Thanks for all the replies. I haven’t been able to get this article off my mind and I’ve tried to read it with less aggressiveness, but this is the conclusion I’ve come to so far. The article draws the reader away from the fact that Jesus is truly present in the Eucharist as the ccc states 1376 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.” First the author makes it seem like the Church has changed its veiws many times on the Eucharist when he writes things like “there have been many changes in the way our Church has understood the Eucharist.” and " In the Middle Ages—roughly between 800 and 1000—something happened to the Eucharist. It became something quite different from what it had been in the beginning. From being the action of people, it became an act of God coming down among God’s people to be adored." Then he makes you think that mabe the church wasn’t always firm on it’s belief of transubstantiation by saying “For the first seven or eight centuries of the Church’s life, the Eucharist had been the people’s Eucharist. The Eucharist was people gathering in community (often in house-churches) to express their praise and thanks to God.” and " Christians, gathered together for Eucharist, were conscious all the while that the risen Jesus was in their midst as they did so. They never even bothered to ask when Christ became present. It was enough to know that he was with them. and then finaly he says " Jesus calls us to eat his flesh and drink his blood. We must avoid an overly literalistic understanding of these words. We do not literally eat flesh or drink blood.".
The author also says " All too often our understanding gets reversed. We think of the Eucharist as a kind of reservoir we come to and get the grace that will carry us through the week. Yet we need to look at the reality of God’s grace quite differently. The grace of God acts in the world, among people." and “We gather together in worship, not to “refuel” lives devoid of grace, but because we need to celebrate all the grace-filled moments of our lives” But the ccc says What material food produces in our bodily life, Holy Communion wonderfully achieves in our spiritual life. Communion with the flesh of the risen Christ, a flesh "given life and giving life through the Holy Spirit,"229 preserves, increases, and renews the life of grace received at Baptism. This growth in Christian life needs the nourishment of Eucharistic Communion, the bread for our pilgrimage until the moment of death, when it will be given to us as viaticum…
The Eucharist is not what it is because we are the Church, we are the Church because of what the Eucharist is. The article says the opposite though.
I am not able to articulate very clearly everything I’m thinking and I’m sorry if this is a confussing mess.
. I have not read this one, but a recent one on the presence of Christ in the Eucharist surprised me with its orthodoxy.
