Benedict XVI - The Good Shepherd accompanies us in death

[T]hrough the figure of the shepherd the early Church could identify with existing models of Roman art. There the shepherd was generally an expression of the dream of a tranquil and simple life, for which the people, amid the confusion of the big cities, felt a certain longing. Now the image was read as part of a new scenario which gave it a deeper content: “The Lord is my shepherd: I shall not want ... Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, because you are with me ...” (Ps 23 [22]:1, 4). The true shepherd is one who knows even the path that passes through the valley of death; one who walks with me even on the path of final solitude, where no one can accompany me, guiding me through: he himself has walked this path, he has descended into the kingdom of death, he has conquered death, and he has returned to accompany us now and to give us the certainty that, together with him, we can find a way through. The realization that there is One who even in death accompanies me, and with his “rod and his staff comforts me”, so that “I fear no evil” (cf. Ps 23 [22]:4)—this was the new “hope” that arose over the life of believers.

Pope Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi (2007), 45-46

Benedict XVI - Most likely to go to Purgatory

There can be people who have totally destroyed their desire for truth and readiness to love, people for whom everything has become a lie, people who have lived for hatred and have suppressed all love within themselves. This is a terrifying thought, but alarming profiles of this type can be seen in certain figures of our own history. In such people all would be beyond remedy and the destruction of good would be irrevocable: this is what we mean by the word Hell. On the other hand there can be people who are utterly pure, completely permeated by God, and thus fully open to their neighbours—people for whom communion with God even now gives direction to their entire being and whose journey towards God only brings to fulfilment what they already are. 

Yet we know from experience that neither case is normal in human life. For the great majority of people—we may suppose—there remains in the depths of their being an ultimate interior openness to truth, to love, to God. In the concrete choices of life, however, it is covered over by ever new compromises with evil—much filth covers purity, but the thirst for purity remains and it still constantly re­emerges from all that is base and remains present in the soul. What happens to such individuals when they appear before the Judge? Will all the impurity they have amassed through life suddenly cease to matter? What else might occur? Saint Paul, in his First Letter to the Corinthians, gives us an idea of the differing impact of God's judgement according to each person's particular circumstances. He does this using images which in some way try to express the invisible, without it being possible for us to conceptualize these images—simply because we can neither see into the world beyond death nor do we have any experience of it. Paul begins by saying that Christian life is built upon a common foundation: Jesus Christ. This foundation endures. If we have stood firm on this foundation and built our life upon it, we know that it cannot be taken away from us even in death. Then Paul continues: “Now if any one builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw—each man's work will become manifest; for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. If the work which any man has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward. If any man's work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire” (1 Cor 3:12­15). In this text, it is in any case evident that our salvation can take different forms, that some of what is built may be burned down, that in order to be saved we personally have to pass through “fire” so as to become fully open to receiving God and able to take our place at the table of the eternal marriage ­feast.

Pope Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi (2007), 45-46

Lewis - Death is Unnatural; We fight it in this world although we know it's defeated in eternity

[W]e follow One who stood and wept at the grave of Lazarus—not surely, because He was grieved that Mary and Martha wept, and sorrowed for their lack of faith (though some thus interpret) but because death, the punishment of sin, is even more horrible in His eyes than in ours. The nature which He had created as God, the nature which He had assumed as Man, lay there before Him in its ignominy; a foul smell, food for worms. Though He was to revive it a moment later, He wept at the shame; if I may here quote a writer of my own communion, ‘I am not so much afraid of death as ashamed of it.’ And that brings us again to the paradox. Of all men, we hope most of death; yet nothing will reconcile us to—well, its unnaturalness. We know that we were not made for it; we know how it crept into our destiny as an intruder; and we know Who has defeated it. Because Our Lord is risen we know that on one level it is an enemy already disarmed; but because we know that the natural level also is God’s creation we cannot cease to fight against the death which mars it, as against all those other blemishes upon it, against pain and poverty, barbarism and ignorance. Because we love something else more than this world we love even this world better than those who know no other.

From "Some Thoughts" in God in the Dock (1970)

 

Merton - Epiphany in Louisville on March 18, 1958

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream. Not that I question the reality of my vocation, or of my monastic life: but the conception of “separation from the world” that we have in the monastery too easily presents itself as a complete illusion: the illusion that by making vows we become a different species of being, pseudo-angels, “spiritual men,” men of interior life, what have you.

