… As for the cogency of the argument from tradition, this historical fact is of decided significance, namely, that the
dogma of the Real Presence remained, properly speaking, unmolested down to the
time of the
heretic Berengarius of Tours (d. 1088), and so could claim even at that
time the uninterrupted possession of ten centuries. … The first occasion for an official procedure on the part of the
Church was offered when
Berengarius of Tours, influenced by the writings of
Scotus Eriugena (d. about 884), the first opponent of the Real Presence, rejected both the latter
truth and that of
Transubstantiation. He repaired, however, the
public scandal he had given by a sincere retractation made in the presence of
Pope Gregory VII at a
synod held in
Rome in 1079, and died reconciled to the
Church. … The
Council of Trent met these widely divergent
errors of the
Reformation with the
dogmatic definition, that the
God-man is “truly, really, and substantially” present under the appearances of
bread and
wine, purposely intending thereby to oppose the expression
vere to
Zwingli’s signum,
realiter to
Œcolampadius’s figura, and
essentialiter to
Calvin’s virtus (Sess. XIII, can. i). And this teaching of the
Council of Trent has ever been and is now the unwavering position of the whole of
Catholic Christendom. …
