Jimmy Akin

Recently I wrote about a priest pouring wine into a chalice of the Precious Blood and alluded to the fact that he might add enough that the point was reached where the Real Presence ceases.

Following this, Ed Peters wrote:

And Jimmy, what point is that? We’re not talking about adding water, etc., which at some hard-to-identify point would render what is in the cup no longer "Wine" (yes, you know what I mean), since at no point would this not still have the appearance of "Wine". Little help? Great question and a good start toward it. Thx, edp.

Excellent question!

Obviously, we cannot in this case use the test of when the accidents of wine cease to be present since the accidents do not cease to be present.

That fact might lead one to suppose–and I’m not at all saying that Ed supposes this, those someone might–that one could continue to add wine to the Precious Blood without the Real Presence ceasing at all.

This would not be the historic understanding of the Church.

This can be seen from the document De Defectibus in Celebratione Missae Occurentibus ("On Defects Occurring in the Celebration of Mass"), which is a document that deals with liturgical abuses and used to be printed in the front of every Missal before the reform of the liturgy following the Second Vatican Council.

It so happens that I have just translated this document (and will be putting it online soon, after I polish the translation and have it vetted), but since Ed has raised an excellent question, I’ll share one bit of the draft translation here:

If a fly, or a spider, or something else falls into the chalice before the Consecration, he [the priest] pours out the wine in a decent place, and he puts other [wine] in the chalice, mixes in a little water, and offers it, as above, and the Mass proceeds. If after the Consecration a fly or something of this sort has fallen in, he removes it, and washes it with wine. After the Mass is finished he burns it, and the ashes and the liquid of this kind is poured into the sacrarium [De Defectibus X §5].

The document thus expressly directs priests to wash whatever has fallen into the chalice with wine. This would make no sense if the addition of wine did not cause the Real Presence to cease, since the whole point of washing the thing that fell in the chalice is to cause the Real Presence to cease, so that it can be reverently burned.

The Church–in a document that was part of the Roman Missal for 400 years–thus has understood the addition of wine in sufficient quantity to cause the Real Presence of the Precious Blood to cease.

Which gets us back to Ed’s question: At what point does this happen?

My answer would be that this would happen when, in the opinion of reasonable men, so much wine had been added that what is in the chalice would no longer be judged by the senses to be the same wine that was there before. I’m talking, in this case, about the wine that was in the chalice as a whole, not the taste or color or other properties it has.

It’s difficult to verbalize what I mean since "wine" in this context if functioning as a mass noun rather than a count noun, and we don’t have a good word in English for the particular body of wine that is poured into a chalice, but I can offer a couple of examples that should be illuminative:

1) Suppose that a priest had a chalice with the Precious Blood in it and the accidents of wine in this case were of white wine. But then suppose that (God forbid) he started pouring unconsecrated red wine into the chalice. If he poured in only a drop and then mixed it throughly, it seems to me that a reasonable man would say that he had not substantially changed the accidents that were in the chalice–any more than pouring a drop of water in would substantially alter them. The Real Presence would thus remain.

But if he poured in a large amount of red wine then at some point a reasonable man would say, "That’s not the same wine any more" and at that point the accidents masking the Real Presence would have changed so much that the Real Presence would have ceased.

In this case it would be easy(er) to tell because the color would have changed (and the taste as well), but I think the same thing would hold even if the color and taste and smell don’t change. At some point so much wine is added that it no longer appears to be "the same wine" (meaning the same unit of wine) that was in the chalice.

Thus my second illustration . . .

2) Suppose that the priest had a large vat full of white wine and then put some of this in a chalice and consecrated it. He then (God forbid) took the Precious Blood in the chalice and pours it back into the vat and mixes it thoroughly.

It seems to me that a reasonable man would say that the unit of wine that appeared to be in the chalice is no longer present. It has been mixed into the vat of wine and has no independent status any longer. Consequently that unit of wine is no longer present, and neither is the Real Presence.

Now, at what precise point the Real Presence would cease is not something that can be determined, any more than the precise point that so much water is added that it ceases can be determined. We can say, in general terms, that this happens when so much water has been added that it would no longer appears to be wine, but we can’t specify a percentage of change where this happens. It’s a fuzzy boundary, like the boundary between red and orange on a color spectrum.

In the same way we can’t specify precisely when too much wine has been added to the Precious Blood, but in principle it seems to me that it would be the point where the unit of wine that appeared to be in the chalice is so substantially altered that it no longer appears to be the same unit. It has been mixed into another unit of wine and no longer has independent status.

Incidentally, we know by faith that these accidents are divisible in the sense that you can drink part of it and leave enough of the apparent unit of wine in the chalice that the Real Presence stays. The apparent unit of wine can be diminished through drinking without losing the Real Presence as soon as the first sip is taken, and the sip also retains the Real Presence. Though at some point, so much can be removed that the Real Presence does cease–as would happen if there were only an undrinkably thin film of wine molecules (or apparent wine molecules) that refuses to form a drop were left in the chalice.

But it seems to me that the accidents masking the Precious Blood can be altered in two ways that cause the Real Presence to cease: (1) they can alter in quality such that it no longer seems to be wine at all or (2) they can alter in quantity such that they no longer appear to be the same unit of wine that was consecrated.

At least that’s the best I can make out of the Church’s historic understanding that the addition of wine to the Precious Blood can cause the Real Presence to cease.

