The Eucharist
The Sacrament at the Center of Rome’s System
he Eucharist stands at the center
of the Roman Catholic sacramental system. The Catechism of the Catholic Church calls it
“the source and summit of the Christian life” and teaches that “the other
sacraments, and indeed all ecclesiastical ministries and works of the apostolate, are bound up with the
Eucharist and are oriented toward it” (§1324). Baptism and confirmation lead to it; penance
prepares for it; holy orders exists to confect it; and it is given at last to the dying as
viaticum.
Two pages on this site treat the doctrines that the Reformers most fiercely opposed. Transubstantiation examines Rome’s claim that the bread and wine are changed into the body and blood of Christ, and The Mass examines its claim that the Eucharist is a propitiatory sacrifice. This page does not repeat those discussions. It looks instead at the Eucharist as a sacrament that the faithful receive: who may come, how often, under what form, and what Rome says it accomplishes in the soul.
Background
The word eucharist comes from the Greek eucharistia, “thanksgiving,” for Jesus “took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it” (Luke 22:19). In the apostolic church the Lord’s Supper was a meal of the gathered congregation. Believers “continued stedfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers” (Acts 2:42), and they came together “upon the first day of the week” to break bread (Acts 20:7). The whole church ate the bread and drank the cup, as Paul assumes when he writes, “as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord’s death till he come” (1 Corinthians 11:26).
History
Over the centuries the Supper changed from a meal the people shared into a rite the priest performed for them. As the Eucharist came to be regarded more as a sacrifice offered by the priest than as a meal received by the church, the people communicated less and less. Calvin traced the cause directly: “the people abstained from communicating in the Supper for a whole year; and this because it is held to be a sacrifice, which is offered by one in the name of all.”1 By the thirteenth century lay communion had become so rare that the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), in its canon Omnis utriusque sexus, made once a year the legal minimum, binding every Christian who had reached the age of discretion to confess to his own priest and to receive communion at least at Easter.2
In the same period the cup was gradually withdrawn from the laity. Fear that the consecrated wine might be spilled, joined to the teaching that the whole Christ is present under either kind, led to the custom of giving the people the host alone. The Council of Constance made the custom law in 1415, and the followers of Jan Hus in Bohemia, who insisted on the cup, became known as Utraquists, from the Latin sub utraque specie, “under both kinds” (see The Mass).
Development
The Council of Trent defined the Roman doctrine of the sacrament in its thirteenth session (October 11, 1551). Besides transubstantiation, it fixed the rules for receiving. It anathematized anyone who denied that the faithful “are bound, when they have attained to years of discretion, to communicate every year, at least at Easter, in accordance with the precept of Holy Mother Church.” It also condemned the Reformers’ teaching on preparation:
If any one shall say, that faith alone is a sufficient preparation for receiving the sacrament of the most holy Eucharist; let him be anathema. And, lest so great a sacrament should be received unworthily, and so unto death and condemnation, this holy synod ordains and declares, that sacramental confession, when a confessor is to be obtained, is of necessity to be made beforehand, by those whom the conscience of deadly sin burthens, how contrite even soever they may deem themselves.3
Ten years later, in its twenty-first session (July 16, 1562), the council defended communion in one kind. It declared that the laity “are not obliged, by any divine precept, to receive the sacrament of the Eucharist under both species,” admitted that “the use of both species has, from the beginning of the Christian religion, not been unfrequent,” and yet ruled that the Church had “approved of this custom of communicating under one species, and decreed that it was to be held as a law.”4 The council thus conceded that the practice of the early church differed from its own, and claimed authority to change what Christ had instituted.
What Rome Teaches
Who may receive. “Anyone who desires to receive Christ in Eucharistic communion must be in the state of grace. Anyone aware of having sinned mortally must not receive communion without having received absolution in the sacrament of penance” (§1415). Children must make their first confession before their first communion (§1457), and the faithful are to observe the Eucharistic fast (§1387). In this way the Eucharist is bound to the sacrament of penance, and both are bound to the priest.
How often. The Church obliges the faithful “to receive the Eucharist at least once a year, if possible during the Easter season,” while it “strongly encourages” them to receive on Sundays or even daily (§1389, §1417).
Under what form. “Since Christ is sacramentally present under each of the species, communion under the species of bread alone makes it possible to receive all the fruit of Eucharistic grace.” Rome nevertheless grants that “the sign of communion is more complete when given under both kinds” (§1390).
