Daily Archives: March 4, 2022

At first glance, it seems like a cannibalistic gesture, even if it is addressed to God and not to a human being. Yet it is the quintessence of Roman Catholicism. We are talking about eating God, an act that is at the heart of the Roman Catholic understanding of the Eucharist.

Can Roman Catholicism really be thought of as the religion of eating God? Matteo Al-Kalak, professor of modern history at the University of Modena-Reggio, exploresthis questionis in his latest book, Mangiare Dio. Una storia delleucarestia (Turin: Einaudi, 2021; Eating God. A History of the Eucharist).

The book is a history of the Eucharist from the Council of Trent (1545-1563) onwards in the Italian context and focuses on how the Eucharist has been elevated to a primary identity-marker: practiced, taught, protected, abused, and used for various purposes, including extra-religious ones.

Using a mosaic technique (p.xiv), he analyzes some pieces of the history of the Eucharist.

It is not surprising that facing the challenges posed by the Protestant Reformation (in all its Eucharistic variants, from the German Lutheran version to the Calvinian-Zwinglian Swiss version), the Council of Trent emphasized the sacrificial character of the Mass and made the Eucharist the symbolic pivot of the Counter-Reformation.

Al-Kalaks book is a collection of micro-stories aimed at forming a mosaic that reflects the crucial importance of the Eucharist in the construction of the post-Tridentine Roman Catholic imagination and strongly Eucharistic emphasis.

After reviewing the biblical data, the book summarizes the medieval debates starting from the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) which intertwined three pillars: who was to dedicate (in Roman Catholic language: consacrate) the bread and the wine (i.e. only the clergy), the confession to be preceded, and the true and proper Eucharist.

One of the outcomes of the Council was the institution of the feast of Corpus Domini (The Body of the Lord, 1247). This Lateran synthesis was contested both before and after the Reformation.

The pages on the heretical movements of the 16th century give voice to the doctrinal fluidity of Italian heterodoxy on the Lords Supper (p.19). In this regard, the opinion of Natale Andriotti from Modena is reported. Talking to a friend he said, Do you think that Christ is in that host? Its just a little dough (p.149).

As pieces of the mosaic, other chapters tell stories of Eucharistic miracles, associated with various prodigies, and the development of a kind of preaching centered around Eucharistic themes (from the model offered by Carlo Borromeo in the 17th century to the impetus given by Alfonso Maria de Liguori in the 18th century).

Al-Kalak touches on the meticulous regulation given to the administration of the Eucharist (from the spaces, to the gestures, to the treatment of abuses) outside and inside the Mass (for example, at the bedside of the sick).

Further chapters follow on the Eucharist represented in poetic, pictorial and architectural forms and on the desecrated Eucharist in witchcraft, magic and superstitious practices.

The discussion of the Eucharist in the face of the cultural disruption of the French Revolution is also of great interest. The Eucharist was seen as a polemical tool against the rationalism of modernity and for the re-Christianization of society (Pope Leo XIII).

In recent years, though, Pope Francis is pushing to loosen the criteria for access to the Eucharist to allow the inclusion of those who are in irregular life situations. The book witnesses to the fact that the Eucharistic theologies and practices are not static and given once and for all, but always on the move.

The volume ends with an interesting postscriptum in which Al-Kalak dwells on the scandal of the Eucharist: only the host is subject to the physiological mechanisms of the human being in such a radical way (191), yet it is believed as a supernatural act filled with mystery.

It combines rational language with sensory ones, opening up to the irrational (p.193). If it is true to say that the Eucharist in the regular mass, in Eucharistic adoration, in Eucharistic processions and fidelity to the pope and to the hierarchy are the two most distinguished features of Roman Catholicism from the Council of Trent onwards (p.195), then a history of the Roman Catholic practice of eating God allows us to enter into the depths of the Roman Catholic religion.

Beyond the fascinating stories told by the book, what is of some interest is its title, Eating God, and its appropriateness to describe the soul of Roman Catholicism.

Already in the early centuries of the church, Christians were sometimes accused of cannibalism precisely in relation to the Lords Supper. What did Jesus mean when he said, Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life (John 6:54)?

The meal of bread and wine associated with the memory of the body and blood of Jesus Christ could give rise to misunderstandings. Was it a truly human body? Was it the blood of a corpse? Was it then a cannibal meal?

