t the National Catholic Reporter, Msgr. Irwin is exercised by the bishops’ draft document The Mystery of the Eucharist in the Life of the Church. His main concern is that the language of the document is too outmoded; “it reflects 400-year-old theology,” he says, rather than developments since Vatican II. It uses musty words like “transubstantiation”; it insists on obscure distinctions between “venial” and “mortal” sin; it uses the term “Real Presence,” for Jesus’ sake! “Are these terms,” Msgr. wonders, “aimed at people who no longer attend Mass,” or are they aimed instead at the bishops themselves?
I’m not that interested—at least not here—in addressing the reverse elitism of this complaint; still less am I interested in the theological parsing of working documents. But in the middle of his discussion, Msgr. Irwin makes a claim about Eucharistic miracles that caused me to start from the wery chair in which I sat.
Msgr. Irwin, I should acknowledge, is a priest in the Archdiocese of New York; he has taught theology at the Catholic University of America for thirty-six years; he’s been dean of the theology department there (2005–2011); he’s published multiple books on the liturgy and sacraments. He’s not exactly what you would call an ignoramus. So I can hear the objections.
But here is the full passage from the Reporter, and you, dear reader, may judge for yourself whether I am being unfair to the Monsignor:
The [bishops’] document speaks of “eucharistic miracles,” some of which are based on accounts of bleeding hosts. The problem here is that the church has never defined or described the Eucharist as “physical” in any way, always “sacramental.”
The miracle of the Eucharist is the Eucharist as celebrated in the church. Any notions of a physical presence of the Eucharist are simply heretical. We “taste and see the goodness of the Lord” by taking wine, consecrating it and drinking what still tastes as wine.
In one very technical sense, the Monsignor is correct. The Church doesn’t speak of the Eucharist as “physical”; or, more precisely, it doesn’t speak of the Real Presence, or “substance,” as physical. (The accidents most assuredly are “physical.”) Msgr. Irwin seems to be relying on a distinction out of Aquinas. If I were a smart-aleck, which I am not, I would accuse the Monsignor of relying on 800-year-old theology.
And it’s not even theology but philosophy, as the USCCB explains:
“Substance” and “accident[s]” are here used as philosophical terms that have been adapted by great medieval theologians such as St. Thomas Aquinas in their efforts to understand and explain the faith. Such terms are used to convey the fact that what appears to be bread and wine in every way (at the level of “accidents” or physical attributes — that is, what can be seen, touched, tasted, or measured) in fact is now the Body and Blood of Christ (at the level of “substance” or deepest reality).
In other words, the “accidents”—the bread and the wine—are physical; the “substance”—the body and blood of Christ—is “deepest reality” (or, in Msgr. Irwin’s word, “sacramental”). So in that sense, he is correct.
But my problem is twofold.
First, his description of any other explanation of the Eucharist as “heretical.” Is Aquinas’s distinction between substance and accidents (800 year old philosophy, by the way) divine revelation? Is God a scholastic, or is scholasticism a philosophical attempt to describe the ways of God to men? (Only if substance-and-accidents is divine revelation could disputing it be a heresy.) The USCCB says that these are “philosophical terms,” not theological ones. (For all I know, it may be that God revealed to Aquinas that Aristotelian terminology is the precise way to describe what happens in transubstantiation; but if so, someone will have to point out to me where the Church has defined this as dogma. As far as I know, only the fact of the Real Presence is dogma, not the explanation of it. The Trinity is dogma, not anyone’s philosophical attempt to explain it.)
Second (and this is the larger problem), Msgr. Irwin attaches his observation—that the Church has never spoken of the Real Presence as “physical,” that’s heresy—to a complaint that the bishops’ draft document mentions Eucharistic miracles. Why, bleeding hosts are physical, he says; and the Eucharist is not physical!
The real Eucharistic miracle, Msgr. says, is “the Eucharist as celebrated in the Church.” It’s not “accounts of bleeding hosts.”
Except that the Church has declared quite a few Eucharistic miracles (as in “accounts of bleeding hosts”) to be “worthy of belief.” How is heresy “worthy of belief?”
(It’s important to understand here what “worthy of belief” means. It means that the Church has examined the purported miracle, found no credible evidence of any scientific explanation or any credible evidence of a hoax, and has found nothing that would contradict the faith.
It does not mean that Catholics are obligated to believe in it or have a devotion to it. No Catholic is obligated to believe in any Eucharistic miracle. “Worthy of belief” means only that a Catholic may without compromising Catholic faith.)
•••
The most well-known of these may be the miracle of Lanciano. According to Fr. William Saunders:
One day [in the 700s], a certain monk was offering the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Although we do not know his identity, an ancient document described him as versed in the sciences of the world but ignorant in that of God. Apparently, he had been plagued by doubts about transubstantiation: he agonized over whether the bread and wine changed substantially into the Body and Blood of our Lord at the words of consecration, and whether our Lord was truly present in the Holy Eucharist.
