The National Eucharistic Revival is starting to take shape around here. What will it look like, and what does it hope to accomplish?
This past Saturday, I attended an event for deacons and wives from two dioceses, Chicago and Joliet. The theme of the event was the National Eucharistic Revival. We listened to four bishops and some other clergy on the topic of the Eucharist.
These one-day deacon events tend to follow a certain pattern: Morning Prayer, then a keynote presentation, then more presentations, then lunch, then still more presentations, and then a final blessing, after which we're sent back to our families, parishes and lives.
This particular event followed the same outline, except that, right before lunch, they inserted Eucharistic Adoration and Benediction. I am not one who has been immersed in this form of spirituality. In fact, I think this is only the second time in my life I have attended Benediction. I don't own the vestments for it, and if anyone wanted me to lead it, I'd need to be trained. So from a "professional" standpoint, I found it interesting. And I was able to take some time to pray, which is nice.
Nobody explicitly said so, but the event seems to be part of the overall master plan for the National Eucharistic Revival. That plan calls for different stages:
- From now through June 2023: the Year of Diocesan Renewal. The hope is that the church will form "Eucharistic missionaries" who will spread the word about the Eucharist, and the Eucharistic Revival, in parishes. I am pretty sure that's what the powers-that-be were hoping to accomplish last Saturday: to turn us all into Eucharistic missionaries
- June 2023 through July 2024: the Year of Parish Revival. From the official website linked in the first paragraph above: "[F]oster Eucharistic devotion at the parish level, strengthening our liturgical life through faithful celebration of the Mass, Eucharistic Adoration, missions, resources, preaching, and organic movements of the Holy Spirit." So there is a practical list that deacons, who tend to be a practical lot, can do
- July 17-21, 2024: the National Eucharistic Congress. 80,000 Catholics (they hope) will descend on Indianapolis "to reconsecrate their hearts to the source and summit of our faith".
- July 21, 2024 through Pentecost 2025: the Year of Going Out on Mission. "Having enkindled a missionary fire in the hearts of the American faithful, the Holy Spirit will send us out on mission to share the gift of our Eucharistic Lord as we enter the universal Church’s jubilee year in 2025"
For better or worse (and, to telegraph the punch line, I think it is worse), Cardinal Cupich's views may not be the prevailing view among church leaders. In thinking about the National Eucharistic Revival, I think most of them are thinking about the sorts of Eucharistic things they know: Adoration, Benediction, processions, et al. In my view, Cardinal Cupich is looking more deeply into the situation. We'd be well-advised to listen to him.
Jim, I think Cardinal Cupich is right when he named the problem as being that too many people don't believe that Jesus has risen from the dead, and is present among us.
ReplyDeleteI also have problems with those surveys which say that only 31% of Catholics believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Which Catholics did they ask, and how did they ask it? I have to believe the people who are showing up for Mass believe it, or they wouldn't be there.
FWIW our parish has done Perpetual Adoration for 22 years, and we have done Benediction with stations of the Cross in Lent, since forever. I view these things as good. I think participating in adoration is spiritually beneficial for those who do it. But the people who do it already believed.
I see all this as just preaching to the choir. They are not going to get any one back to church that way.
ReplyDeleteThe powers that be would do much better if they decided to celebrate the Eucharist better by having better homilies and hymns that the people can sing.
But no, the problem is with the people who don't come to Mass and don't know the correct answers when sociologists ask them questions. A lot of wasted time, effort, and money in my opinion.
If they really wanted to reach out they could begin livestreaming all these improved Masses. There is a parish in Boston that has a national and even world-wide audience by doing this.
DeleteBetty and I have tuned in recently. Great homilies and great music. They sing hymns that the people know, but also have four cantors that can do their own parts, descants, etc.
Betty as a cantor thinks they are even better than the group at the National Shrine which has done recordings. Especially since they are not doing music that the people cannot do.
Of course it is enjoyable to listen to good homilies and good music. But a caveat, people can start thinking of it as entertainment, and themselves as spectators. How much of themselves do they put into worship? Worship is the bottom line of why we're there, it's a first commandment issue, not to mention the third one. We can put ourselves into a no frills daily Mass as much as one for a high holy day with an accomplished choir and stellar homily.
