Yet three events combine to make me rush in where angels might fear to tread. The first is the sad situation in the Irish-language school in Dunboyne. Not having all the facts, it would be improper for me, by any careless comment, to inflame an already difficult situation.

The second event is the recent death of Bishop Alan Clarke, a bishop of the Roman Catholic Church in England, whom I was privileged to know. With our own Archbishop Henry McAdoo of Dublin he was the first co-chairman of ARCIC (the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission). Together they presided over a remarkable ecumenical document on Eucharistic agreement.

Kevin Myers versus St Thomas Aquinas on Transubstantiation

The third was Kevin Myers column and comment on Dunboyne in the middle of the past week when he said:

There is a single, central difference between the Catholic Church and the main reformed religion here, the Church of Ireland, and that difference has remained unbridged and unbridgeable despite 40 years of the ecumenical movement. No amount of pussy-footing is going to change the towering importance to the Catholic Church of the doctrine of transubstantiation. The Roman Catholic dogma is that during the consecration, the host actually becomes the body of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and Redeemer of All Mankind; not symbolically, not in a complex piece of imagery, but in full reality.

Now Myers is right in saying that belief in the real presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist is an essential part of the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. His next sentence, however, is one, I think that might cause embarrassment to many, bishops as well as theologically informed laity and of course he may even have intended it to be embarrassing:

This piece of human flesh, of tongue and breast and bowel, is then consumed by the worshipful.

That sentence would, I think, have amazed St Thomas Aquinas. Human flesh would seem to be exactly what St Thomas was not saying.

However, even this is still an aside for the purposes of this sermon. It's not my purpose to explain the teaching of another Christian Church.

Anglican Eucharistic Teaching

What I do think I have the right to demand, however, is that the teaching of my own Church should not be misunderstood as it commonly is, and as it's often described in the letters to the daily papers.

Kevin Myers quoted remarks would seem to imply that in the Church of Ireland the Eucharistic consecration is symbolical, a complex piece of imagery. Now I can forgive him for implying this. He's not the first person to believe that the Anglican Eucharist is a watered down version of the real thing all about symbolism and spiritual presence. Indeed even members of the Church of Ireland have sometimes been so afraid of Roman Catholic belief in that real and essential presence of Christ in the Eucharist that they themselves have almost spiritualised the presence out of existence. More religious battles have probably been fought on the manner of how Christ is present than on almost any other subject.

How is Christ present?

Yet the belief that in the Eucharist Christ is present and that in it he gives himself to us is as much a statement of the Book of Common Prayer as it is of the Roman Missal. The Thirty-Nine Articles certainly didn't like the medieval definition of transubstantiation particularly the type and style of its Aristotelian philosophy. But those same Thirty-Nine Articles do declare and make clear that sacraments are indeed effectual signs they effect and they give what they proclaim. And nothing could be more definite than the words used when you receive the sacrament in this cathedral this morning, The body of Christ keep you in eternal life, the blood of Christ keep you in eternal life. I believe it to be true Anglican belief and tradition to affirm that, in this sacrament we shall have a life-giving sacramental encounter with the risen Christ. As the hymn says, Here, O my Lord, I see thee face to face.

The Thirty-Nine Articles

And I would also want to affirm what the Articles mean when they say that in the Eucharist the means by which we receive Christ's presence is by faith. Not that in any sense whatsoever our personal faith creates Christ's presence, but that our personal faith recognises it.

ARCIC

And I would want to go still further and affirm, as did ARCIC and Archbishop McAdoo and Bishop Alan Clarke, that the presence of Christ is conveyed by the Eucharistic bread and wine to the faithful communicant. We receive Christ in answer to the prayer of the Church and in fulfilment of the promise of Christ. So that the presence isn't only in the devout communicant, it's also in the consecrated elements themselves. As to how it happens Anglicans have always expressed a reverent agnosticism we would tend to say that an explanation of divine things using human language can never be precisely accurate, let alone totally adequate. That it does happen, however, and that it isn't something created by our personal faith, we affirm as truth.

A recent Anglican statement of Faith

That this isn't just some sort of Anglican high church belief, rejected by Anglican evangelicals, can be seen in a document as recent as 1995. In that year the Inter-Anglican Liturgical Consultation met in Dublin. It was representative of virtually every theological spectrum within world Anglicanism evangelicals, liberals and what's popularly called high church. Indeed its findings were received by the Anglican Consultative Council as well as by the Lambeth Conference of Bishops the two highest and most authoritative bodies within the Anglican Communion. And this is what the document said:

The mystery of Christ's presence is given unique expression, to be discerned by faith, in the whole sacramental action when bread and wine are taken, eucharistized, distributed, and consumed, in remembrance of him. This remembrance or anamnesis is no mere mental recollection, but effects a real encounter with the Lord in his saving acts, especially his atoning death and victorious resurrection. In appointing bread and wine as the visible and tangible means of the presence of his body and blood, the Lord affirms that participating in the sacrament allows the faithful communicant truly to feed upon his sacrificial life.

A plea for clarity

So, please, and I say this to all journalists and to all who write letters to the papers, please stop putting into print the (unintended?) misinformation that Christ's presence in the Anglican Eucharist is merely spiritual. Spiritual does not mean unreal and certainly not the real absence.

And you know, having this clearly understood and presented, even teaching it to children as well as to adults, might even be a real help in situations such as the one currently prevailing in Dunboyne.