During the three-year national eucharistic revival in the Catholic Church in the United States, including a year of parish revival, a national eucharistic congress in 2024 and the National Year of Mission, I would like to offer three examples where citing the church’s magisterium precisely and where offering the Mass according to the “texts and rites” of the Roman Missal are crucial—because sometimes phrases can be misquoted and possibly lead to heterodox ideas.
Taking liberties with the wording of magisterial teachings or the wording of the liturgy is an extremely dangerous and self-serving exercise in terms of the church’s belief. Every text and rite of the Roman Missal carries a theological meaning—sometimes more than one. Tampering with words and tinkering with ceremonies can only lead down a slippery slope. Church words and actions are a very large matter.
The real presence of Christ
The first teaching (“canon”) about the Eucharist from the 16th-century Council of Trent states that the Eucharist contains (the Latin is “contineri”) “truly, really and substantially, the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ together with the soul and divinity, and therefore the whole Christ.” The teaching from Trent never says that the Eucharist is “the real presence of Jesus.” It always uses the term “body of Christ.”
To describe the Eucharist as the “body of Jesus” or “the real presence of Jesus” would be too limiting to the historical body and earthly reality of the Word made flesh and the incarnate Son of God. The “body of Christ” refers to the entirety of the mystery of the totality of Christ: his whole earthly ministry and also his suffering, death, resurrection and ascension to the Father’s right hand to intercede for us in heaven. The Eucharist is the real presence of this body of Christ, not Jesus only.
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The Rev. Kevin W. Irwin is a priest of the Archdiocese of New York who has been on the faculty of the School of Theology and Religious Studies at the Catholic University of America since 1985. Among his recent publications are Models of the Eucharist (Paulist, 2020) and Ecology, Liturgy and the Sacraments (Paulist, 2023).
With thanks to America and Fr Kevin W. Irwin, where this article originally appeared.