DeleteJack, agree. It is preaching to the choir and won’t bring people back,
DeleteJim, Cupich’s take on this isn’t one I’ve heard before. Most Catholics who have trouble accepting the RCCs teaching on Real Presence have a problem with the doctrine of transsubstantiation, but not with the resurrection.
I think there's some tangential things here. If they don't believe in the divinity of Jesus, they probably believe in neither his resurrection nor his presence in the Eucharist.
DeleteKatherine, I know Protestants who believe in Jesus’s presence in the Eucharist but reject the doctrine of transsubstantiation. They believe that Jesus is present in some mysterious way but they don’t believe that the bread is Jesus’s flesh under the appearance of bread nor that the wine is Jesus’s blood.
DeleteFWIW - I don't think I heard the word "Transubstantiation" mentioned a single time the entire day at last week's conference. Maybe the bishops who are leading this nationwide initiative have decided that philosophical explanations aren't going to fly with today's crowd?
DeleteI have noticed that the articles I read tend to avoid using the term. But they also don’t define what they DO mean by Real Presence. I don’t know if Real Presence is even defined at all when they do their surveys.
DeleteBut transsubstantiation is still the official teaching, is it not?
"Revival" indicates something has died and needs resuscitation? I don't think taking Communion has fallen off for those who are at Mass. So is it to get those who left the Church to get squared away with Confession and back in line? To revive traditional Catholic understanding of the Eucharist?
ReplyDeleteRight. Supposedly, the impetus for this Revival is polling data which indicates that only 31% of Catholics accept the Catholic explanation of Jesus's Real Presence in the Eucharist. I wouldn't assume that those 31% who got it right are the 31% who show up on Sundays.
DeleteFwiw - when I'm at mass, and I'm not distracted or spacing out, I try to enter into the Eucharistic Prayer in a spirit of gratitude. For me, that is the heart of the Eucharist: thanksgiving. I don't ponder the meaning of the Real Presence during that moment. And rarely at any other moment. Not that it's wrong to exert the intellect on questions like, "What is the nature of the Eucharist?" But I don't think fostering a wider understanding of the meaning of Real Presence should be the goal. I think the goal should be to try to enable people to enter into a spirit of thanksgiving. But that's just me.
I see it as grace made tangible. It's the closest you can get to Jesus, his suffering, his brokenness, and his forgiveness. In taking the sacrament, you acknowledge your part in his brokenness and recognize yourself as recipient of his forgiveness. It should give you the inspiration to do better, by giving Jesus a home in you.
DeleteI don't think that squares exactly with what the RCC teaches, but if transubstantiation is the way Jesus enters the elements, so be it. I certainly don't deny the theologians their fun in trying to explain things they don't understand. I do look askance at the way the Church makes rules about who gets to receive. I think a lot of Catholics do, too.
Could part of the revival be to underscore who is fit to receive? Another salvo by the smaller-but-purer Church faction? "There goes everybody," with apologies to Pope John 23.
What does it seem reasonable to do if those who were baptized and raised Catholic (1) don't believe in the divinity of Jesus or (2) don't believe in the Real Presence?
ReplyDeleteHaving spent a great deal of time over at sites like the the now defunct Strange Notions website (which in name, at least, is part of Bishop Robert Barron's Word on Fire ministries), it is my own personal opinion that apologetics may strengthen the faith of apologists themselves but probably few others.
To Anne C: To the best of my knowledge Thomism is the official philosophy of the Catholic Church, and transubstantiation is the official explanation of the Real Presence. However, again to the best of my knowledge, a Catholic can believe in the Real Presence without knowing or studying the technical, official philosophical explanations of it. Mysteries can't actually be explained, so it is possible to believe in them without being a Thomist and professing to believe exactly what Aquinas said.
" Mysteries can't actually be explained, so it is possible to believe in them without being a Thomist and professing to believe exactly what Aquinas said."
DeleteDavid, exactly!
Yet the church explains the mystery - how is the Eucharist the Real Presence - as coming about via transsubstantiation. It is still thomism, but it seems like the folk talking about the Eucharist do everything they can to avoid admitting that this IS what the church teaches. They would do well to follow the lead of the EC - Christ is present in some way, but the bread is not actually Jesus’s flesh nor the wine Jesus’s blood no matter what Thomas says. But it still officially says that it is literally Jesus’s body - flesh - a that the wine is actually blood, just under a different physical appearance. It’s SO hard for the church to admit a doctrine is wrong, so it twists itself into pretzels trying to obfuscate instead of just saying Transubstantiation was the dominant theology, based on Aristotle’s philosophy, but it’s wrong.