Christian apologetics of the early centuries tried to unravel the misunderstandings as much as possible, indignantly rejecting the accusation of cannibalism and, if anything, indicating the biblical parameters of the ordinance instituted by Jesus himself.

Yet, already starting from the Fourth Lateran Council, and even more so from the Council of Trent, the church of Rome embraced transubstantiation, i.e an understanding of the sacrament according to which, after the consecration of the bread and wine and the transformation of their nature into the body and blood of Christ, there is a sense in which the Roman Catholic Eucharist is a real eating of God.

If the bread really becomes the flesh and blood of Jesus (the God-man), taking it in some way means eating God,

Can it really go that far? Evidently yes, according to Rome. While the Reformation insisted on recovering the distinction between Creator and creature, the radical nature of sin and the sufficient mediation of the God-man Jesus Christ for the salvation of those who believe, the Roman Catholic Church instead veered on the analogy between Creator and creature and on the prolongation of Christs mediation in the hierarchical and sacramental church, to the point of considering the creatures eating God as possible, even necessary.

For Roman Catholicism, man is capable of God (capax dei) to the point of having to really eat him.

Is this the meaning of the meal that the Lord Jesus instituted the night he was betrayed and that he gave to the church as a memorial of him in view of his second coming?

The debate on this question in history has been very lively and is still crucial.

In the eating God of the Eucharist, Roman Catholicism puts all its worldview at work: its view of reality as touched but not marred by sin, the extension of the incarnation in the church, the divinization of man, and the already of salvation enjoyed in the fruition of the sacraments without waiting for the not yet of the final banquet.

If you think about it, as absurd as it appears, eating God is a synthesis of Roman Catholicism.

Leonardo De Chirico is an evangelical pastor in Rome (Italy). He is a theologian and an expert in Roman Catholicism. He blogs at VaticanFiles.com.

Published in: Evangelical Focus - Vatican Files - Eating God? A history of the Eucharist and a glimpse of Roman Catholicism

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Eating God? A history of the Eucharist and a glimpse of Roman Catholicism - Evangelical Focus

Read this in The Manila Times digital edition.

Then he [the devil] took him [Jesus] up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a single instant. The devil said to him, "I shall give to you all this power and glory; for it has been handed over to me, and I may give it to whomever I wish. All this will be yours, if you worship me." Jesus said to him in reply, "It is written: You shall worship the Lord, your God, and him alone you shall serve."

The Gospel of Saint Luke, 4:5-8

AFTER years of contagion across the globe and days of carnage in Ukraine, Catholics needed no ashes crossed on their foreheads last Wednesday to remind them that they were dust and to dust they shall return. Nor was the Lenten message of sin, atonement and forgiveness needing much explanation to see its relevance to the headlines.

Indeed, the March 6 Sunday Mass Gospel reading from Saint Luke, excerpted above, recounting the three temptations of Jesus after his baptism, may well resonate with believers pondering Russia's invasion and fasting for peace in Europe, now caught in the crossfire of bullets and bombs, sanctions and accusations.

How did all this bloody mess happen? Geopolitics and diplomacy experts can spin out intricate analyses and timelines plotting how Russian President Vladimir Putin began with subtle warnings, then brandished threats and troops, and finally unleashed his divisions after dialogue did not get him the security assurances Russia demanded.

But the triple blandishments of the tempter may well tell the story of how Russians went from Slavic brothers of neighboring Ukrainians to missile-firing invaders of the second-largest country in Europe next to Russia itself.

Turning stones into bread

The first temptation, enticing the famished Jesus after 40 days of fasting to turn stones into bread to satisfy his hunger, is apropos to Russia and Ukraine not only because they are among the 10 largest wheat producers on the planet.

More than just highlighting two giants of grain, our Lord's admonition that "Man does not live by bread alone" underscores what else we need for the fullness of life: "every word that comes from the mouth of God," as other Bible translations add.

In the context of international relations, leaders and governments demand tangible guarantees of security to reassure and impress their peoples. Not just promises of peace, but pledges that fearsome forces would never cross certain lines.

Bread, not just words, even if the promises may speak of God's will for all humanity.

So, Russia wants the most powerful forces on earth, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), never to embrace Ukraine. But even those words the US-led alliance and Ukraine were not willing to give, let alone the bread of NATO boots never stepping into Slavic lands.

