The Eucharist is only a symbol! Answers to common objections III, seriatim.

s it hap­pens, I have already answered this objec­tion before in a two-part exe­ge­sis of John 6. That was back in 2014. You can read them here and here. (You ought to, because I go into a lot of detail I won’t repeat below.) But recent­ly an anti-Catholic stat­ed the objec­tion to tran­sub­stan­ti­a­tion in a pecu­liar­ly abso­lutist sort of way:

[Com­mu­nion] is sup­posed to be done pure­ly as a sym­bol or metaphor of the body and blood of Christ. How­ev­er in Catholic mass before every­one par­tic­i­pates in the com­mu­nion, the priests con­duct a rit­u­al that they call tran­sub­stan­ti­a­tion. They believe this ritual/prayer turns the bread and wine into Christ’s lit­er­al body and blood which is not true and this is cannabilis­tic in nature.

It is sup­posed to be mere­ly a sym­bol? Who says? Where can I find this spelled out any such way in the Bible? Is there a text where Christ says, “Now, do this as a sym­bol of my body and blood?” If the Bible does not spell this out for us in terms like that, then what we have here is an inter­pre­ta­tion; and the anti-Catholic I cite above fails to show why it is nec­es­sary.

Indeed, in John 6, Christ con­sis­tent­ly speaks of this as though he real­ly is being lit­er­al:

Then Jesus said unto them, Ver­i­ly, ver­i­ly, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you.

Whoso eateth my flesh, and drin­keth my blood, hath eter­nal life; and I will raise him up at the last day.”

For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed.

He that eateth my flesh, and drin­keth my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him.

As the liv­ing Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father: so he that eateth me, even he shall live by me.”

“My body is true food,” Christ says. “My blood is true drink,” he says. And at the Last Sup­per: “This is my body”; “this is my blood.” He does not say “This rep­re­sents my body and blood.” He insists on lit­er­al terms.

A true believ­er that the Eucharist is mere­ly a sym­bol of Christ’s body and blood must show why this is the nec­es­sary inter­pre­ta­tion that fol­lows from John 6 and from the Last Sup­per texts in all four gospels.

Why, when Christ’s audi­ence in John 6 objects, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” does he not say, “Wait, I am just being sym­bol­ic”? Why instead does he repeat him­self in the same lit­er­al terms he had just used? (If any­thing, Christ dou­bles down and becomes even more stark in his lit­er­al­ness. I explain this in my ear­li­er arti­cles.) Why is he will­ing to let so many aban­don him upon a mis­un­der­stand­ing?

And, if the Eucharist is just a sym­bol, what are we to make of Paul’s words in 1 Corinthi­ans 11:29? For those who eat and drink with­out dis­cern­ing the body of Christ eat and drink judg­ment on them­selves.

And how is it that the ear­li­est Chris­tians sim­ply under­stood that the Eucharist does in fact become the body and blood of Christ?

Here is Justin Mar­tyr in the First Apol­o­gy 66:

For not as com­mon bread and com­mon drink do we receive these; but in like man­ner as Jesus Christ our Sav­iour, hav­ing been made flesh by the Word of God, had both flesh and blood for our sal­va­tion, so like­wise have we been taught that the food which is blessed by the prayer of His word, and from which our blood and flesh by trans­mu­ta­tion are nour­ished, is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh.

And here is St. Cyril of Jerusalem in his Cat­e­chet­i­cal Lec­tures 19:7 and 22:2:

[T]he Bread and Wine of the Eucharist before the invo­ca­tion of the Holy and Adorable Trin­i­ty were sim­ple bread and wine, [but] after the invo­ca­tion the Bread becomes the Body of Christ.

—

He once in Cana of Galilee, turned the water into wine, akin to blood, and is it incred­i­ble that He should have turned wine into blood?

And expla­na­tion for all this is nec­es­sary, not just a hit-and-run dec­la­ra­tion that we are “sup­posed” to inter­pret com­mu­nion as a sym­bol. Says who?

As for the charge of can­ni­bal­ism, any­one who makes such a claim does­n’t quite under­stand the dis­tinc­tion between sub­stance and acci­dents which the Church teach­es. Sub­stan­tive­ly (in their essence) the Eucharis­tic ele­ments become the body and blood of Christ. But the acci­dents (i.e., the taste, smell, appear­ance, etc.) remain bread and wine. That is to say, we are not eat­ing Christ’s body or blood in the form of flesh, or the form of blood.

Tim Sta­ples goes into much more detail on this, and I would rec­om­mend you read this arti­cle. He lays out sev­er­al ways in which com­mu­nion and can­ni­bal­ism are dif­fer­ent. Michael Foley notes some oth­er dif­fer­ences:

• Can­ni­bals eat the dead, but Christ is liv­ing;
• Can­ni­bals eat the body, but Catholics also receive the soul and divin­i­ty of Christ;
• The body and blood, soul and divin­i­ty of Christ are infi­nite, not finite;
• The Eucharist is nei­ther vio­lent nor bloody, as in can­ni­bal­ism

When peo­ple make claims like this, they are real­ly being too clever by half, and haven’t ful­ly thought it through. These two arti­cles are good at explain­ing impor­tant dif­fer­ences between can­ni­bal­ism and Eucharist.

The only nec­es­sary bur­den of proof is upon the anti-Catholic to show why a metaphor­i­cal read­ing of the texts is the nec­es­sary one. It’s not “nec­es­sary” just because some­one shows up on Face­book and says it is.