DeleteI am not sure why Aquinas felt compelled in his day to think through and offer Transubstantiation as an explanation of Real Presence. But I am pretty sure that during the Reformation period (which, I guess, extended at least as far as Vatican II), Transubstantiation was deployed as an apologetics stratagem to explain to Catholics, and anyone else who would listen, how Catholic beliefs differed from Protestant beliefs.
DeleteAs we are now (at least officially) in a more ecumenical age, I'd like to think that the energies and physics of interfaith relations are being exerted to find points of convergence, rather than to define differences. Transubstantiation may have less practical usefulness in ecumenical discussions. Perhaps?
Btw, it may be some leader's judgment (and he might not be wrong!) that it wouldn't be wise to saddle deacons with the language of Transubstantiation, because most of us aren't formed in Thomism or philosophy and we're likely to screw up the explanation in the adult-education sessions I'm speculating they want us to spin up in our parishes.
DeleteWe learned the basics of the concept of transubstantiation in high school, and we were not being trained to be deacons. It seems to me it is at the core of the Catholic faith—essential to the Catholic understanding of the Sacrifice of the Mass—not some esoteric dogma that must be soft-pedaled so as not to confuse the hoi polloi. The Catechism says the following:
Delete1376 The Council of Trent summarizes the Catholic faith by declaring: "Because Christ our Redeemer said that it was truly his body that he was offering under the species of bread, it has always been the conviction of the Church of God, and this holy Council now declares again, that by the consecration of the bread and wine there takes place a change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood. This change the holy Catholic Church has fittingly and properly called transubstantiation."
1413 By the consecration the transubstantiation of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ is brought about. Under the consecrated species of bread and wine Christ himself, living and glorious, is present in a true, real, and substantial manner: his Body and his Blood, with his soul and his divinity (cf. Council of Trent: DS 1640; 1651).
The Catechism was promulgated in the 1990s, which was not so long ago that it can be considered dated, at least in my opinion. Here's a snippet from a 2021 CNA story:
Pope Francis on Sunday encouraged Catholics to not water down the reality of Jesus Christ’s humanity and his teaching that the Eucharist is his Body and Blood.
“Indeed, Jesus affirms that the true bread of salvation, which transmits eternal life, is His very flesh,” Pope Francis said during his Angelus message at the Vatican Aug. 22. . . .
Even today the revelation of Jesus’ humanity, and the fact that the Eucharist is Jesus’ Body and Blood, can cause scandal, he said. It is something difficult for people to accept, he added, explaining that this is what Saint Paul calls the ‘folly’ of the Gospel in the face of those who seek miracles or worldly wisdom.”
“What sense can there be, in the eyes of the world, in kneeling before a piece of bread? Why on earth should someone be nourished assiduously with this bread?” he said.
According to Pope Francis, we should be surprised if the words of Jesus Christ do not throw us into crisis, “because we might have watered down His message,” he stated.
It seems to me that to avoid mention of transubstantiation is to water down Catholic teaching. I should add that in my own view, I don't see how the dogma can be reconciled with the modern philosophical or scientific understanding of what makes bread bread or wine wine. So it is indeed a stumbling block in the 21st century probably more than it was in the lifetime of St. Paul.
On the feast of St. Nicholas [in 1273, Aquinas] was celebrating Mass when he received a revelation that so affected him that he wrote and dictated no more, leaving his great work the Summa Theologiae unfinished.
DeleteTo Brother Reginald’s (his secretary and friend) expostulations he replied, “The end of my labors has come. All that I have written appears to be as so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me.” When later asked by Reginald to return to writing, Aquinas said, “I can write no more. I have seen things that make my writings like straw.”
We believe that the bread and wine become the body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ our Lord when the words of consecration are said (though still retaining the form and appearance of bread and wine). At least some of the Lutherans believe that the bread and wine become the body of Christ when they are received by the believer. And the Lutherans I know have stricter rules than we do about who may receive. I am not well acquainted with many Episcopalians, but an explanation of their belief I have heard is that the presence of Christ in the bread and wine is like light shining through glass; the light does not change the glass but neither is it constrained by it. What if all these are true? We can't explain how Jesus Christ was born of a virgin by the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit either. Maybe we're trying too hard to parse a mystery.
