Why are the Statistics So Low?
This past week in our podcast, You Were Born for This, Mary and I spoke to the three- year plan the Bishops of the United States are going to start this coming weekend, the solemnity of Corpus Christi, on Eucharistic revival (see eucharisticrevival.org). It’s an impressive and encouraging plan, and please God it will bear much fruit in the Church. In large part, the revival is motivated by the abysmally low statistics amongst Catholics regarding belief in the Real Presence. Though the surveys vary, the statistics seem to indicate that somewhere around 70% of Catholics do not believe that the Eucharist is the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus. Suffice to say, this is alarming.
What is the right strategy, though, for addressing this?
When these statistics come up, many people in the Church seem to think the solution is more teaching on the Real Presence, as if people have never heard what the Church teaches. However, as a priest friend of mine puts it, the problem for many people isn’t so much that they haven’t been taught this; the problem is that they have been taught it and simply don’t believe it. It doesn’t seem to make sense; it’s not credible. It can appear to many that the Church wants people to suspend their reason and just blindly believe something that seems more akin to magic.
Not so. The Eucharist is not magic. It’s much, much more exciting than that!
As we’ve mentioned before in this space, we in ACTS XXIX are big fans of From Christendom to Apostolic Mission: Pastoral Strategies for an Apostolic Age. This work, more an extended essay than a book, was published a few years back now by University of Mary, with a foreword written by Monsignor James Shea. In it, the authors offer the following insight that I pray the bishops will take into account in the Eucharistic revival about to begin. Though we shared this on our podcast episode this week, it’s so good that it bears repeating in this space, and perhaps makes for some rich reflection as we prepare to celebrate the great feast of Corpus Christi this weekend.
“In an apostolic time, those who present the Gospel, whether to their parishes or to their families, should assume that the majority of their hearers are unconverted or half-converted in mind and imagination, and have embraced, to some degree, the dominant non-Christian vision. The new evangelization aims at the renewal of the mind, because it recognizes that people’s minds have been barraged by a daily onslaught of false gospels, leading to confusion and distraction away from invisible realities to concerns solely of this world. Preaching in an apostolic age needs to begin with the appeal to a completely different way of seeing things; it offers a different narrative concerning the great human drama; it needs to aim to put in place the key elements of the integrated Christian vision of the world within which the moral and spiritual disciplines the Church imposes find their place … (italics mine).
“To take an example outside the strictly moral realm, but that touches on it and that elucidates the need of the time: it is often noted that a large percentage of Catholics in America don’t believe in the doctrine of the Real Presence. They look at the Eucharist as symbolically and ritually meaningful, but not as a transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. Some in the Church respond to this situation by saying that we need be clearer about what the Church teaches; their view is that apparently many people don’t know what that teaching is. While there may be simple ignorance of Church teaching in play here, a more significant factor is the lack of a sacramental vision of the world. Living in our culture and embracing its ruling vision, such Catholics have assumed as self-evident a materialistic, ‘scientific’ view. If a thing looks like bread, tastes like bread, has the chemical composition of bread, then it is bread. A priest saying some prayers in the midst of a particular rite doesn’t change that. Likely enough, many Catholics who say they believe what the Church teaches about the Eucharist, in fact don’t quite. They may acknowledge it out of a desire to be obedient, but it has no real meaning for them, and their conviction is fragile and easily lost (italics mine).
“What is necessary here is a conversion of mind to a sacramental vision of the world. Not just at Mass, but all the time, we are living in a sacramental reality: we inhabit both a visible and an invisible world; we make our way through an intermingling of the seen and the unseen such that what happens on the visible plane has implications in the vast invisible world. Our bodies are sacramental, a mingling of the spiritual and the material; the Catholic understanding of what and how we eat, what we do sexually, how we treat those who are sick or dead, are pointers towards the way the whole world works. Plunging a person into water really can, under the right circumstances, transfer them from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light. We walk in the presence of powerful, invisible angelic beings not only when we might happen to think about them, but all the time. Touching another person involves two beings in spiritually meaningful contact. The world is an enchanted and dangerous and momentous place in which we are working out an incomprehensibly high destiny that transcends space and time. This view of the world is consonant with what natural sciences have discovered, but it also goes beyond it. Once the realm beyond the natural world is seen and embraced, a whole set of doctrines become easier to understand and believe” (italics mine).
Let us continue to ask the Holy Spirit to enlighten the eyes of our minds to see all of reality ever more clearly, and this week especially, to open the eyes of our minds to the Real Presence of Jesus hidden beneath the appearance of bread and wine.
