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Transubstantiation has proved a stumbling block to many outside the Roman Catholic Church and difficult if not doubtful to many inside it. Yet the Eucharistic change can mostly be explained without delving too deeply into the mysteries of medieval metaphysics. The Eucharist is the chief sacrament of the New Law and, as such, transubstantiation turns out to be primarily a legal notion. Thus Our Lord's real presence in the consecrated elements cannot be equated with the mere fact that he is there. As God the Son, Christ is always present everywhere and his body and blood are present wherever he is by concomitance with his divinity. What is new after the consecration is not his presence in fact, or de facto, but his presence by law, or de jure. Just as God is present on all mountains but Mount Horeb alone is holy precisely because God ordered Moses to worship him there, so Our Lord's body and blood are present in all bread and wine but consecrated bread and wine alone are holy precisely because of his re-enacted order to consume them so as to partake of his body and blood. The ensuing change in the elements obliges us to worship them and to avoid public scandal in the distribution of Holy Communion. This obligation has proved difficult to reconcile with the recent teaching of Pope Francis in Amoris Laetitia, yet legal obligations are deduced by the rules of practical inference and such deductions are defeasible, a feature which enables the difficulties over Amoris Laetitia to be defused. More long-standing difficulties concerning transubstantiation, however, mean that a discussion of it cannot entirely avoid matters of metaphysics when it comes to considering the persisting properties of bread and wine. Those properties act as that glue between the prior and the posterior necessary in any change. They are without substance afterwards because they were so beforehand and belong to a special and independently required class of no-place properties. Yet although the properties of bread and wine remain, the powers do not. In response to worship Our Lord manifests his powers, not only by pouring out interior graces but also by exterior and verifiable miracles, miracles which prove that the consecrated elements are no longer bread and wine because they possess powers which no bread or wine possess.

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9781974136483

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Dermot Cassidy was educated at Trinity Hall in Cambridge and Wadham College in Oxford in the days when men were men, women were women and children were to be seen and not heard. Like Tom Bombadil, whom he increasingly resembles, he resides in a little land in the West where he forlornly awaits the return of those halcyon days.

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