With neither words nor bread to bring home, Russia decided to address its fears by marching on the stones of Ukraine and making them bread to feed its hunger for security from Western powers which had invaded thrice in centuries past.

Testing, not trusting

The third temptation sought to stir Jesus into distrust of the Father by throwing himself off a high precipice to see if angels fly down from heaven and keep him from falling to earth. To which our Lord replied: "You shall not put your God to the test."

Certainty and control are what comes to mind in this discourse between Jesus and the devil. So like our modern time of science and technology, when humanity constantly strives to assert control over the world and ascertain proven truths with empirically validated knowledge leaving no room for faith and trust.

So it is between nations: the powers that be must have certainty and control. Trust is never enough, never enough, as a popular musical chants.

Hence, NATO reserves the right to accept whom it may wish into its ranks bristling with the most advanced armaments ever. No matter that such assertion of membership control would erode trust and confidence in a land fearful of invading hordes from the West, especially after the alliance expanded well beyond the agreed limit of its expansion.

Thus, with the Western alliance unwilling to compromise on control, the bear in the east decided to ascertain its security and take armed control of a potential area of hostilities.

The power and the glory

The second temptation appears last in the Gospel of St. Matthew, which may show his Jewish orientation, putting greater value on worshiping God over trusting Him, which Luke may highlight from his perspective influenced by Greek rationalism.

Whether second or third in Scripture, however, the temptation's lure of worldly power and glory is certainly most relevant to the NATO-Russia tussle over Ukraine.

For both President Putin and Russia, at stake are the nation's stature and strength in the world and its quest for the unified glory of "United Russia" the very name of Putin's political party, the largest in the country.

As for the West, no less than President Joseph Biden of the United States, NATO's most powerful member, declared in his first State of the Union Address to the US Congress on March 2 that the conflict with Russia was a global battle between democracy and autocracy,

And the prize is nothing less than the domination by one or the other ideology over the planet and its 7.9 billion souls.

Thus, like gladiators, the great powers bow to the master of the world before dueling to the death, and he will give it to whoever remains standing after the carnage.

As in the Garden of Eden, humanity has again fallen to the tempter. Let us fast, pray and atone for these sins driving our world to perdition.

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The 3 temptations of Vladimir Putin and NATO - The Manila Times

Editors note: a powerful new book by well-known essayist and literary critic Anthony Esolen entitled In the Beginning Was the Word: An Annotated Reading of the Prologue of John was recently published by Angelico Press, from whom we obtained permission to share a part of it with our readers. Our own contributing editor Dr. Peter Kwasniewski wrote the Foreword to the book and tells me that it is dynamite. This compact but profound commentary on the Prologue of John should be of great interest to all Catholics but especially those who assist at the ancient Roman Rite, where these opening verses of the Fourth Gospel are read after nearly every Mass.TSF

Paul and John, the storm of fire and the calm immensity of the sea, speak as one. Behold, I make all things new, says He who sits upon the throne in the Apocalypse (Rev. 21:5). Paul spoke of Gods saving work in the same vein, as the full and ultimate making of things forever new: Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new (2 Cor. 5:17).

What do we make of such a claim about Christ? I have heard many an unbeliever say that the story of Jesus is but the story of every semi-divine hero in the history of the world. That is not true. Quite the contrary. Let us pause to look at the matter.

Alexander the Great traveled all the way to the oasis of Siwah in Libya to consult the oracle of Ammon, whom the Greeks associated with Zeus. He wanted to say that he was the son of Ammonian Zeus, and not the son of the half-barbarian warlord Philip of Macedon, whom, historians believe, Alexanders ambitious mother Olympias put out of her sons path by assassination. Alexander wanted to stamp his aristocratic card. It is an acknowledged trick of the self-promoter, and the ancients themselves saw it as such. The Julian clan in Rome traced their lineage back to Iulus, the son of that Aeneas who, according to old self-promoting Roman folklore, settled his refugees from Troy upon the Italian shores. This Aeneas was the son of Anchises by the goddess Venus. Every important clan wanted a ticket like that. It is like establishing your membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution.