PRE-PUBLICATION UPDATE: After writing the above, I decided to check the Summa Theologia to see what Aquinas said, and he says the same thing. He even uses some of the same examples, like adding red wine to white, and speaks in terms of the wine having to be not just qualitatively but "numerically" the same wine that was consecrated, which is what I was getting at by talking about it being the same "unit" of wine that was consecrated.

Blogger Catholic Mom writes:

I’ve been engaging in an online discussion with some folks and the gist of the discussion is they believe Christ is as present when 2 or 3 are gathered in His name or in the faces of the poor as He is in the Eucharist. Therefore, all this fuss about tabernacles and reverence is irrelevant. As long as we are out there ministering to our fellow man we are meeting Christ just as much as we would in the Eucharist.

I can explain that the Eucharist is the True Presence of Christ, Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity. I am not sure how to describe the presence of Christ we find in the gathering of Christians or when we minister to the poor. I know it is distinct from the Eucharist. How would you verbalize this difference?

It is somewhat difficult to answer this question because in telling us that he is present wherever two or three are gathered in his name, he didn’t give us a lot of detail about what this manner of presence entails. The same is true for the "if you did it for the least of my brethren, you did it for me" passage.

It is clear that Jesus is present in these places in that his divinity is omnipresent, but he seems to mean more than that.

Yet it is also clear that he is not present there in the same way that he is in the Eucharist. The Eucharist is Jesus–just disguised. But it is clear that a poor person to whom we are ministering is not Jesus himself. It would not be appropriate to react to the poor person exactly the way we would react to Jesus himself. For example, it would not be appropriate to offer the poor person the worship of latreia, which is due only to God.

Common sense thus tells you that–whatever Jesus’ mode of presence is in such cases–it is less than the full reality of that presence which is found in the Eucharist. Therefore, one does an injustice to the Eucharist–and to Jesus himself–if one attempts to flatten the uniqueness of the Eucharistic presence and reduce it to the other modes of his presence which Scripture and theology speak of.

To do so speaks of either gross ignorance of the faith or an agenda of some sort that is so strong it overrides what is patently obvious.

If I were to attempt to unpack what Jesus meant in referring to these alternate and lesser modes of presence, the best I could probably do would be to say that Jesus is speaking metaphorically when he makes these statements in the gospels. It is important to point out that a metaphor is not the same as a fiction. Metaphors are ways of expressing a truth that is otherwise difficult to convey, or at least to convey with the same vividness that hte metaphor carries.

Consequently, I would say that–while Jesus’ divine nature is present in such instances since it is omnipresent–he is also "present" in the sense that he spiritually guides and works through  and helps people gathered in his name. Similarly, since we have a duty toward Jesus to exercise charity toward others, when we show charity or fail to show it to the poor we are fulfilling or failing to fulfill a duty toward Jesus and thus our action has reference to him even though we are outwardly acting toward someone else.

But in these cases Jesus’ Body, Blood, and human Soul are not present, as they are in the Eucharist. Jesus uses the metaphor of his presence in these cases not to signify that he is fully present in them as he is in the Eucharist but that he is guiding and working through and helping people or that our actions toward others have to be viewed in relation to our obligations to him.

There may be more to it than this, for we are not privvy to all of the divine mysteries, and Jesus may be present in more mystical ways that I am not able to articulate, but it is clear that Jesus’ presence in the Eucharist is both unique and supreme and not to be flattened onto a par with other modes of presence.

There is absolutely no difficulty demonstrating that from Church documents, as the following indicate.

The Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church says this:

282. How is Christ present in the Eucharist?

Jesus Christ is present in the Eucharist in a unique and incomparable way. He is present in a true, real and substantial way, with his Body and his Blood, with his Soul and his Divinity. In the Eucharist, therefore, there is present in a sacramental way, that is, under the Eucharistic species of bread and wine, Christ whole and entire, God and Man.

While the Catechism itself says:

1373 "Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised from the dead, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us," is present in many ways to his Church: in his word, in his Church’s prayer, "where two or three are gathered in my name," in the poor, the sick, and the imprisoned, in the sacraments of which he is the author, in the sacrifice of the Mass, and in the person of the minister. But "he is present . . . most especially in the Eucharistic species."

1374 The mode of Christ’s presence under the Eucharistic species is unique. It raises the Eucharist above all the sacraments as "the perfection of the spiritual life and the end to which all the sacraments tend." In the most blessed sacrament of the Eucharist "the body and blood, together with the soul and divinity, of our Lord Jesus Christ and, therefore, the whole Christ is truly, really, and substantially contained." "This presence is called ‘real’ – by which is not intended to exclude the other types of presence as if they could not be ‘real’ too, but because it is presence in the fullest sense: that is to say, it is a substantial presence by which Christ, God and man, makes himself wholly and entirely present."

One of the most important discussions of this topic is found in Paul VI’s encyclical Mysterium Fidei, which was written precisely to combat erroneous understandings of Christ’s presence. Sections 35-39 of the encyclical are in particular devoted to the topic, and the pope offers an explanation of different ways in which Christ is present in different things and activities, concluding, under the heading "The Highest Kind of Presence":

These various ways in which Christ is present fill the mind with astonishment and offer the Church a mystery for her contemplation. But there is another way in which Christ is present in His Church, a way that surpasses all the others. It is His presence in the Sacrament of the Eucharist [38].