Introduction to Part I
This is the first of two essays on the Eucharist as sacrament, and on the depth of meaning that word carries. “Sacrament” is the Latin Church’s rendering of the Greek mysterion: a hidden saving reality made visible, a mystery given a body. Across the centuries the Church has used the language of sign and symbol to describe the Eucharist. Augustine spoke of the visible sign of invisible grace. Thomas placed the sacraments in the category of sign. Trent called the Eucharist the symbol of a sacred thing. Never did the Church mean by these words something less than real. She meant something more real than our words can hold.
The essays approach this mystery from three directions: historically, in the Church’s long struggle to find the right grammar for Christ’s presence; sacramentally, in the theology of sign and reality that runs from Augustine through Aquinas to Rahner and Chauvet; and liturgically, in the conviction, shared by Guardini, Pope Francis, and Pope Leo XIV, that the Church must once again become “capable of symbol.” Part I takes as its starting point a fine recent essay by Rita Ferrone. Part II turns to a concrete pastoral question in which these principles are at stake.
For more than seventy years, one of the most quoted lines in American Catholic letters has been a single sentence spoken in a shaky voice at a New York dinner party. Mary McCarthy, long lapsed, told the assembled literati that she now regarded the Eucharist as a symbol, and a rather good one. Flannery O’Connor, who had sat silent all evening, finally answered: “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.”
I have always loved Flannery. I have also always thought that line got it wrong. Not wrong in its faith; O’Connor’s devotion to the Real Presence was fierce and unfeigned. It was wrong in its grammar. It conceded to McCarthy the very premise that needed contesting: that a symbol is something less than real, a pious stand-in, a picture of an absent thing. Flannery defended the Eucharist by surrendering the word the Church herself has used to describe it.
That is why I commend to you, without reservation, this very fine essay by Rita Ferrone. Readers of this Substack will know her from Commonweal and from her commentary on Sacrosanctum Concilium. Here she takes up the O’Connor anecdote, noting that it was once again rolled out admiringly during the bishops’ Eucharistic Revival of 2022 to 2025. She then does what few have bothered to do: she asks whether the opposition of “symbol” and “reality” actually serves the faith it claims to defend.
What Ferrone argues
Her essay moves in three phases. First, she shows how the either/or framing has become the default setting of American Catholic discourse. The notorious and problematic 2019 Pew survey forced respondents to choose between “symbol” and “the body and blood of Jesus,” and when 69 percent chose “symbol,” the bishops spent some $28 million on a national revival. Second, she turns to Romano Guardini and to Pope Francis’s Desiderio desideravi, where symbol is not the enemy of presence but the very way the Holy Trinity chooses to communicate with us, according to the logic of the Incarnation, the sacrament/symbol par excellence of God’s presence. Francis, following Guardini nearly word for word, asks how we might once again become capable of symbol. She notes, too, that our present Holy Father, Leo XIV, has taken up this thread in his third catechesis on Sacrosanctum Concilium at his Wednesday General Audience. Third, and with prophetic directness, she names the real crisis: not a failure of doctrine but a failure of stewardship. We are heirs to a sacramental minimalism that asks how little we can do and still be valid, rather than how much we can do so that the sign speak loudly, clearly and expansively.
Her closing data point deserves wide circulation. When later surveys by CARA and Vinea Research rephrased the question properly, asking whether the Eucharist is a symbol in which Jesus is present, between 89 and 92 percent of churchgoing Catholics said yes. The supposed collapse of Eucharistic faith was, in no small part, an artifact of a badly worded questionnaire.
What symbol means in the grammar of sacramental theology
Let me add a word from my own formation. At Louvain we were taught that in sacramental theology, symbol does not mean what it means in a high school English class. It does not mean a token that points away from itself toward something absent. A true symbol is a reality so deep and so dense with meaning that it surpasses our words to explain it. It does not stand in for what it signifies; it makes that reality present and gives it a body.
Think of a kiss. Physiologically, one could describe it as two labial structures contracting so as to interface in a tactile way. Every word of that description is accurate, and every word misses the point entirely. A kiss is love made present: the often incomprehensible reality of one person’s self-gift to another, given flesh. No one who has been kissed by a mother, a spouse, or a dying friend would call it “merely” symbolic. It is precisely because it is a symbol that it is so devastatingly real.
This is not a novel or progressive idea. It is the tradition. The Council of Trent itself, in its decree on the Most Holy Eucharist (Session XIII, ch. 3), teaches that the Eucharist shares with the other sacraments the character of being symbolum rei sacrae, the symbol of a sacred thing and the visible form of invisible grace. St. Thomas places the sacraments squarely in genere signi, in the category of sign (ST III, q. 60, a. 1). Karl Rahner’s essay on the theology of the symbol gave us the language of the Realsymbol: the self-expression in which a reality comes to be what it is. And Louis-Marie Chauvet taught a generation that symbolic mediation is not the obstacle to grace but its native habitat. Christ himself, as Colossians puts it, is the image of the invisible God. The Incarnation is the Father’s Symbol, spoken in flesh.