What it accomplishes. Rome teaches that holy communion increases union with Christ, “preserves, increases, and renews the life of grace received at Baptism,” and cleanses from past sins (§1391, §1392, §1393). Yet the forgiveness it gives is limited. The Eucharist “strengthens our charity . . . and this living charity wipes away venial sins,” but “the Eucharist is not ordered to the forgiveness of mortal sins—that is proper to the sacrament of Reconciliation” (§1394, §1395). The Catechism of the Council of Trent explained this by comparing the sacrament to food that repairs “the daily waste and falling away” of the body, so that “by the Eucharist are remitted and pardoned lighter sins, commonly called venial.”5 Grace is pictured as a supply that is spent and replenished.
Adoration and viaticum. “Because Christ himself is present in the sacrament of the altar, he is to be honored with the worship of adoration” (§1418). The consecrated host is reserved in the tabernacle, carried in procession, and brought to the dying, for whom it is “viaticum,” provision for the journey, “the seed of eternal life and the power of resurrection” (§1524).
The Reformers’ Response
Luther opened The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520) with the Lord’s Supper and named three “captivities” that Rome had imposed on it: the withholding of the cup, transubstantiation, and the sacrifice of the Mass. The first concerned the people directly: “The first bondage, then, of this sacrament is as regards its substance or completeness, which the tyranny of Rome has wrested from us.”6 Luther pointed out that the Gospels attach the word “all” to the cup rather than to the bread: “Christ did not say concerning the bread, ‘Eat ye all of this,’ but did say concerning the cup, ‘Drink ye all of this.’”7
More deeply, Luther restored the Supper to its character as Christ’s testament, a promise made by the Savior before his death:
Let this then stand as a first and infallible truth, that the mass or Sacrament of the Altar is the testament of Christ, which He left behind Him at His death, distributing an inheritance to those who believe in Him. . . . You see then that the mass—as we call it—is a promise of the remission of sins, made to us by God; and such a promise as has been confirmed by the death of the Son of God.8
Trent answered by condemning anyone who says “that the chief fruit of the most holy Eucharist is the remission of sins.”9 For Rome the sacrament nourishes a soul already in grace; for the Reformers it seals the promise of forgiveness to the believer who receives it in faith.
Calvin, in his Short Treatise on the Holy Supper (1541), applied that difference to the troubled conscience. Where Rome barred the way to the table until the penitent had confessed to a priest, Calvin urged weak believers to come:
Since then it is a remedy which God has given us to assist our frailty, to fortify our faith, to augment our charity, and to further us in all sanctity of life, so far from this making us abstain, we ought the more to make use of it, the more we feel oppressed by the disease. For if we allege as pretext for not coming to the Supper, that we are still weak in faith or in integrity of life, it is as if a man excuse himself from taking medicine because he is sick.10
The worthiness Calvin required was not a state of grace certified by absolution, but faith: “we must hold in firm and hearty confidence the Lord Jesus Christ as our sole righteousness, life and salvation, receiving and accepting the promises which are given us by him as certain and assured.”11 He rejected the adoration of the host as well: “We have no commandment to adore, but to take and eat.”12
The Eucharist and Scripture
The Supper is to be received, not reserved. Christ said, “Take, eat” and “Drink ye all of it” (Matthew 26:26–27). The bread is broken to be eaten in remembrance of him (1 Corinthians 11:24), not shut up in a tabernacle or carried in procession for worship.
The cup belongs to all the church. Paul delivered the Supper to the whole congregation at Corinth: “let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of that bread, and drink of that cup” (1 Corinthians 11:28). No apostle withheld what the Lord commanded.
The Supper proclaims a finished forgiveness. “This cup is the new testament in my blood” (1 Corinthians 11:25), the blood “shed for many for the remission of sins” (Matthew 26:28). Christ’s blood does not wipe away venial sins only, leaving mortal sins to another sacrament: “the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin” (1 John 1:7), and “by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified” (Hebrews 10:14).
Faith, not absolution, is the preparation. Paul warns against eating “unworthily” and “not discerning the Lord’s body” (1 Corinthians 11:27–29), but he commands each one to examine himself, not to go first to a priest. The bread of life is received by faith: “he that believeth on me shall never thirst” (John 6:35).
The Lord’s Supper is not fuel for a soul that must keep its own grace alive. It is the Lord’s table, spread for sinners who trust in his once-for-all sacrifice. For the doctrines of the real presence and the sacrifice, see Transubstantiation and The Mass.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version.
