Eucharistic Accidents
Looking for a place to happen…
Though an accident cannot naturally exist, in the Holy Sacrament the accidents of bread and wine remain after these substances have ceased to exist, being sustained by divine power. Our Lord is to them instead of a substance. They lean upon Him, yet do not touch Him; and as in the Incarnation the Sacred Humanity has no human person to support it, so in Transubstantiation, the accidents are without a substance to uphold them.
Lately, “Upper Italy” has mostly talked about breasts – (here), (here) and (here), in case you missed the fun part. In Italian terms this is almost unforgivable, since it means we are not “serious.” As a way of hiking up our general level of gravitas and solemnity, we’re going to do something about that today. We are in fact going to place our immortal souls in some jeopardy by discussing the Eucharist and the several heresies of Transubstantiation.
Once upon time, and historically not that long ago, you could just sort of automatically feel the Inquisitor’s irons warming up at the simple smell of those words – or, if you got it right for the Church of Rome, some Protestant instead was probably beginning to tie a noose at the mere thought.
Here’s the deal. All the Christian churches of which we are aware practice some form of ceremony called Communion. The ritual is a sacramental or memorial reenactment of Jesus’ distribution of unleavened bread and wine to his disciples at the Last Supper – saying to them as he handed around the bread, “This is my body,” and, regarding the wine, “This is my blood.”
At any rate, the whole crux of the question – and one it was once very easy to die for – is in that waffling language about “sacramental or memorial reenactment”. Get that one wrong and one way or the other you are still, today, supposed to fry in Hell.
Roman Catholicism holds – and cares very deeply about this – that in the course of the Sacrament called Holy Communion the bread and wine are miraculously “transubstantiated” into the literal flesh and blood of Christ. They acquire His “Real Presence.” Because this is not always immediately obvious to observers, the complex piece of theology we cited at the opening of this note was created to explain how that could be possible when to many it looks like nothing much is happening.
“Eucharistic accidents” in this special theological sense are, then, the merely physical, we might say “accidental” leftovers – suggestions more even than, say, shadows – of the nature of the bread and wine before they are replaced in a recurring ceremonial miracle by the “Real Presence” of Christ.
You might think – most people do, even most Catholics, about 70% in the United States, something we mentioned (here) – that this is the Church trying desperately to talk itself out of a theological hole after the Protestants seized the high ground of calling a ritual spade a spade. They after all consider communion a kind of re-enactment of a historical fact, not a “Sacrament” at all; in a broad sense not unlike setting off fireworks on the Fourth of July to commemorate the British bombardment of Fort McHenry during the War of 1812. “Bombs bursting in air,” and so on.
Does this matter? Not really, except that as we mentioned, if you come down on the wrong side of the issue – or even if you don’t come down at all – you are probably going to burn in Hell.
Since we don’t like shooting fish in barrels, and since the whole matter got a fair amount of press anyway, we didn’t bother at the time to go over the recent reminder by the Vatican about the absolute primacy of Roman Catholicism.
That is to say, if you missed this, after having cleverly moved to coax lapsing believers to return to the the faith by taking Mass back into a language no-one understands, Latin – (here) – the Vatican has now undertaken the obvious next step of formally declaring that the Roman Catholic brand of Christianity is the only one officially recognized by Jesus Christ.
That is exactly what it said, and we are not really paraphrasing more than a tiny bit. In a remarkable document entitled “Answers to questions regarding aspects of Church doctrine” – dated 29 June but only distributed on July 10th, a couple of weeks ago now – the Vatican specifically asserts that “Christ’s only Church is the Catholic one” and points out that because this is the case, similar Protestant, ah, “organizations” cannot properly speaking be considered churches at all.
Upper Italy supposes that Protestant entities, to the degree they care, are not very amused by all this, but these are mostly churches – sorry, that would be “cults” – that do not as a rule have a centralized frothing-at-the-mouth department to hand out reaction statements. Churches that do – the Russian Orthodox Church and Egypt’s Copts – commented rather snippily.
The Russians pointed out that “The Catholic Church is stuck in the 11th Century,” (a reference to the “Great Schism,” something we will go into another time) while the Copts – whose own Christian tradition is believed to be quite as old as Roman Catholicism, delicately underlined that “No-one can exclude anyone else from God’s grace because the road to Salvation is open to everyone and God is the only judge”.
Other, similar, sources considered that the Vatican’s statement was “not helpful” and many Catholics of an ecumenical bent who had believed that the wars of the Reformation were history may need to do some hard thinking about who exactly is to be their Religious Service Provider.
Careful readers will know that we picked this one a few months ago – (here) – in a charmingly irreverent note entitled “Chubby Checker and the Harrowing of Hell.” We think you should go read that now so you can see how clever we have been.
The Vatican’s blunt pronouncement was still a stunner. Not because it was unexpected, but in the same way it was a surprise when the Berlin Wall fell. Everyone knew it would go down someday, but “not quite yet” had been the conventional answer for a such a long time that it was hard to get a handle when “yet” finally showed up.
We may as well be clear about this. The Church’s announcement means that it expects you will go straight to Hell if you do not sign up, if you fail to get the right grip on the “Real Presence” question, among other things. There is no other way to interpret this. If there is only one way to God and you do not choose to take it, you are going to spend eternity among the Devil’s flames.
Does this sound familiar? The only thing odd is that it’s coming out of Rome. We are looking at the most classic of all the evangelical pitches, and that is the key to understanding what is actually going on. The Church (big “C”) is run by clever people, whatever you may think, and they have largely written off Europe and even to a considerable degree North America. These places are not the future of Catholic Christianity, but of heathen greed and of classic “illuminist” liberalism
If the question is “why now?”, the answer is: because protestant evangelists have begun seriously hurting the Church of Rome in its “growth markets,” mostly in the Second World; South America somewhat more than Africa. That can’t be allowed to happen and the decks must be cleared for real battle.
In other words, the Catholic Church is about to become something that happens every time time the going starts to get a little rough – every few hundred years or so – and that is “evangelical.”
Ecumenical types, for a while anyway, a century or two, can go screw themselves. God is pissed off, and His Only Church is getting ready to do something about it.