DeleteKatherine, it seems that the Lutherans are not one. The Evangelical Lutheran Church of America is more progressive than the Missouri Synod. Our grandson attends an ELCA Lutheran school. It is very progressive, including not only welcoming the children of gay couples, but fully including the gay parents in such standard classroom activities as being “room parent “, which in the olden days was always “ room mother”. I have only received communion there and in a local Lutheran church, but they invited all baptized Christians to receive. The EC parish we attended for years invited “all who seek Christ” to the table, although some EC parishes restrict it to baptized Christians.
DeleteSince Jesus invited ALL who followed him as disciples to share the bread and wine (metaphorically his body and blood) and all were Jews, not Catholics but Jewish followers of Jesus, the invitation to all Christians to come to the table seems to express Jesus’s command better than the exclusive communion of the RCC. I have been told by several professional Catholics that Christians who aren’t baptized Catholics, who were baptized in a denomination that rejects the doctrine of transsubstantiation, can’t come to the table because it would break the unity of belief that the host is literally flesh and the blood is literally - substantively- blood, under the appearance of bread and wine.
In a conversation with our now retired rector he told me that Episcopalians believe that Christ is present - Real Presence - in the Eucharist in some mysterious way, but not in the doctrine of transsubstantiation. If I’m not mistaken, the Orthodox accept the possibility of transsubstantiation but don’t demand belief in it or any of the other theories (/consubstantiation etc). Jack is the expert there. My Protestant father- in- law once expressed the opinion of many (seldom expressed to Catholics out of a desire not to sound impolite) , shared by some Catholics - those who were actually taught it - that the doctrine implies cannibalism. My memory of Augustine’s understanding of the Eucharist avoids this unfortunate concept. Since it is based on the philosophy of a pagan ( Aristotle) it could be dropped I would think. Perhaps Augustine’s understanding should replace the Thomistic explanation. But the RCC has backed itself into a corner with its foolish claim of infallibility. I suspect that few Catholics would be willing to chew and swallow a piece of raw flesh at communion or drink blood yet this is what the doctrine teaches is happening. I’m sure that I wouldn’t.
Episcopalians say Christ is really, physically and spiritually present, and they do not feel the need to explain it but no longer deny transubstantiation. The glass metaphor makes the Anglican understanding of the Real Presence sound more remote than it is.
DeleteAnglicans welcome all baptized Christians to the Table.
Strict Lutherans love exclusionary Eucharistic rules even more than Catholics.
https://www.episcopalchurch.org/glossary/real-presence/
DeleteReal Presence
The presence of Christ in the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist. The 1991 statement of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission notes, “The elements are not mere signs; Christ's body and blood become really present and are really given. But they are really present and given in order that, receiving them, believers may be united in communion with Christ the Lord.” ….In Eucharistic Prayer A of Rite 2, the celebrant prays that God the Father will sanctify the gifts of bread and wine “by your Holy Spirit to be for your people the Body and Blood of your Son, the holy food and drink of new and unending life in him” (BCP, p. 363). The Catechism notes that the inward and spiritual grace in the eucharist is “the Body and Blood of Christ given to his people and received by faith” (BCP, p. 859). Belief in the real presence does not imply a claim to know how Christ is present in the eucharistic elements. Belief in the real presence does not imply belief that the consecrated eucharistic elements cease to be bread and wine. See Transubstantiation
The Episcopalian understanding is much more palatable (sorry) to people like me who don’t accept the doctrine of transsubstantiation. When Catholics are asked if they believe in the Real Presence and they say No, I suspect that they are thinking about transsubstantiation, not the Resurrection. It would be interesting to see the survey questions and to know if the respondents were asked how they understand the term Real Presence.
Being told that I MUST accept this doctrine is one of the reasons ( there are several) that I left the RCC. Others have left for that reason also. They simply don’t accept certain Catholic teachings, although more leave because of contemporary teachings than because of disbelief in transsubstantiation.
I have vivid memories of long classroom back and forth discussions with my Thomistic Synthesis professor about this issue - about the philosophy of substance and accidents that it is based on.