So the problem was never that Mary McCarthy called the Eucharist a symbol. The problem is that she, and too many Catholics since, have understood “symbol” as a synonym for unreal. Flannery should have replied, “Yes, Mary, and that is exactly why it is the most real thing in this room.”
A word about Eucharistic miracles
Some will object that Eucharistic miracles, the bleeding hosts and fragments of flesh venerated at Lanciano and elsewhere, settle the matter in favor of a crudely physical presence, as though at last the “mere symbol” had been stripped away to reveal the real thing beneath. That is not the Church’s teaching. We do not receive the physical flesh and blood of the Lord; we receive his true, real, and substantial presence under the accidents of bread and wine.
The Church has walked this road before. In 1059, Berengar of Tours was made to swear an oath declaring that Christ’s body is “sensually” broken by the hands of the priest and ground by the teeth of the faithful. Twenty years later, the formula he was required to profess spoke instead of the bread and wine being substantially changed, the very term that paved the way for Thomas and for Trent. The Church chose the grammar of substance and sign over the grammar of flesh and teeth.
St. Thomas faced the question of miraculous hosts directly (ST III, q. 76, a. 8). He denies that what appears is Christ’s body in its own proper form, which is seen only in heaven. He teaches instead that God miraculously alters the appearances, either in the eyes of the beholders or in the sacramental accidents themselves, while the sacrament remains unchanged and Christ remains present exactly as before. Nor is this deception, he insists. Like the Risen Lord who walked unrecognized beside the disciples on the road to Emmaus, the miracle conceals in order to reveal. Citing Augustine, Thomas calls it “a figure of the truth,” given to show that Christ’s body and blood are truly present in the sacrament.
Note what this means. For Thomas, the Eucharistic miracle is itself a sign: a sign pointing to a Sign. It does not contradict our theology; it is an extraordinary and unexplainable grace that focuses our attention on the real presence of the Lord, a mystery touching the great mysterium fidei. The Church never obliges the faithful to believe in any particular one (cf. CCC 67), and they are not the essence of Eucharistic faith. They remain, at most, a theological anomaly at the margins of the mystery, never its measure.
Why this matters for the lex orandi
Ferrone is right that the consequences are not merely academic. When symbol is reduced to “mere symbol,” the minimalists win twice over. Communion under both kinds, which the General Instruction of the Roman Missal (no. 281) calls the fuller form of the sign, is withdrawn in some dioceses precisely to teach the doctrine of concomitance, as though starving the sign would feed the faith. A few drops of water suffice at the font. A baby bib stands in for the baptismal garment while the priest speaks of bringing it unstained to the judgment seat of heaven. Ferrone calls this grotesque. I would only add that it is also, in the deepest sense, a failure of participatio actuosa, because a sign that does not speak fully and expansively cannot draw the faithful into the mystery it carries.
The lex orandi forms the lex credendi. If we pray with impoverished symbols, we should not be surprised when belief grows thin. The answer is not to set doctrine against symbol but to let symbol be fully itself: bread that looks and tastes like bread, the cup offered to all, water that can actually wash, oil that glistens, a garment worthy of the name. Then, and only then, will our catechesis on the Real Presence have something to point to.
An open question
Ferrone ends where Francis and Guardini do, with a question rather than a formula: how do we become capable of symbol again? I can think of no more urgent question for pastors, liturgists, and catechists in the wake of the Eucharistic Revival. I would gently suggest that we begin by retiring Flannery’s punch line from our homilies and conference talks. It was a great line. It was a faithful line. But it has done its work, and it is time we gave the word symbol back to the Church that has always known what it means.
In Part II, I will turn from principle to practice. This year a small number of American dioceses, my own among them, have issued norms restricting Communion from the cup, grounding their decisions in the doctrine of concomitance. Concomitance is the Church’s teaching that the risen Christ cannot be divided, so that he is present whole and entire, Body, Blood, soul, and divinity, under each of the Eucharistic species. Whoever receives the consecrated host alone, or the cup alone, receives the whole Christ. I will ask what the Church’s tradition, from St. Thomas to the General Instruction of the Roman Missal, teaches about the relationship between that doctrine and the fullness of the sacramental sign, and what is at stake when the two are set against each other.
Read Rita Ferrone’s essay in full here: https://crc.blog.fordham.edu/faith-religion/is-the-eucharist-a-symbol/
With thanks to Liturgy and Truth and Monsignor Arthur Holquin, S.T.L., where this article originally appeared.
