Fr. Coleman O’Neill, OP on the Blessed Eucharist
“In the final chapter on sacramental spirituality, O'Neill writes: ‘To see Christ in the Church, personally acting through the organs of her visible, earthly structure, so as to build up his own body, this is the key concept of sacramental theology. To seek consciously to discern the features of Christ in the doctrinal, juridical, and liturgical organs of the Church and to go forward to live in union with him as he exists and acts through these organs, this is the distinctive characteristic of sacramental piety’ (294). Based on our reading of the entire book, show how one specific sacrament (you can choose) is an invitation to deeper union with Christ. An excellent answer will draw on the essential theological and pastoral dimensions of the sacrament discussed by O'Neill. It will also need to be attentive to the first four chapters where O'Neill presents his full account of sacramentality.”(This post is one of a series of six assignments in fulfillment of a sacramental theology course at the University of Notre Dame.)
Being the “the source and summit of the Christian life” (CCC 1324, quoting Lumen gentium 11), the Blessed Eucharist is—as Fr. Coleman O’Neill even subtitles the eighth chapter of Meeting Christ in the Sacraments—our “union with Christ.” In this post, I will treat both O’Neill’s account of sacramentality in general (Chapters 1-4) and the theological and pastoral dimensions of his account of the Blessed Eucharist in particular (Chapters 8-9).
Sacramentality in General
O’Neill opens this work of Thomistic sacramental theology with an account of the priesthood of Christ, drawing particularly on the Exodus narrative and the New Testament epistle to the Hebrews. Following the exitus-reditus(“departure-return”) schema that is characteristic of St. Thomas Aquinas’ theological paradigm, O’Neill conceptualizes the Church as “a great people on the march towards God, seeking a lasting city, a vast exodus of humanity, fleeing from the captivity of sin, stretching across the desert of time, weary sometimes of the journey, but urged on always by hope of coming to the land promised by God” (1). But whereas the ancient exodus was the march of an earthly people to an earthly promised land, the spiritual exodus of the life of a Christian is a transformed exodus, because “the leader and lawgiver is no longer a mere image of Christ” (2), as was Moses, but is rather Christ himself. Furthermore, whereas the ancient Israelites were on a march toward the earthly Jerusalem, the march of a Christian is toward the heavenly Temple, the New Jerusalem, where “the Lord God Almighty is the temple thereof, as is the Lamb” (Revelation 21:22). The entire epistle to the Hebrews, then, is an account of this priesthood of Christ our heavenly High Priest: “the priesthood of the New Law no longer has a purely ritual function; it is the priesthood of Christ and its powers are those of Christ himself, the Priest who ministers in the heavenly sanctuary” (5-6).
United by the Holy Spirit which the ascended Christ sent from heaven to empower the Church on earth, Chapter 2 treats Christ’s activity in the Church under two modes: his activity in the individual members of the Church’s faithful, and his activity in the “juridic or institutional functions of the Church” (26). The individual members of the faithful “reproduce Christ in themselves by their faith” (cf. Galatians 2:20) through “the work of the Holy Spirit sent by the risen Christ” (28). Considered as a whole community, the mystical Body of Christ has “an innate inclination towards corporate worship,”, and the Church’s corporate worship—above all the Eucharistic liturgy—serves “as a bodily manifestation of corporate spiritual union with Christ” (31). It is by means of the Eucharistic liturgy that “the faithful may participate by faith in Christ’s heavenly worship and consequently in Calvary” (38). O’Neill is careful to point out that Christ’s glorified humanity is active in all the sacraments, but that “not every sacrament embodies or contains Christ in the way the Eucharist does, [wherein] there is true and complete bodily presence” (38, italics mine).
In Chapter 3, O’Neill develops more fully the classical typological connection of Christ as the New Moses by recounting (44) parallels to Moses in the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John (the Eucharistic realism of which, incidentally, is one of the things that most persuaded me of the truth of Catholicism’s claims about the Eucharist as I was discerning my eventual conversion from Protestantism to the fullness of faith in the Catholic Church!). O’Neill also mentions the importance of obedience to the ethical and moral teachings of Christ and His Church as a constitutive element of our “vital union with Christ” (50-51). This is an emphasis which I think the institutional Church on a parochial and diocesan level could do a better job of making to the individual faithful—perhaps, for a timely example, with something like a reading group or series of presentations on the recently-released declaration on human dignity Dignitas infinita? Catholic moral theology is the most scintillatingly beautiful, most logically coherent—and, let us not forget to mention, the most true—ethical worldview. It is the one that truly leads to human flourishing, but also, I think, sadly the corner of the Church’s theological treasury that most often goes uninvestigated by the her faithful.