Certainly these traditional values are very real, but their reality is not of an order outside everyday existence in a contingent world, nor does it entitle one to despise the secular: though “out of the world,” we are in the same world as everybody else, the world of the bomb, the world of race hatred, the world of technology, the world of mass media, big business, revolution, and all the rest. We take a different attitude to all these things, for we belong to God. Yet so does everybody else belong to God. We just happen to be conscious of it, and to make a profession out of this consciousness. But does that entitle us to consider ourselves different, or even better, than others? The whole idea is preposterous.

This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. And I suppose my happiness could have taken form in the words: “Thank God, thank God that I am like other men, that I am only a man among others.” To think that for sixteen or seventeen years I have been taking seriously this pure illusion that is implicit in so much of our monastic thinking.

It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes: yet, with all that, God Himself gloried in becoming a member of the human race. A member of the human race!  To think that such a commonplace realization should suddenly seem like news that one holds the winning ticket in a cosmic sweepstakes.

I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

This changes nothing in the sense and value of my solitude, for it is in fact the function of solitude to make one realize such things with a clarity that would be impossible to anyone completely immersed in the other cares, the other illusions, and all the automatisms of a tightly collective existence. My solitude, however, is not my own, for I see now how much it belongs to them — and that I have a responsibility for it in their regard, not just in my own. It is because I am one with them that I owe it to them to be alone, and when I am alone, they are not “they” but my own self. There are no strangers!

Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed…I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other. But this cannot be seen, only believed and “understood” by a peculiar gift.

Merton - Prayer of Trust

My Lord God,
I have no idea where I am going
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.

Nor do I really know myself,
And the fact that I think I am following
your will does not mean that I am
actually doing so.

But I believe that the desire to please
you does in fact please you.
And I hope that I have that desire in all
that I am doing.

And I know that if I do this, you
will lead me by the right road
though I may know nothing about it.

Therefore I will trust you always
though I may seem to be lost
and in the shadow of death, I will
not fear, for you are ever with me
and you will never leave me
to face my perils alone.

Keefe - Real Presence Not Physical, Not Part of Fallen World, but Rather Restoration of it

A question over the physical presence of the risen Christ in the Eucharist has been rattling around the English-speaking Church for the past decade. In recent months some published questions and answers concerning the "physical presence" of Christ in the Eucharist have been the subject of controversy.

One prominent pastor, after an unexceptionable affirmation of the traditional Eucharistic piety and doctrine supporting the exposition and adoration of the Eucharistic Lord, remarked ad cautelam that the Risen Jesus is not "physically present" in the Blessed Sacrament:

Contrary to what you may hear about the practice, Jesus is not physically present or contained in the tabernacle or the monstrance, nor is he a prisoner nor lonely, he does not need our company.

It is evident from the context in which this denial was placed that the "physical presence" he had in view is one which would submit the Eucharistic Christ to the accidents of space and time — a view of the Real Presence that is clearly ruled out by the Church’s historical tradition.

By now there is sufficient confusion and misunderstanding about what the Church means by the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist — a situation complicated by talk of the "many presences" of Christ — to warrant a review of the Church’s teaching.

 . . .

[T]he conviction that the Real Presence is properly called "substantial" was firmly in place more than a century before Saint Thomas spoke of the Eucharistic presence of Christ as a presence "per modum substantiae", i.e., in the manner of substance.

By this term he meant to indicate a Real Presence whose objective reality is not empirical, and which therefore is not submitted to the fragmentation, the mutability and the corruption proper to fallen time and space.

It follows that, insofar as "physical" is understood to mean "empirical", the Real Presence is not "physical". . . . Anyone accustomed to that interpretation of the "physical" would understand a denial of the "physical" presence of Christ in the Eucharist to be a denial of his substantial or concretely actual Real Presence. It must be insisted that the Real Presence is precisely corporeal, objective, and historical: it is a concrete Event — presence, whether the Event be termed transubstantiation, or the offering of the One Sacrifice. It is in this specifically Catholic understanding — that the Eucharist is concretely an Event, identically the Event of the Cross, that the Catholic Church parts company with those Protestants who affirm, with Luther, a Real Presence, but who, with Luther, deny the Sacrifice of the Mass, and deny transubstantiation.

