Dear Parishioners,

It’s Easter Season and “tis the season to celebrate sacraments.” In addition to Confirmation, celebrated for 41 teenagers last Thursday and 15 adults this weekend, first communions really abound. We’ll have a total of seven “first communion masses” with three celebrated yesterday, one at this weekend’s 12:15 and another three next Saturday. It’s an important time for our youngsters, but also not a bad time for us grown-ups to reflect on our adult understanding of our Catholic faith and Christian convictions about the presence of Christ in communion.

There are at least three extremes when it comes to belief in the “real presence” of Christ in the Eucharist – extremes which a fair number of Catholics hold but which the Catholic Church, Tradition and theology, have outright rejected or at least carefully avoided. One extreme is the belief that Jesus’ presence is “merely symbolic” and communion just a dramatic reminder of Jesus; a second and quite different extreme is the belief that Jesus is “physically” – that is materially or corporally present; a third extreme, likewise rejected by our Church, is that the presence of Jesus is somehow locked into the host, or limited to the moment of consecration, or confined to the space of bread and wine. Despite devotional rhetoric about “the prisoner in the tabernacle”, that extreme misrepresents Catholic faith.

The Catholic belief and conviction about Christ’s presence at mass might be described in three statements. 1) The presence of Jesus is personal and it is real; 2) It is the presence of the Risen and Spirit filled Christ – not a matter of molecular flesh and body fluids much less of an object or a thing, but of the personal presence of the Lord. Christ’s Aramaic words “this is my body…this is my blood” – are more helpfully put in English as “this is my self…this is my life, given for you.” The traditional teaching about “transubstantiation” has been the Church’s way of guaranteed belief in the substantial personal presence of Christ and at the same time excluding belief in a material, physical or molecular change in bread and wine; 3) Christ is present “most especially in the Eucharistic bread and wine” but his presence is real at many other levels: in the faith gathering of baptized believers, in the proclaiming of the Word of Scripture, in ourselves so that we may “become what we receive”, in our going forth after Eucharist to bring the presence of Christ to our world and share the presence of Christ as the Church.

When we say “Amen” to “the Body of Christ”, I believe we are called to give an assent to a variety of profound truths : to the Risen Christ who lives, to Jesus who by the power of his word and the Holy Spirit is personally present to us through the blessed bread of communion, to the larger picture that all of us together are called to be “body of Christ”, and to an expression of communion with one another and with the worldwide Catholic Christian family. As St. Augustine preached: “If you are the body and members of Christ, then it is your sacrament that is placed on the table of the Lord; it is your sacrament that you receive. To that which you are, you respond “Amen” (“Yes, it is true”). Be then a member of the Body of Christ that your Amen may be true.