Sacrament, Sign and Presence in the Holy Eucharist

O sacrum convivium, in quo Christus sumitur. Recalitur passionis eius, mens impletur gratius
et future gloria pignus datur.
O sacred banquet in which Christ is received. The memory of His passion is renewed, the
mind is filled with grace and the pledge of future glory is given.
Many of us have heard and read popular preachers and writers refer to the real, true,
substantial presence of Jesus Christ, body, soul and divinity, in the holy Eucharist. For most
Catholics, belief in this presence of Jesus is held by faith and with little else. We hear, we accept,
we profess the real presence with very little understanding of the mystery other than that it is a
mystery.
To all the marks mentioned above of the real presence of Jesus in the holy Eucharist, Saint
Thomas Aquinas would add most emphatically sacramental. Jesus is really, truly, substantially
present in the Eucharist sacramentally. For St. Thomas, this qualification does not detract from
our faith in the real presence; it aids our understanding of the kind of reality and the way that reality
is made present in the Sacrament of the Eucharist.
Our first consideration from St. Thomas must be what is meant by a sacramental presence.
We all remember the definition of a sacrament learned in catechism class: an outward sign
instituted by Christ to give grace. We all know that the sacraments are more than just “outward
signs”; they [sacraments] are outward signs that contain and effect an inner reality. More
specifically the sacraments effect what they signify: e.g. in baptism the sign is of washing, the
effect is the cleansing of the soul of sin.
In the Eucharist these characteristics are most present and most evident. As a sacrament, the
Eucharist is not merely some sequence of actions invented/instituted by Jesus to commemorate an
event in His life. What is instituted/effected/created by Jesus is an entirely new realm of reality.

The sacramental realm, hence the sacramental reality, is neither the reality of heaven nor is
it the reality of earth. The sacramental realm has its own ontology, it’s own unique realm of being.
This realm is not proper to heavenly or earthly reality, to time or to eternity. The sacramental realm
instituted by Jesus links and bridges between heaven and earth, time and eternity.

In the Eucharist, Jesus is really, truly present sacramentally. In the Eucharist Jesus is not
present with the reality He had on earth or the reality He has in heaven. By its very nature, as
instituted by Jesus, the sacrament is a sign, for through this sign the reality is made present; through
this sign/sacrament the effect of what is signified comes about.

Suppose a priest were celebrating mass, if at the moment of consecration the bread
disappeared and Jesus Himself in His eternally glorified or His historical crucified body stood on
the altar: there would be no sacrament. In such an event there would be the real body of Christ as
it is in heaven or as it was on the Cross.
In order for the sacrament to make Jesus really present sacramentally, i.e. by means of the
sacrament, the sign instituted by Christ must be present.
This is not to say that Jesus is not really present but only present in sign. We must remember
that the sign, the sacrament, is a whole realm of reality on its own which is not proper to the reality
of heaven or of earth. What is proper to the sacramental reality is that it is transitive, it is a bridge
reality, a realm of being which links the earthly and the heavenly realms.
St. Thomas says that Jesus is made really present in the Eucharist in two ways:
1. by virtue of the sign/sacrament and
2. by virtue of concomitance.

1. Jesus is made present by virtue of the sign/sacrament by the effect of the signification. The
sacrament effects what it signifies. In the Eucharist the sign signified by the bread and the wine is
the body and the blood separated in the death on the Cross. By virtue of, by the power of, the
sacrament the body and blood of Jesus Christ, on the Cross, are made present, are re-presented.
On Holy Thursday when Jesus first instituted the Eucharist, He made the reality of the future
Crucifixion present. When the priest consecrates the Eucharist now he makes the reality of the past
Crucifixion present. We could say that on Holy Thursday Jesus pre-presents His death on the Cross
as the priest now re-presents this same event.

2. But Jesus is not only really present in the Eucharist by virtue of the sign/sacrament; He is
also really present by virtue of concomitance. Concomitance means to walk along with. By virtue
of concomitance, Jesus is present in the Eucharist as He actually is. When Jesus told his disciples
“this is my body” and gave Himself to them in the first instance of the Eucharist, the concomitant
presence of Jesus contained in the Eucharist, that was given to and received by the Apostles, was
His real presence as He was with them at the Last Supper. By virtue of the sacrament He gave
Himself to them as He would be the next day: Crucified.
To illustrate the concomitant presence of Jesus in the Eucharist St. Thomas presents the
following considerations. If one of the Apostles preserved a portion of the Eucharistic species after
the Last Supper the concomitant presence of Jesus in that Eucharistic species would undergo
change as Jesus underwent change. Jesus’ presence in that Eucharistic bread or wine would
accordingly change as Jesus changed: as He was present at the Last Supper, as He suffered in the
Garden, as He died on the Cross. After His death on the Cross and His soul was separated from
His body the concomitant presence of Jesus in the Eucharist would have been Jesus’ soulless body.
Hopefully, from these considerations we can see more clearly how Jesus is really, truly,
sacramentally, present in each of our Eucharistic celebrations today. By virtue of the sacrament
Jesus’ death on the Cross is made present on our altars, by virtue of His concomitant presence
Jesus’ resurrected and glorified body and soul and divinity are made present because that is how
He is now and forever… amen!