God, who is Truth and Goodness as well as omnipotent, cannot make a moral order that contradicts himself. Solid Catholic philosophy and theology, of course, recognized that Ockham was wrong. For Ockham, it’s not that “God forbids murder because it’s wrong” but “murder is wrong because God forbids it.” The Divine Will could make good evil and evil good. Ockham, taken by God’s omnipotence, essentially made reality - at least in morality - a matter of divine will. Instead of a real world confronting man, the Cartesian world is built from man’s head out: “I think therefore, I am,” versus “I am therefore, I think.” I would argue that all subsequent efforts to make reality inaccessible - Kant’s noumena and phenomena, the pure phenomenologists’ quests, and many others in between - are all essentially variations on a theme that start when reality (at least as far as it matters) originates in the thinking subject’s head rather than the reality itself.ĭescartes, in my judgment, put Western thought on a fruitless path, but the damage was already done in the late Middle Ages with the nominalism of William Ockham. I get that.ĭescartes destroyed the idea of a real world with his systematic doubt. They’ll think it’s just a theological issue and, since they don’t share the theology, they don’t really care what we think. The larger culture generally does not really care about the Eucharist. Today, I want to offer some thoughts about why the larger culture needs us Catholics to be clear about what we understand the Eucharist to be.
In my “Scripture and Art” blogs, depicting the Sunday Gospels in painting, I have tried to address the theological truths that need to be emphasized in these weeks.
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Despite Jesus’ clear emphasis on the Eucharist as his Real Flesh and Blood, most of those who had come to follow him when they thought the program was “Jesus’ Plan for Free Lunches in Galilee” left him when he demanded something else. Jesus’ Jewish interlocutors rejected his teaching that he could be “really present” through eating in someone’s souls.
John 6 lends itself perfectly to addressing American Catholic Eucharistic illiteracy, precisely because Jesus is tackling the same question. 15) all the Sunday Gospels focus on the Eucharist, including a continuous reading of John 6. 22 (except for the Solemnity of the Assumption Aug. Two years after that report came out, and after more than a year of lockdowns on celebration of the Mass from sea to shining sea, as the Church is tentatively returning to “normal” (a “normalcy” I have questioned here and here), the Church’s Lectionary has afforded us an opportunity to address the deficits in Eucharistic catechesis. The 2019 Pew report that disclosed the pathetic state of American Catholic understanding of the Eucharist should have been a wake-up call for the American hierarchy.
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