I think that the "raw flesh and blood" belief has been pretty well rejected as a mistaken idea. I've even heard priests say that in homilies, that any sense of cannibalism is a faulty understanding.
DeleteI did know about the multiple branches of Lutherans. They are mostly LCMS here, though there is an ELCA congregation (pretty sure Nebraska ELCA is more conservative than California ones!)
There is also one Wisconsin Synod congregation out in the country. They think Missouri Synod is too liberal.
My paternal grandfather was a Danish Lutheran. He died when I was very young, so I never got to have any conversations with him about it. I do know that he wasn't comfortable in the LCMS church ( probably because a lot of congregations back in that day were German language.) He didn't have a problem with my dad being raised Catholic, but never converted himself.
But Katherine, the teaching IS that the bread IS body - flesh (the substance of a body is flesh, muscles. Fat etc) and wine (substance) is blood - but under a different appearance (the bread and wine are then the accidents) . The priests do their best to try to hedge the teaching, but it is what it is. Better to redefine it honestly than to pretend that it doesn’t imply what it indeed does imply. Or that it is “ misunderstood”. They should stick with “mystery” and soul and divinity and edit out the parts that say the bread is turned into body and the wine is turned into blood.
DeleteI’ve read some interesting stuff about the complications Aquinas faced in regards to this teaching. One example - when human beings eat and drink they eventually excrete the remains of what was consumed from the digestive track. Some pretty awkward implications from that reality too.
Anne, I think the teaching is that once the elements no longer have the appearance of bread and wine that they cease to be Christ's body and blood. Which solves the digestive tract issues.
DeleteKatherine, it seems that is another attempt to get around the meaning of the teaching - it seems that the church really doesn’t want to teach transsubstantiation anymore and is looking for a graceful exit. There are a lot of good ideas out there about better ways to define Real Presence that don’t involve saying that bread is Jesus’s flesh and wine is Jesus’s blood. .
DeletePlus , before the elements “cease” being in a recognizable to the eye form of bread and wine, people may have already chewed up Jesus’s “body.”
It’s rather telling that the word wasn’t even mentioned at the meeting Jim went to. I have read articles about the Eucharistic Congress(?) that also never use the word. However I’ve also
read articles that do use it and understand that it is problematic. Unfortunately my class in Thomistic Synthesis made a huge impression on me and it didn’t weasel around the subject. Back in the ancient times in the late 60s.
Anyway, the whole reason I brought it up was simply because I don’t agree with Cupich that the problem of people not “believing” the Catholic definition of Real Presence is related to the Resurrection story. When I have read articles about this subject, these surveys, people usually mention transsubstantiation, not the resurrection.
The ancient tradition of the church says that liturgy comes first, then belief.
ReplyDeleteLex orandi, lex credendi (Latin: "the law of what is prayed [is] the law of what is believed"), sometimes expanded as Lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi (Latin: "the law of what is prayed [is] what is believed [is] the law of what is lived")
Another way of saying this is: legem credendi lex statuat supplicandi (the law of praying is to establish the law of believing)
In the period after Trent, we kept the Mass in Latin but attempted through vernacular catechisms to explain the mysteries of the faith.
The rational for the liturgical reform of Vatican II was to go back to the sources (the way the liturgy was celebrated) and have the liturgy shape our understanding of the faith by reforming the liturgy so that the people could more fully participate in the liturgy. A major part of that reform was the three-year cycle of scripture readings which brought more scripture into the Mass.
Unfortunately, in the transition to the vernacular we lost a lot of the beauty of the sung Mass in Latin. Both Anglicans and Orthodox have gone to English while retaining the beauty of the completely sung liturgy which was an important part of the lex orandi.
The tactic of the Eucharistic revival seems to be to convince people to believe certain things so that they will then come to Mass more often. Apparently, it does not matter how well the Mass is done, as long as people come regularly to Mass with the correct beliefs.
The ancient tradition, and Vatican II, says that we should be doing the Mass better so that people will experience the mysteries that are at the core of our belief system, and the basis for living Christian life.
The experience of the liturgy is more than simple rational discourse.
Andrew Greeley expressed this well in his book on Religion as Poetry. He maintained that religion (especially Catholicism) works more like poetry (symbols, images, multiple layers of meaning) than like prose (philosophy or the sciences).