The Pharaohs in Egypt were considered the earthly personifications of the benevolent god of justice, Osiris, guaranteeing the healthy flooding of the Nile, so that people could cast their seed broadside and the bumper crops would come. The Egyptians believed that divine power flowed through the Pharaoh, sure enough, but no one would say of Tutankhamen the boy-king that he was in himself the origin of the universe, and its significance. There are many stories in human lore about heroes who rise from obscurity and neglect to the heights of glory. Beowulf is one, but Beowulf dies in the end, and the smoke rises above his funeral pyre and is swallowed up in the sky, while the Geats he ruled look forward to annihilation at the hands of the Swedes, their old enemies. The world is also full of stories of men who achieve enlightenment, which they then pass along to their followers: Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Lao-Tzu, Zoroaster, even Longfellows pleasant Hiawatha. Not one of them takes upon his shoulders the sins of the world. Not one of them is or claims to be the Lord of the world.

There is, in the story of Jesus, no sense that he gains enlightenment, no dramatic turning point that puts his life on the path to glory. He is not ever the Prince Siddhartha under the Bodhi tree. He is not ever Mohammed, hitherto an ordinary man working among the caravans, visited by a reciting angel in a cave. We have only one account of his boyhood, whence we gather that he was already that same Jesus we know, calmly confident, speaking and listening and replying. There is in his story nothing of Napoleon or Dick Whittington or Epictetus or Oedipus or Arthur or even Moses. The story of Jesus is not like the story of man. It is instead the key that opens the story of man. It brings those stories into the light, for all men, and for each man. I am the door of the sheep, says the Lord. I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and shall find pasture (Jn. 10:7, 9). Jesus does not conform his story to ours, but we may find the answers to our stories in his: If any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me (Rev. 3:20).

And so Saint John brings us back to the beginning, but what does that mean? Let us consider what he surely has in mind, and what he expects those who hear him to have in mind if they are Jews: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The Hebrew for that wordfor we must remember that John was himself a Jew, thinking first in his native Aramaic and then in the sacred parent language of Hebrew, but writing in his third language, Greekis bereshith, at the rosh or the head of things. I believe that it meant more to the Jewish mind than our first means to us, or at the start, or to begin with, or even in the beginning, if we think of beginning only in a temporal sense, for instance as the first domino to fall in a series.

We should not allow our digital clocks and calendars to mislead us. When the Jews celebrated the feast that marked the end of the old year and the beginning of the new, it was not like what Americans do when they gather in Times Square to watch a conglomeration of electric lights fall, and the numerals change on the historical odometer, whereupon everyone takes a drink, and wakes up the next morning foggy and disillusioned. Says God to Moses: Thou shalt observe the feast of tabernacles, that is, of barns, granaries, vats,

Seven days, after that thou hast gathered in thy corn and thy wine: and thou shalt rejoice in thy feast, thou, and thy son, and thy daughter, and thy manservant, and thy maidservant, and the Levite, the stranger, and the fatherless, and the widow, that are within thy gates. Seven days shalt thou keep a solemn feast unto the Lord thy God in the place which the Lord thy God shall choose: because the Lord thy God shall bless thee in all thine increase, and in all the works of thine hands, therefore shalt thou surely rejoice (Dt. 16:1315).

Seven, of course, is the number of days in the week, and the week is the divine unit of time. It is suggested by the lunar month of roughly four weeks, but otherwise it is not observable, not evident to the eye. If I may stretch a point: the week is like the angels, invisible. We have the week by the memory of what God has done in the beginning: And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all the work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it (Gen. 2:23). For that reason they who worship Him must also keep the day holy, for in six days the Lord made the heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the seventh day, and hallowed it (Ex. 20:11). We in our anti-culture of work that makes many a bad thing and unmakes many a man and woman, and of hedonism that brings no pleasure, are apt to view the command as a prohibition: do no work on the Sabbath. It is better viewed as an invitation: Thou shalt feast! Rest, here, is not simply an interruption in labor. It is the feast, the refreshment, the crown of life. The heavens and the earth and all that is in them are oriented toward the feast. It is the feast that is their root and trunk and crown, their sap and leaf and flower. In the beginning and in the end, there is the feast. []

We walk along a narrow land bridge, with a precipice on each side. To the left is the fall into abstraction and mere philosophy. To the right is the fall into mythology and idolatry. We have here neither Heraclitus nor Homer, but what alone will make sense of each, and both together. So, just as we must not reduce the gospel to a footnote to Greek abstraction, so we must not to reduce the gospel to a story about god-characters, Mr. and Mrs. Zeus, whether the characters are to be interpreted literally or allegorically. The gospel is not a work of mans fevered imagination, nor is it rationalism in symbolic garb. In the beginning was the Word, says John, and if all he meant by it was old dry Stoicism sweetened with some Jewish honey, it is hard to understand why Christians would ever be persecuted by anyone. A shrug would suffice: We are using figures of speech. Figures of speech cover a multitude of vagaries.

