Radical Catholicism | Back to the Basics

The Evening of Life

 In the book “A Year with the Saints” on page 101, there are some very incisive and fundamental thoughts from John Henry Newman about mankind’s final act. Every person should reflect on the truths emphasized by Newman. We all are accountable for our lives and will be asked to justify our lives before God. Nothing that I or anyone else can say adds to Newman’s wisdom. Read the quotation below and adjust your life as needed.

“Each of us must come to the evening of life. Each of us must enter on eternity.  Each of us must come to that quiet, awful time, when we will appear before the Lord of the vineyard, and answer for the deeds done in the body, whether they be good or bad. That, my dear brethren, you will have to undergo. … It will be the dread moment of expectation when your fate for eternity is in the balance, and when you are about to be sent forth as the companion of either saints or devils, without possibility of change. There can be no change; there can be no reversal. As that judgment decides it, so it will be for ever and ever. Such is the particular judgment. … when we find ourselves by ourselves, one by one, in his presence, and have brought before us most vividly all the thoughts, words, and deeds of this past life. Who will be able to bear the sight of himself? And yet we shall be obliged steadily to confront ourselves and to see ourselves. In this life we shrink from knowing our real selves. We do not like to know how sinful we are. We love those who prophecy smooth things to us, and we are angry with those who tell us of our faults. But on that day, not one fault only, but all the secret, as well as evident, defects of our character will be clearly brought out. We shall see what we feared to see here, and much more. And then, when the full sight of ourselves comes to us, who will not wish that he had known more of himself here, rather than leaving it for the inevitable day to reveal it all to him!”

— Blessed John Henry Newman, p.101 “A Year with the Saints”

Really Present 2

All of the Apostles and early Church Fathers never questioned the dogma of the Real Presence of Jesus’ body and blood in the Eucharist.  St. Paul emphatically warned “that those who discern not the body of the Lord are guilty of a grave crime, the minds of the faithful the necessity of detaching, as most much as possible, their mind and understanding from the dominion of the senses; for if they believe that this Sacrament contains only what the senses disclose, they will of necessity fall into enormous impiety.”

Second and third century Church fathers, such as St. Justin Martyr, St. Cyprian, St. Clement of Rome, St. Ignatius of Antioch, St. Irenaeus, and many other church leaders all confirmed and vigorously taught that the consecrated bread and wine was actually the body and blood of Jesus.

St. Ambrose (339-397) declares that the true body of Christ is received in this Sacrament, just as the true body of Christ was derived from the Virgin, and that this truth is to be believed with the firm certainty of faith. In another place he teaches that before consecration there is only bread, but after consecration there is the flesh of Christ.

In Sermon 227 to the neophytes on Easter, St. Augustine says that the visible bread and wine on the altar, “sanctified by the word of God,” is His Body and Blood. Through devoutly receiving that Body and that Blood that was shed for us, we become that Body, which means that we are joined in the close union of the Mystical Body.

St. Hillary noted, “When our Lord himself declares, as our faith teaches us, that His flesh is food indeed, what room can remain for doubt concerning the real presence of His body and blood?”

The Council of Trent (1545-1563) unequivocally restated the dogma reaffirming that upon consecration the bread and wine became the body and blood of Jesus. “ All the accidents of bread and wine we can see, but they inhere in no substance, and exist independently of any; for the substance of the bread and wine is so changed into the body and blood of our Lord that they altogether cease to be the substance of bread and wine.”

As St. Thomas Aquinas, the Catholic Church’s preeminent philosopher/ theologian, neared death he commented on the Eucharist, “If in this world there be any knowledge of this sacrament stronger than that of faith, I wish now to use it in affirming that I firmly believe and know as certain that Jesus Christ, True God and True Man, Son of God and Son of the Virgin Mary, is in this Sacrament . . . I receive Thee, the price of my redemption, for Whose love I have watched, studied, and laboured. Thee have I preached; Thee have I taught. Never have I said anything against Thee: if anything was not well said, that is to be attributed to my ignorance.”

Pope John Paul II in his encyclical on the Eucharist again reiterated the long held and frequently repeated the dogma that the body and blood of Jesus to truly present in the consecrated Eucharist.

Thus, it is abundantly clear that throughout the long history of the Catholic Church its official teaching regarding the Eucharist containing the real presence of the body and blood has never changed. The consecrated bread and water is indeed the body and blood of Jesus Christ!!