The Eucharist is considered the central and most important event for the Catholic community life ever since its inception. The event is celebrated in commemoration of the Christ’s sacrifice of his own life for the salvation of humanity, and it has been uniting believers in the communion since the Last Supper, during which Jesus Christ shared bread and wine with his disciples after saying thanks to God and proclaiming, “Take and eat; this is my body. Drink from it, all of you, for this is my blood of the covenant, which will be shed on behalf of many for the forgiveness of sins.” (The New American Bible, Matt. 26.26-28). The understanding of the sacrament’s meaning and the rites that were observed during its celebration have been changing over the centuries, during which the laity became increasingly distant from the event and turned into the audience, while the priest, who presided over the Mass, became the main participant of the celebration. However, nowadays the situation has been gradually changing after the Second Vatican Council held from 1962 to 1965. As a result of this ecumenical council, the Roman Catholic Church started renovating the old traditions, including the ones concerning the Eucharist, trying to bring people closer to each other and to the understanding of the event, making it a communal commemoration as in the first centuries of the current era. The disputes regarding the presence of Christ during the Eucharist still take place, especially around the issue of transubstantiation, as well as around the problem of making the laity closer to the Christ, the event and each other through changing some of the long-standing traditions, such as the structure of church, the language of the liturgy and many others. Indeed, as the tradition that intends to unite people in one faithful community, it needs to be altered in such a manner that will allow common people understand it better and participate in it more actively, as this is a prerequisite not only of the preservation of the Catholic tradition, but of uniting the Catholic community in the meaningful act of thanksgiving.
The first question that arises in connection with the Eucharist is how Jesus Christ becomes present during the celebration in the bread and wine. The traditional Catholic understanding of this phenomenon, or mystery, has been explained through the process of transubstantiation. The origins of philosophical approach to the process lie in Greek metaphysics formed by Aristotle and formulated as a dogma by the Saint Thomas Aquinas (Lee 1). According to this philosophic approach, every entity in this world has a substance, which lies in the core of the entity, and accidents, which are the unimportant qualities that accompany the substance, but do not define it. An example that Bernard J. Lee suggests in his work “The Eucharist in Catholic Life” helps to better understand how this approach can be applicable to the Eucharist. He explains that human nature is present in humans of all shapes, races, nationalities, ages; they are all different in their accidents, but united by their substance: they are all people (Lee 3). Accordingly, during the Eucharist, the consecration turns the ordinary bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ by changing the substance of the former, while maintaining their accidents, which are not important. Thus, the Christ becomes present during the Eucharist through the transubstantiation after the consecration of the bread and wine. However, this understanding of the process has been challenged many times, especially by Luther, Calvin and Zwingli, who refuted the Church’s official position and suggested their own interpretation. The modern scholars also suggest the new way of looking at transubstantiation, and Lee, as one of them, suggests analyzing the grammar of the Scripture, as well as the early accounts of Paul, Luke, Mark and Matthew regarding the words of Jesus about the bread, the wine and the cup.
The interpretation of the Jesus’ words can be done by analyzing the accounts of them. The first issue arises when translating the Latin phrases into English. While it is commonly known and accepted that Jesus told “This is my body”, it is seldom known that the Latin word for “this” was not actually referring to bread, as from the grammatical point of view there are difference in gender between the Latin “this”, which in this case is the “hoc” in neuter gender, and the word “bread”, which is “panis” of the masculine gender (Lee 5). The original Latin translation of the words of Jesus should have said “hic” instead of “hoc”, which would be of a masculine gender and, thus, a reference to the bread. It is presumed that the Christ was actually referring to something bigger that the bread, probably, to the whole community that was becoming his body after eating the bread, “Now you are Christ's body, and individually parts of it” (The New American Bible, 1 Cor. 12.27). The second part of the Eucharist is also open to interpretation, as two of the four account of the Last Supper suggest different wording regarding the consecration of wine and the transformation of its substance into the blood of the Christ. While Mark and Matthew claim that Jesus said that wine was his blood, and suggested to drink it after thanksgiving, Paul and Luke suggest a different wording, stating that Jesus claimed that “this cup is the new covenant in my blood, which will be shed for you” (The New American Bible, Luke 22.20). Thus, Jesus meant that by drinking wine from the cup would constitute a new covenant between God and the people, a covenant in his blood, and this corresponds to the Jewish tradition of settling the agreement by drinking wine from a communal cup (Lee 6). Thus, by eating the bread and drinking wine from the cup with Jesus, the king, would unite the community into the new Body, the Christians, and this union would be sealed by the covenant with Jesus. While this interpretation of the event can be accepted or not accepted, the Eucharist has been used for gathering the laity for the commemoration of the sacrifice of Jesus for many centuries.