This time, when the monk pronounced the words of consecration, the host was miraculously changed into flesh and the wine into blood. The monk was awestruck. Weeping joyously, he regained his composure. He called the congregation around the altar and said, O fortunate witnesses, to whom the Blessed God, to confound my unbelief, has wished to reveal Himself visible to our eyes! Come, brethren, and marvel at our God, so close to us. Behold the Flesh and Blood of our Most Beloved Christ. Those who witnessed the miracle soon spread the news throughout the surrounding area.
Shortly after the occurrence, the Blood coagulated into five globules of different sizes, but the Flesh remained the same. The archbishop ordered an investigation. The testimony of witnesses was recorded. The Flesh and Blood appeared to be human flesh and blood. The archbishop sent a scale for the weighing of the globules: each individual globule weighed the same as the other individual ones (although different in size) or as all five together or as any other combination. Eventually, the Flesh and the globules of Blood were placed in a special ivory reliquary, but not hermetically sealed. Church authorities certified the miracle although the original document was lost some time in the 16th century.
Much more recently, in 2002, a priest in Buenos Aires found two stray fragments of the consecrated host on the altar of the Church of St. Mary. In keeping with Church regulations, the priest placed the fragments in a chalice with water, so that they would dissolve, and then placed the chalice in the tabernacle. One week later, according to Rome bureau chief Ines St. Martin, the priest checked the chalice.
Astonished, he reported that the water had turned a deep red, like the color of blood. An “informal” analysis at the time suggested it was indeed blood, but little more was done to investigate.
But two years later, in 2004, a Eucharistic minister “claimed to see a drop of blood fall inside a chalice.” Still two years later, on the feast of the Assumption—August 15, 2006—
a host that had fallen to the floor during Mass was once again placed in water at Santa Maria, and it too turned into what was believed to be blood.
The archbishop asked for tests.
When the results came back, the lab reported that the substance ‘could be’ human tissue. Another analysis by a doctor in Sydney, Australia, likewise concluded that the substance was human tissue and ‘could’ belong to a heart.
Not satisfied with “coulds,” Dr. Ricardo Castanon sent the samples to a doctor in New York.
This last doctor was more definitive: The substance, he reported, belonged to a heart muscle called the myocardium—more specifically, the left ventricle that pumps oxygenated blood from the lungs to the body. The doctor also found that the person the sample came from had suffered greatly, including trauma to the chest.
Told the sample didn’t belong to a living patient, the New York doctor said he found the presence of white blood cells inexplicable, since they usually disintegrate minutes after a blood sample is removed from the body. He also reported the sample had a ‘beat,’ which also had been noted in the first report.
In light of those findings, Castanon swiftly drew spiritual conclusions: The fact that the substance is from the myocardium, he said, suggests the Eucharist is what ‘pumps blood into [Christ’s] Church.’ ”
Later, the archbishop described this Eucharistic miracle as a “mark of the Lord” and as “Mary opening a space for us to encounter Jesus.”
The archbishop’s name was Jorge Mario Bergoglio.
•••
Msgr. Irwin wants us to believe that the antiquated language of the working document on the Eucharist is incompatible with a time in which many Catholics no longer attend Mass and doubt the Real Presence. It is odd then that he should make such extreme charges against one of the very things that has encouraged and rekindled faith in the Real Presence: Eucharistic miracles.
A doctor who examined a Eucharistic miracle and found it to be genuine said it taught him that “the Eucharist is what pumps blood into Christ’s Church.”
Now, that is faith. Why shouldn’t the bishops be writing about it in a document about the Eucharist?
If it were true (as the Msgr. sure seems to me to be suggesting) that belief in Eucharistic miracles somehow contradicts how the Church speaks of the Eucharist—that it somehow constitutes actual heresy—how is it that the Church is declaring all these Eucharistic miracles “worthy of belief”? Does Msgr. mean to tell us that the Church has been encouraging heresy about the Eucharist lo these many years?
The whole point of speaking of them as “Eucharistic miracles” is that the Eucharist (although itself a miracle) does not normally turn into physical, visible blood or heart tissue. A miracle is an exception, not a rule. Transubstantiation is already a miracle; by the laws of nature, bread is not supposed to turn into the body of Christ, either physically or sacramentally. A Eucharistic miracle is just God taking transubstantiation one miracle further.
It makes no sense to criticize a miracle by protesting that it’s not normally how it works. That’s what a miracle is. Bread and wine do not normally become the body and blood of Christ in any sense. Virgins do not normally conceive. Conceptions are not normally immaculate.
Msgr’s logic, taken to its logical conclusion, would deny all miracles. Or, at a minimum, it would demand that God always perform the same miracle the same way.
We have no power to make such demands upon God. He can peform his miracles any way he wants to, and he is not constrained by the technicalities of Aristotelian language about “accidents” and “substance.” God, believe it or not, is bigger than our theology or our philosophy about him.
No one is required to believe in these miracles, not even Msgr Irwin. But to suggest that those who do believe in them are guilty of heresy (this would include the Holy Father) is going a bit too far.
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