Non-Catholics have often accused Catholics of idolatry because we worship the Blessed Sacrament. From the non-Catholic point of view, the charge is fairly straightforward: Catholics worship bread and wine, which they mistakenly hold to be God. Catholics, for their part, admit that worshipping bread and wine would be idolatrous. We deny that we worship bread and wine. We worship the body and blood of the God-Man, Jesus Christ, hidden under the appearance of bread and wine. In fact, Catholic worship of the Eucharist is the most powerful defense against idolatry.
It is an historical fact that Eucharist-worshipping Catholics were the strongest critics of idolatry in the ancient world. The Church fathers mocked the pagan sacrifice offered to idols, and the crude attempts of temple priests to animate the statues of their gods. The problem with the heathen, St. Athanasius wrote, was they preferred the body and its senses to “things perceived by thought.” (Against the Heathen, 3)
Catholics have always noted a stark difference between Eucharistic adoration and the idolatry of pagans. Pagans offer sacrifice to their idols to placate or appease their capricious gods. For Catholics, the Eucharist is the sacrifice, to which we conjoin the offering of our own lives in a rational act of worship. (Romans 12:1) The God whom we worship in Eucharistic sacrifice is not pleased with the blood of goats and bulls. “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” (Psalm 51:17)
Many of our critics equally despise both Catholics and pagans. They acknowledge little difference between the sacrifice of the Mass and the sacrifice of pagans. They claim to prefer a “spiritual” presence. John Calvin (1509-1564), for instance, despised the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist. For Calvin, the power of the Eucharist was not to be found in the elements themselves, but in experience of the believer. Communion, he said, makes us “feel within ourselves the efficacy of that one sacrifice.” (Institutes of the Christian Religion, 4.17.1.)
Calvin’s view might seem preferable to the crude sacrifices of the pagans, but it poses a more subtle danger. It is the danger of deifying our own emotions. Calvin goes so far as to argue that God’s spirit can and must be felt; without that feeling, he argues, there is no salvation. (Institutes 3.2.39) Calvin’s position is very common today. We encounter it every time someone claims to have felt God in an emotionally moving experience.
The Catholic position is vastly different. God’s presence is not a sensible reality. It cannot be equated with the movements of our emotional life or with any act of our senses. For this reason, the Eucharist is the strongest possible defense against idolatry. The presence we proclaim is one that absolutely transcends our sensory faculties. It cannot be seen, felt, smelt, or tasted. As St. Thomas sang, “Seeing, touching, tasting are in thee deceived.” It is only hearing which is not deceived. “What God’s Son has told me, take for truth I do; Truth himself speaks truly or there’s nothing true.”
Eucharistic doctrine contradicts idolatry in another, more subtle, way. The Eucharist, like all the sacraments, is a sign (but not only a sign). What, precisely, is being signified? In the Eucharist, we have a sign of Christ’s body and blood now in heaven (and also present in the elements), and we have body and blood shown forth in a state of separation or immolation, connecting the Eucharist to the sacrifice of Calvary. It is the memorial of his death, the guarantee of his abiding presence, the source and summit of the Church’s unity, and the pledge of our eternal inheritance.
The Eucharist solidifies St. Paul’s admonition, “Set your heart on things above, and not on earthly things.” (Colossians 3:2) One who worships the Eucharist desires above all things to be incorporated more fully into Christ, to imitate his virtues, and to be empowered by his divine life. It is not his own emotions he cares about, but the honor of God. “Surely,” writes Newman, “it is our duty ever to look off ourselves, and to look unto Jesus, that is, to shun the contemplation of our own feelings, emotions, frame and state of mind.” (Parochial and Plain Sermons, 15)
In the Eucharist, we do not seek a visible, sensible deity, nor one who bubbles up in our own bodily passions. We offer everything, including our own bodies and all our sensible emotions, joined to Christ in the Eucharist, in a sublime sacrifice to the One True God. We seek the hidden and transcendent God who gives himself in ineffable mystery.
Godhead here in hiding, whom I do adore / Masked by these bare shadows, shape and nothing more . . Jesu, whom I look at shrouded here below / I beseech thee send me what I thirst for so, some day to gaze on thee face to face in light / And be blest forever with thy glory’s sight.
Amen