the altar.

There is a further problem for the principle, and it is historical rather than textual. The Church was celebrating the Eucharist long before she had a settled list of the books of the New Testament. The writings of the apostles were read at the Eucharist and recognised by the same communities that already believed in the Real Presence. The doctrine did not depend on the canon; the canon was handed on by the Church that held the doctrine, and by the men who had known the apostles.

Scripture itself never claims to be the Church's only authority. Paul commands the Thessalonians to hold to the traditions he taught them by word and by letter (2 Thessalonians 2:15), tells Timothy to entrust what he heard to faithful men (2 Timothy 2:2), and calls the Church the pillar and bulwark of the truth (1 Timothy 3:15). Peter warns that the ignorant and unstable twist Paul's letters to their own destruction (2 Peter 3:16) — a warning about private interpretation written inside Scripture itself.

None of this is an argument against reading the Bible. It is an argument that the Bible, read plainly, is on the Catholic side of this question, and that what turns the bread into a picture is a theological system standing outside the text and over it.

This is not a slogan aimed at brothers and sisters who love Christ and honour His word. It is an invitation to take the word at its word. The one thing the passage will not permit is to say that the words are clear in principle but must be read against themselves in fact.

First, take the claim seriously and state it in its strongest form — a caricature is easy to knock down and persuades no one. Second, put the burden of proof where it belongs: the words are there, plainly, and those who deny them must explain how a symbol produces the guilt, the sickness and the judgment of 1 Corinthians 11. Third, stay in the texts. John 6 and 1 Corinthians 10 and 11 are enough for the whole argument, and the Fathers show that the early Church read them the Catholic way.