At some point the gathering became more symbolic than meaningful, but nowadays, with the attempts to restore the old traditions and meaning behind the rites, the Church is trying to make the separate lay people closer to each other and to strengthen the community. One of such many attempts is directed at redefining the position of the laity and the priest during the liturgy. Though at first, when the Christian community was still relatively small, people continued gathering for the communal suppers, the expansion of Christianity led to the increased amount of people attending the liturgy. The sense of community started losing its strength at that point. At the same time, as the Latin language began to lose its popularity, and local languages overtook it, the liturgy texts often remained in Latin. Generations passed, and people stopped understanding the meaning of the Latin words, which led to the increase of gap between the priest, the people and the sacrament of the Eucharist. Nowadays, the churches take many different steps to restore the unity. First and foremost, they start using local languages during the process to boost the participation of people in the liturgy. It is often important that the texts be translated not literally, but using various literature devices to make them correspond to the peculiarities of the local language. The second step is to change the shape of the churches that have been built for a long time in a manner that allowed people to only watch each other’s backs and the back of the priest, which transformed the community into the audience of some distant and staged event. Nowadays, the increasing number of churches redesign their interior to create the fan-shaped environment, where people can see the priest, who turns the face to his laity, as well as see each other, thus, creating the sense of communal participation (Lee 9). Another step is to change the posture of the laity that was used to kneel before the priest during the liturgy, while the latter was standing. To increase the sense of community it is more advisable that all present were participating on the equal conditions, except for those, whose health forbids from certain kinds of physical activity. Thus, either the community needs to stand along with the priest, or the priest needs to sit or kneel along with the community. This would also allow for the change in perception of the segregation of the lay people from the priests and other ordained people, and return the initial meaning of the celebration to the Christians.
As the Roman Catholic Church attempts to accommodate to the modern world and become less conservative and closer to people, some of its suggestions are beneficial to the whole Christian community. In the world, where the meaning behind the religious traditions is being forgotten, and the observance of rites becomes the chain of automatic actions, the restoration of the old traditions and presentation of their initial meaning to the Christian public can become advantageous to the Church, as well as its adherers. The individualism that prevails in the modern Western society can leave a Christian Catholic person lacking the sense of unity with other people and God that the Church, as the Body of Christ, is supposed to give, and encouraging people to participate in the Eucharist rather than observe it can help to return this long-lost sense, as well as the meaning of the words and sacrifice of Jesus Christ.
Introduction:
- The return of the meaning of the sacrament of the Eucharist to the Christian community
The modern interpretations of the mystery of transubstantiation:
- The grammatical peculiarities in the Jesus’ reference to his body
- The differences in reference of Jesus to wine and cup and the new covenant
The steps of the modern Roman Catholic Church to restore the communal participation in the Eucharist:
- The translation of the liturgy texts into the local languages
- The reshaping of the Church space to transform observation into participation
- The change in posture of the laity and the priest
- The desegregation of the laity from the ordained people
Conclusion
Works Cited
Lee, Bernard J. “The Eucharist in Catholic Life.” St. Mary’s University. N.d. Print.
The New American Bible. The Holy See. Libreria Editrice Vaticana. Web. 13 Oct. 2014. <http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0839/__PVZ.HTM>.