Finally, in Chapter 4, the author considers the Church under her title, if you will, of “the universal sacrament of salvation” (Lumen gentium 48). What O’Neill says of the Christ’s mystical body—the Church, namely the assembly of the faithful not only on earth but also in purgatory and in heaven—could just as well be said of Christ’s substantial, bodily presence in the Blessed Eucharist: The Body of Christ “is consequently the sacrament of the whole mystery of redemption in both its divine origin and its human realization. Now that Christ is glorified in heaven and has become the source of the Spirit, his body remains for the eye of faith the sacrament of salvation. Endowed with the power of the three Persons of the Blessed Trinity, the body is the direct cause of our sanctification. As sign and cause, the body of Christ is the basic sacrament of salvation” (81).
So having surveyed O’Neill’s account of sacramentality in general and how it engenders our union with Christ, we turn now to the theological and pastoral dimensions of the Blessed Eucharist in particular.
Theological and Pastoral Dimension of the Blessed Eucharist
At the beginning of Chapter 8, the author reflects on the manner in which children are prepared to receive their First Holy Communion: “The Christian mind grasps almost without reflection that the meaning behind the Eucharist is that it unites us to the person of Christ…it is essential for the teacher to establish a person-to-person relationshipbetween the child and our Lord in the sacrament” (162, italics mine). The Eucharistic realism of John 6 is recapitulated, and O’Neill goes on to explain that this personal union with Christ is brought about by the real and substantial presence of Christ’s body, blood, soul, and divinity in the Blessed Eucharist under the sacramental appearances of bread and wine.
To conclude this essay, I will cite here four passages from these chapters, two theological and two pastoral, which I found particularly remarkable or insightful:
Theological Passage #1: “Since the Son of God became man, assuming a complete human nature, men can become sons of God only by full exercise of their humanity, using their bodies as well as their souls…The materiality of the Blessed Eucharist reminds us that we are not disembodied spirits…that we can find union with God only in the physical conditions of our earthly life…Our worship derives from a God enfleshed; we serve God with our bodies as well as our minds” (165). Like the references to John 6 above, this passage likewise reminded me of my conversion to the Catholic faith, when I realized just how shot-through Catholicism is with the reality of the Incarnation, and with its emphasis that “matter matters,” so to speak—that what we do with our bodies matters to God (read: the beauty of Catholic moral theology!), and that what we do with God’s Body (the Blessed Eucharist) matters to us (namely, it effects our salvation).
Theological Passage #2: The act of faith “establishes that personal relationship of submission to Christ which constitutes fundamental union with him…From this flows trust in Christ’s mediation…Far from Christ’s mediation making our merit and reparation superfluous, it makes them possible” (189). The Catholic teaching that it is possible to merit salvation is often misunderstood by our Protestant brothers and sisters. But this misunderstanding is merely symptomatic, I think, of our failure as individual Catholics to articulate clearly the beauty of the entire economy of salvation and its sheer gratuitousness, in which, as we say to our Lord in the sacred liturgy, “You are glorified in the assembly of your Holy Ones, for in crowning their merits you are crowning your own gifts” (cf. the Roman Missal, Preface I of Saints).
Pastoral Passage #1: “Even the grace of marriage, the most earthbound of the sacraments, finds its logical outcome when husband and wife are united with one another and with Christ at the altar rail…The Eucharist, Christ in bread, is the inspiration; from it come the balance and the judgment so necessary for the difficult task of living a Christian life as a contributing member of human society” (175). Here we are reminded that all the sacraments are oriented toward union with Christ in the Eucharist and, furthermore, that our sacramental union with Christ and His Church is supposed to overflow as a force for unity in the family—the fundamental building-block of society—and into our greater communities: our neighborhood, our city, state, country, and human society as a whole.
Pastoral Passage #2: O’Neill gives a helpful (if dated!) analogy for how Christ’s body, blood, soul, and divinity can all be present under each of the two separate sacramental species (the outward appearance of bread and the outward appearance of wine): “As far as sacramentalism goes, the body is present as distinct from the blood. To object that this is only make-believe is to reveal that one is thinking of Christ as he exists in his natural state in heaven…Since two distinct symbols are placed by the priest, two distinct sacramental presences are procured…Or possibly a television provides a helpful example. The screen carries the image of the announcer, the loudspeaker carries his voice; in the studio these two are united in one person” (197-198).
So let us always be eager for this substantial union with the person of Christ our Lord in the Blessed Eucharist, by which he feeds us with himself and gives us, as another liturgical prayer attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas states, “a pledge of future glory and a foretaste of the heavenly banquet” (O sacrum convivium). Or, to put this aspiration in some of the most beautiful words of Fr. O’Neill, “The focal point of all that belongs to Christ in the world, the Eucharist opens onto heaven. The substance of the bread is withdrawn from this world and changed into the substance of the glorified body of Christ; those who eat the transubstantiated bread are themselves drawn into the sphere of eternal happiness” (183).