It is well to avoid language which can be so easily misunderstood. It is better by far to speak of a substantial Real Presence because it is by a Presence per modum substantiae that the Risen Lord is incapable of being "imprisoned" or "contained" in this fallen world, whatever we may do.

If this is elementary; it is also an inadequate, because merely negative, grasp of the meaning of Christ’s Real Presence per modum substantiae. It is important that we view positively the Risen Christ’s Eucharistic transcendence of the changes and corruption of our fallen world, which is to say, that we understand it not merely as a sort of miraculous immunity, but rather as Jesus the Christ’s Lordship of history.

Thus understood, the Eucharistic Sacrifice, the concretely corporeal and historical Event-Presence of the risen Christ, is the liberation of all creation, by its Head, from its ancient imprisonment by sin and the fear of death.

So viewed, we recognize in the Eucharistic Sacrifice the Head’s restoration to our fallen history of its free unity and salvific significance. This is His "recapitulation", His "re-heading", of the fallen world.

In the Mass the risen Christ, the second Adam, the Head, restores to the Good Creation — in signo, in the sacrificial institution of the Eucharistic One Flesh — that free and nuptial unity, the loveliness it had "in the Beginning," which is to say, that it had in the Christ, who is the Beginning, the Alpha as well as the Omega.

This Catholic conviction must trump the lis de verbis over whether the Real Presence of the Eucharistic Lord is "physical". His historical objectivity, His Sacrificial Event-Presence in the Mass and in the world, is Lordly: only thus is it redemptive.

Father Donald Keefe, SJ, author of Covenantal Theology, is professor of systematic theology teaching at Sacred Heart Major Seminary, Detroit.

From Donald J. Keefe, The Reality of the Real Presence in Adoremus Bulletin Online Edition – Vol. VIII, No. 1: March 2002. 

Merz - Eucharist is Christ's Risen, "Spiritualized", Supra-Physical Body (Eucharistic Miracle Is Not)

During the Protestant Reformation, there were many attacks made against the purported teaching of the Church on the Eucharist. Pamphlets appeared, showing a giant Christ bearing marks of the Passion and several Catholics gnawing on His body. Although John 6:54 uses the verb Trogo, which means “to gnaw,” the pamphlet was a wildly distorted interpretation of Catholic teaching on the Eucharist. John uses Trogo to emphasize the reality of eating that is a necessary part of the Eucharist, but not to imply that the Eucharist has anything to do with gnawing on an arm or leg of Christ. 

When we break the host at Mass during the “Lamb of God,” or when we chew the host after reception of Holy Communion, Christ does not suffer any injury. We do not physically touch, break, chew or taste the Body and Blood of Jesus, but only the physical characteristics of the Sacrament of the Eucharist.

In John 6:63, we read the words of Jesus, “It is the spirit that gives life, while the flesh is of no avail. The words I have spoken to you are spirit and life.” Sometimes, Protestants will point to this verse to say that Jesus used the word “flesh” earlier (“eat my flesh and drink my blood”) only metaphorically, because here he clearly says that “the flesh is of no avail.” But Jesus is making an important distinction between earthly, mortal flesh (“no avail”) and his own human-divine — and most importantly — risen, glorified flesh.

This is the body, blood, soul and divinity that we consume in the Eucharist. We do not eat mortal, earthly flesh; we do not eat the pre-risen, pre-glorified flesh of Christ. The Eucharist is the living flesh and blood of Christ, as he currently is, risen and glorified. We eat his Spirit-imbued flesh and blood, but only in and through the veil of the physical reality of the bread and wine, which are essential to the Eucharist as determined by our Lord. Understanding this distinction is vital as we seek to grow in our understanding of the true nature of the miracle of the Eucharist.

Catholics do believe in the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Sacrament of the Eucharist, in which the merely physical characteristics of bread and wine mediate the glorified, supernatural reality of the Risen Jesus. Is the resurrected and glorified body of Jesus as he now is, ascended in heaven, real? Absolutely! Is it physical? Yes, the body of the Risen Jesus — unmediated by the Sacrament of the Eucharist — is physical, but it is much more than physical, at least as understood on this earth.