Likewise, we may be too accustomed to Johns first verse to feel how stunning it is, as stunning as was the first chapter of Genesis, with its frank, terse, and confident rejection of everything strictly mythological about the creation stories of the peoples roundabout. Here we might pause to take a look at that.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earthat a stroke, the sacred author dispenses with the theogonies you find everywhere else, the generations of gods, such as Cronus usurping authority from his father Ouranos, and Zeus his son doing the same in turn to him, assisted by his strategic political alliance with some of the Titans, the generation of gods contemporaneous with Cronus. There is nothing of that in Genesis, or of Osiris betrayed and dismembered by his evil brother Seti, and his sister-wife Isis gathering up again all his scattered limbs; or of the Babylonian Marduk enlisting the allegiance of the younger gods to slaughter the ancient sea-goddess Tiamat, and then fashioning the universe from her remains. There is no foundational violence or conquest. There is also no star-worship, no planetary mysticism. For God made the luminaries for times and seasons, the sun to govern the day and the moon to govern the night, and he also made the stars, says the author, as if it were an afterthought. It is a poke in the eye of the Chaldean stargazers. As a mythas a story about how the moon got her spots, or why the whale is so big, the creation account in Genesis would have been a failure, but then it is not intended as a myth, that is, an explanatory story, so much as it is a stripped-down poetic revelation of what the world is: the good and wholly gratuitous creation by God, oriented toward its fulfillment in the worship of God, the feast of the Sabbath.

It is also not a piece of political propaganda. In the beginning (of the earth, that is, and of mankind), in Babylon, there was violence and empire, with Marduk emerging as the dominant god, just as the Babylonians had overrun and built upon the Sumerian civilization that came before. In the beginning (of civilization, that is), in Greece, there was political cunning and reason, in the person of Zeus, outflanking the hideous older gods of brute domination. So did the Greeks project the political organization called the polis back upon the conflict of the generations of the gods. In the beginning (of large-scale agriculture), in Egypt, there was a good god murdered, whose fertility and whose benevolence entered the Nile River and the mud at her banks, making Egyptian civilization possible. None of that, absolutely none of it, is to be had from our sacred author of Genesis.

One might expect the author, if we were talking simply of human agency, to present to us the holy city of Jerusalem, the City of Peace, as present in the seed from the beginning. For man likes to cast the gods in his image, which will usually be a national or tribal image. But Jerusalem is not here. Rather the first city-builder we learn of is Cain, also the first murderer of his kin, his brother Abel. And the first prominent city in Genesis is Babel, emblem of the greatness and the folly of Babylon, and forever after the type of human confusion. Babel is the anti-word, the sign of human language itself falling into change and decay, into misunderstanding and strife.

Just as the beginning of all things is not, in Genesis, a civic myth aimed at justifying any specific place or form of human organization, so also the beginning in John is not local or specific or bound to a culture. We here are talking about all men, everywhere, and about each single man. The scope is universal, and the touch is intimate. No broader range is possible, nor any deeper gaze into the dark corners of every human soul. What cultural trappings we find are minimal, no more than is necessary for any kind of human communication to take place. We expect a people who raise corn to give us a Hiawatha, and they do. We expect a people who live beneath the steady glare of the tropical sun to give us a Quetzalcoatl, intense and merciless, demanding his daily tribute in the blood of the peoples enemies. We might expect the Hebrew herdsmen to give us a god of the sheep and the cattle, but they do not. There was no time, and there never will come a time, when the account in Genesis of the creation and the fall of man will not speak home truths about who we are. The ancient here does not grow old. There was no time, and there never will come a time, when the opening of Johns gospel will not prompt the attentive reader to ponder the very being of God, of his relationship to man and to all things, and of the inner life that is Gods own, a relationship of love.

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In the Beginning Was the WordExcerpt from a New Book by Anthony Esolen - OnePeterFive