The Eucharistic Congress will remind us what communion really means

With the International Eucharistic Congress in Australia on the horizon for 2028, we have an opportunity to reflect on the church’s rich history of reflection on the Eucharist.  

In the early church, the identification of the Eucharist and the church was so strong that communio stood for both, referring at once to the reception of the sacrament and at the same time the fellowship of Christians, above all the saints.  

This can be recognised also in the Apostles’ Creed, which appears to make no explicit reference to the Eucharist, but the Latin communio sanctorum [communion of saints] signifies both holy people and a communion in holy things—the sacraments and the grace of God.   

It was the understanding of the early Church Fathers that the effect of participation in communio (Christ’s sacramental body) was the unity or communio of Christ’s body, the church.  

In the medieval period, much energy was spent on clarifying how Jesus of Nazareth, the Eucharist and the church could each and all be Christ’s body.  

This question would have unintended consequences for Catholic understanding of the relationship of the Eucharist to the church, to a degree isolating the personal reception of sacraments from the intrinsically social nature of salvation.  

In his seminal study of the issue, the French ressourcement theologian Henri de Lubac notes that the first generations of Christians employed the phrase “mystical body” to refer above all to the Eucharist, to distinguish Christ’s sacramental body from Jesus’ body born of the Virgin Mary.   

The church meanwhile was referred to as the corpus verum, the “true body,” as Christ’s body really present in the world in the communion of believers.  

However, by the late medieval period a switch or inversion in terminology had occurred. The expression “mystical body” had passed from the Eucharist to the church instead.  

Furthermore, in the midst of apologetic debates about the nature of Christ’s substantial presence in the Eucharist, Catholic theologians and apologists increasingly described the Eucharist as “true flesh,” “flesh received in truth,” and his “true and substantive presence.”   

This emphasis on the truth or reality of Christ’s sacramental body, over its “mystical” character, only intensified in the sixteenth century in the confrontation of Protestant objections to Catholicism.   

The net effect for Catholics following these centuries was a weakening of the intrinsic relationship of the Eucharist and the church, with “mystery” coming to be opposed to the visible or true and losing its strong sacramental meaning, while the concept of his “true body” became loosened from its original ecclesial foundation and significance.   

It would be de Lubac himself, the Second Vatican Council to which he contributed, and St John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI following the council, who would best recover the ancient and more cohesive understanding—the Eucharist as the body of Christ which makes Christ’s body, the church, by its reception.   

This formula remains helpful in that it staves off an individualistic piety focused on the Eucharist without any regard for the unity of Christ’s body, the church, for which it is given.  

Equally, it seeks to avoid the opposite danger, of seeing the church or worshipping community as an end in itself, and the “levelling down” of sacraments, as Pope Benedict XVI put it, to mere “celebrations of the community.”  

Still in the church today we can see both distortions at play, to the detriment of the unity of the church and to an understanding of the Eucharist and the Mass as essential to Catholic identity and mission.  

The Eucharist invites our deeper appreciation of this divine gift as communio for a church ever vulnerable to polarisation and factionalism, and the communio of believers as a true body and real presence of Christ in an all-too-divided and warring world.