What I Saw In the Chapel
The Staggering Truth about the Eucharist
by Marion Fernandez-Cueto
in Faith
on Monday, October 25, 2010 6:00 AM
In September, the Pew Research Forum on Religion and Public Life released a study about religious knowledge in the United Sates. One of the more sobering results: more than 45% of Catholics are not aware the Church teaches that bread and wine used at Mass are not mere symbols, but actually become the Body and Blood of Christ at consecration.
I am a convert who entered the Church solely for the Eucharist, and while that decision has since been grounded in a deeper appreciation for the entirety of Catholic teaching, I still found the Pew statistic astonishing.
“How can so many Catholics not know about the Eucharist?” I exclaimed to my husband, a revert who had drifted from the Church until his late 20s, when a fearsome and feisty Franciscan nun persuaded him to sample her RCIA classes. (Nine months later he was confirmed—and promptly introduced to me). “How is that ignorance even possible?”
My husband was amused at my incredulity. “Easy,” he shrugged. “I never knew it myself. And you can’t know what you can’t know.”
“But what about your First Communion? What about Mass?” I badgered. “Didn’t you hear the priest say, you know, ‘the Body of Christ,’ every single Sunday? What on earth did you think he was talking about? Why do you think you were saying ‘Amen’?”
Andrés just shook his head. “No one ever spelled it out for me,” he explained. “First Communion was just this social rite of passage, and after that, no one even talked about the Eucharist — not my parents, not my friends, not even the priests. We were just expected to know about it, I guess.”
I still wasn’t satisfied. “Adoration,” I insisted. “You must have known something was going on there.”
“Are you kidding?” my husband said softly. “I’d never heard about Adoration until I met you.”
Suddenly, I understood. Because it was Adoration — not the Mass, not the Catechism, not strenuous apologetics from well-meaning Catholic friends, that first revealed to me the stupendous reality of the Eucharist.
In my late teens, I had been skulking around the Church for about a year — observing random Masses, picking through Catholic literature — when a co-worker invited me to attend a weekend retreat at a monastery. Intrigued by some of the advertised lectures on Aristotle (monks doing metaphysics?!) I accepted.
We had ample downtime between the retreat sessions and meals, and wandering around the monastery grounds one winter afternoon, I stumbled into a small, cave-like chapel. And froze in the doorway.
Before me, ten or fifteen people — habited nuns, monks, and lay persons I recognized from the philosophy sessions—were kneeling prostrate on the thin carpet. At the front of the room was an altar, and on the altar, encircled by a simple gold monstrance, was one of the consecrated Hosts I had often seen at Mass. Candles flickered on either side and the room was bathed in silence and late-afternoon sunlight.
Surely I’d encountered Church teaching on the Eucharist before that moment. But it wasn’t until I saw fifteen otherwise sane, intelligent and delightful people bowing down before a monstrance that I grasped the full significance of that teaching, and it rocked me to the core.
Stumbling out into the cold, faded evening, I fought back tears and alternating sensations of panic and euphoria. “They are kneeling to a piece of bread. They are kneeling to a piece of bread.” Round and around, the terrible words ricocheted in my head. Had the monstrance contained a carrot I could not have been more horrified.
And yet the alternative—that the bread might not be bread at all—was just as devastating. I knew that night that I had witnessed something either so demonic it was beyond ridicule … or something so holy it would shatter my life as I knew it.
It would be three more years before I dared enter the Church, but that night marked the beginning of the shattering.
I’ve been Catholic now for 10 ½ years. It’s hard to recall that monastic scene without a pang of wistfulness for my gasping, virginal wonder before this great treasure of the Church. There are too many Sundays now when my participation at Mass is perfunctory, too many days when the lessons I partake to my own cradle Catholics sound tinny and trite.
Those are the times I know I must return to Adoration to find again my first love, bringing, when possible, the kids, whose hearts remain attuned to that Great Presence even when they tune out mere words.
And whether we linger for an hour or five minutes, time still stops for me as it did that winter afternoon long ago, and God still whispers, and gazes and loves …
Flannery O’Conner was once invited to a literary dinner party where the Eucharist was dismissed as a “pretty good symbol. In a shaky voice, she offered her now-infamous retort: “If it’s a symbol, then to hell with it.”
I feel sure that if any of the Pew’s 45% could discover Adoration, they would find themselves agreeing with her — literally. Because one cannot kneel to a symbol.
“That was all the defense I was capable of,” O’Connor explained later, “but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.”
The Body of Christ?
Amen.
—Marion Fernandez-Cueto writes from Houston, TX. She was baptized into the Catholic Church in 2000.
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