However, the clerical/lay establishment of Catholicism both before and after the Council has tended to center Catholicism on Systematic Theology and Catechism/Religious Education rather than Scripture and Liturgy. If one looks at theological education among Protestants, it is mainly based on Scripture; if one looks at theological education among Orthodox it is mainly focused on the Liturgy. To become a priest in Orthodoxy you have to learn to sing the liturgy; most of the catechesis in an Orthodox parish involves teaching the people, especially the choir how to celebrate the liturgy. Catholic Theological education remains focused on Systematic Theology, mainly modern substitutes for Thomism.
Ideally our theological education would focus on three things: scripture, liturgy and spirituality using an historical approach to help see the changing understanding of all three over time. Essentially that is what I did for my own theological education.
The Eucharistic Revival is essentially beating the dead horse of the prose approach to religion. We need better homilies and music to celebrate the poetry of the liturgy.
This conversation reminds me that, with every breath we take, we inhale oxygen atoms, a very tiny amount of which passed through Jesus' body, became part of it. When I eat, some of those carbon atoms probably were part of the Lord's body at one time. Literally. So we do that already all the time, ingesting the Body and Blood of Our Lord, and we can't keep the Hindus and Rosicrucians from doing it too.
ReplyDeleteI think that the sacramental Eucharist is something more, or the acknowledgement of something always with us.
The categories of Aristotelianism are foreign to me. Substance and accident don't help me. Perhaps quantum theory and quantum entanglement could be exploited to provide another Theory of Eucharist. But I'm not sure it would get us closer to understanding this. I think it is what it is and our best understanding is in the receiving and acceptance of it.
Stanley, that is very poetic, and I am going to think on that! Plus points for mention of the Rosicrucians!
DeleteJean, I once did a back-of-the-envelope calculation and came up with around one hundred O2 atoms breathed by Jesus per breath. How accurate I was, not sure, but good enough to be sure it happens regularly and often.
DeleteSometimes physical fact lends itself to poetic musings.
On another group, we were trying to assess the age of Miss Havisham (she is 37 in the book) in Modern Years based on Victorian life expectancy and her various stressors and lifestyle. We figured she would be about 70 in today's years.
Delete"Miss Havisham"; LOL, brings back memories of reading Great Expectations in high school. I liked Dickens.
DeleteA couple of years ago I made a bucket list of authors I felt I should read to complete my education. I had always avoided Dickens because of his use of dialects. But a good Brit reader who can do the accents, makes it much more enjoyable, and I finished David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, and Great Expectations that way. Gave up on Bleak House, though.
DeleteLibrivox.org has free audio books in the public domain read by volunteers. The late Nicholas Clifford from Commonwealth was one of their volunteers, specializing in Henry James.
Stanley, in the first paragraph, I had the impression that the spirit of Teilhard de Chardin had come upon you.
ReplyDeleteI suspect any explanation in terms of atomic physics, including
perhaps speculation on what the nature of the Resurrected body of Christ and our resurrected bodies might be like, would be much more difficult to understand than Aristotelian metaphysics.
It reminded me however of Katherine’s important post:
https://newgathering.blogspot.com/2021/06/parsing-eucharist-ii.html
in which she quotes Deacon Steven Greydanus
"When I was first trying, as a young non-Catholic, to understand what exactly Catholic theology claims in regard to Christ’s presence in the Eucharist, I was much helped by the discovery that there is one important way in which Christ is said not to be present in the Eucharist. He is said to be present really and substantially, physically and spiritually, in his body and in his blood, in his humanity and divinity — but he is “not present as in a place,” according to Thomas Aquinas, or “not locally present” in the words of Cardinal Newman."
"Only in heaven is Christ’s body “locally present” or “present as in a place”; his mode of presence in the Eucharist is different and “nonlocal.”
Perhaps in the Eucharist we receive the resurrected body of Christ as promise of our own resurrection. A poetic way of understanding it.
Jack, receiving the resurrected Body and Blood of Christ certainly is an interesting theological insight. Breaks away from the conundrum of something appearing as what it is not, kind of a deception.
DeleteInteresting how locality and non-locality are now even concepts in physics.
Sometimes I wonder if even Aristotle's concepts could come back in some form in some future physics.
Interesting ideas, Jack and Stanley. Maybe the theologians should be replaced by physicists?
Delete