In this world, all that is physical is subject to decay, but the risen body of Jesus is not subject to decay or death of any kind. As St. Paul writes, it’s a spiritual body (1 Corinthians 15:44). A spiritual body is a physical body that has been completely penetrated and so transfigured by the Holy Spirit. It’s been thoroughly spiritualized. Non-Christians (and even some Christians) will use the term “spiritual” in a derogatory way: “You have a spiritual way of looking at things, whereas I deal with physical reality!” But Christians know that the spiritual is the most real. The physical decays and passes away, but the spirit is immortal. When the Holy Spirit completely imbues a physical body, it becomes a resurrected, glorified body, what St. Paul called a spiritual body, which is more than physical. The Eucharist is a Sacrament of this. The Real Presence of Christ as He is in heaven is mediated to us through the Sacrament.

Eucharistic miracles

I think it’s helpful to contrast the Sacrament of the Eucharist, which we consume at Mass, and the examples of Eucharistic miracles that have occurred several times over the centuries (and which we never consume).

A Eucharistic miracle occurred in the parish church of the Italian town of Lanciano in the eighth century. A monk of St. Basil was celebrating Mass and doubting the Real Presence. Suddenly, the host appeared like flesh and the wine like blood. There were many eyewitness accounts of the event. The host had the same qualities as human heart tissue with the blood registering AB-negative. Both the miraculous flesh and the five globules of blood remain on display (remarkably well preserved) in Lanciano 12 centuries later.

No one has ever desired to consume this tissue or blood, and the Church would not allow it, not simply for the reason of preserving a kind of relic, but because the Eucharistic miracle is no longer the Sacrament of the glorified flesh and blood of the Risen Christ. . . . The miracle of Lanciano is that the Sacrament of the Risen Christ has become a physical relic of the pre-glorified body. It has become something that the Sacrament of the Eucharist is not.

Glorified body

We believe that, under the appearance of bread and wine and mediated through the Sacrament, we receive the living, glorified body, blood, soul and divinity of the Risen Christ.

In the consecrated host, all the physical elements of bread remain — philosophically, these are called the “accidents” of bread: its taste, color, size, molecular and chemical elements. However, the “substance” of bread, its “bread-ness,” which we cannot directly perceive, has been changed into the “substance” of “Christ-ness” (hence, the term transubstantiation).

By way of analogy, perhaps one could say that the spirit or soul of the bread has been changed, while the body of the bread remains the same. But this change affects it on the deepest and truest level. If scientists did a physical, chemical, molecular analysis of the Sacrament of the Eucharist, they would find only the qualities of unleavened bread. This is what is “physical.”

And these physical elements may be so changed (either by corruption or mixture with something else) that they are no longer recognizable as bread to be eaten or wine to be drunk, in which case, per St. Thomas Aquinas: “then Christ’s body and blood do not remain under this Sacrament” (Cf. Summa Theologiae III:77:4).

The Real Presence of the body and blood of Christ is incorruptible, whereas the physical elements of bread and wine, even after consecration, are nonetheless corruptible. In other words, the only part of the consecrated host that is physical is the appearance (“accidents”) of bread and wine. The “substantial” presence of Christ is supra-physical.

Is Christ “physically” present in the Sacrament of the Eucharist? If “physical” means the accidents of taste, color, size and molecular and chemical makeup, then the answer is no. Christ is truly present in “substance,” but only in a mediated way through the Sacrament of the Eucharist. His physical, unmediated presence is what we await with blessed hope at the Second Coming of the Lord at the end of time.

When we consume the Holy Eucharist, the physical accidents of bread and wine are broken down and become part of our bodily metabolism, but the spiritual reality, the most real and enduring reality, is that we become part of the Body of Christ. Only spiritualized flesh and blood could possibly make that happen! This is why the Catholic Church teaches that Christ is not physically present in the Eucharist in an unmediated way, but He is truly, substantially present in His spiritualized and glorified body, blood, soul and divinity.

Taste and see the goodness of the Lord!

Fr. Merz is pastor of St. Thomas More Newman Center Parish in Columbia, diocesan vicar for permanent deacons, and chairman of the Diocesan Liturgical Commission.

From Daniel Merz, SLD, "Priest of the diocese explains Christ’s presence in the Eucharist" in The Catholic Missourian, September 26, 2024.