Inside America

The “Objectivity” of Christ’s Presence

A new Encyclical: Ecclesia de Eucharistia

By Lorenzo Albacete

When Pope John Paul II added the “Mysteries of Light” to the Rosary, he said that the events of Christ’s life should be looked at through the eyes of Mary. In his new encyclical on the Eucharist (Ecclesia de Eucharistia), the Holy Father insists that “to contemplate the face of Christ, and to contemplate it with Mary, is the ‘program’ which I have set before the Church at the dawn of the third millennium, summoning her to put out into the deep on the sea of history with the enthusiasm of the new evangelization. To contemplate Christ involves being able to recognize Him, wherever He manifests himself, in his many forms of presence, but above all in the living sacrament of his body and his soul” (para 6).
The Risen Christ cannot be recognized as present in our world any other way than through the eyes of Mary. As in the Incarnation, it is through Mary that the Holy Spirit makes Christ a concrete, tangible presence, a living “face” to recognize and contemplate. That is why we pray: “Come Holy Spirit, come through Mary.”
Mary assures us of the “objectivity” of Christ’s presence. She assures us that our experience of his presence is not something purely subjective, like the projection of our dreams and desires. The good news of salvation is possible only if this salvation and the new life it communicates to us originates outside of us. “Salvation” implies something that we cannot bring about by our own efforts. It means being rescued from a hopeless situation. Good intentions, inspiring ideas, religious devotion and enthusiasm, knowledge and virtue cannot save us. We are saved by an event that occurs independently of our possibilities for “self-improvement.” The dead cannot bring themselves back to life. This “something that happens to change our situation” is called an event. We are saved by the event of Christ, an event that first occurred in human history in the flesh of the Blessed Virgin Mary. We are saved only by this event.
This event occurred once and for all some two thousand years ago in the womb of Mary and “expanded” the scope of its saving power through the mysteries of Christ’s life, especially his death and resurrection. This saving presence of the One who has conquered death reaches us through the experience of the unity between those who share his life and are thus “body of Christ.” This unity, however, is not a matter of feelings or common goals. It is a fact, an objective fact created by the Holy Spirit from the event of Christ. This unity has a name: the Church. But what is it in the life of the Church that assures us that this unity is indeed a reality that doesn’t originate in us? It is the sacrament of Christ’s body and blood. It is the Eucharist. All throughout the new encyclical the Pope insists on the importance of recognizing the objective fact of Christ’s saving presence in the Eucharist. That is why he emphasizes “we must maintain that in objective reality, independently of our mind, the bread and wine has ceased to exist so that the adorable body and blood of the Lord Jesus are really before us” (para 15).
If the Eucharist is the sacrament of the “objectivity” of Christ’s saving presence, then there is an inseparable connection between Mary and the Eucharist. This is indeed what the Holy Father writes: “At the Annunciation, Mary conceived the Son of God in the physical reality of his body and blood, thus anticipating within herself what to some degree happens sacramentally in every believer who receives, under the signs of bread and wine, the Lord’s body and blood” (para 55).
Mary protects our Eucharistic devotion from degenerating into ritualism or sentimental piety. As the memorial that makes present the objective event of our salvation, the Eucharist assures us that the experience of a communion of life within which we have encountered and contemplate the face of the Risen Christ in each other is a vocation to make Him objectively present in all the circumstances of life through which we seek “the fulfillment for which each man and woman, even unconsciously, yearns” (para 59).