Is “Eucharist” a noun or a verb?

Current Eucharistic debates cannot be reduced to allowing or not allowing the celebration of the traditional Latin Mass. If that was the issue rather than just a symptom, a solution might be more readily worked out.

But the current debates run deeper. Nor are they just “old” versus “new.” Those who cite posture for receiving Communion, for example, want to cast the issue in those categories.

Andrea Grillo, the Roman liturgist to whom it attributed authorship of Traditionis custodes, which restricts the Latin Mass, recently wrote a piece criticizing Blessed Carlo Acutis. Acutis’s canonization was deferred until September because of the papal interregnum. Grillo deems him to victim of “mal-education” when it comes to “Eucharistic theology” because Acutis was interested in Eucharistic miracles.

It doesn’t stop there. Consider Paul Turner’s Eucharistic Reservation (Liturgical Press, 2024), his recent book on Eucharistic worship outside Mass. Turner takes issue with the practice in many churches after Communion when all priests face the tabernacle while one places unused hosts in the tabernacle, and then all bow as he closes the tabernacle door. Turner also thinks that elevating the host at the consecration is a contamination from the old rites and that it would be better for the priest to extend the host more vertically versus populum for the people to see. That probably tallies with Charlotte Bishop Michael Martin’s obsessions over whether candles should be on or beside the altar and the angle of the sacramentary if upon the altar.

Recall that Cardinal Blase Cupich objected to an open Eucharistic procession through Chicago during the cross-country journey to Indianapolis’s Eucharistic Congress last year because supposedly adoration “privatize[s] one’s relationship to the sacrament and to the Lord himself, overlooking the communitarian dimension of Eucharistic worship.” The bishops’ three-year National Eucharistic Revival was regularly marred by similar sniping over its attention to adoration.

Nor are these issues stemming from suppressed desiderata under Pope Francis by partisans trying to see whether the new “papa” will indulge them differently.

We are at a key moment in Church history. Vatican II, like Trent and other councils before it, is passing into history. In twenty years, we’ve gone from a Pope who was a council father to one who was a conciliar peritus to one who was still in seminary to one who was a Chicago Catholic school student. Like debates over the Constitution, there remain debates as to what the Council Fathers wrote, what they intended, and what the “living Council” (the “spirit of the Council”) has imposed over the last sixty years. Those three things can be very different and, I would argue, the votaries of the third want to seize the narrative to fossilize their vision as the history of the Council. It’s called “seizing the narrative.”

July 1 is the fortieth anniversary of my doctorate, so I’ve seen theological arguments for a good period of the post-conciliar era. I’d argue that, particularly under Pope Francis, we were regularly served up a diet of 1970s retreads that didn’t make it the first time around (e.g., Cardinal Kasper’s Communion for the divorced) but got one more lap. And I’d suggest one of those retreads behind the current Eucharistic debates alludes back to a debate from the 1970s: is “Eucharist” a verb or a noun? Is “Eucharist” something/someone that is? Something we do? Or both?

Vatican II made clear that the “Eucharist is the source and summit of the Christian life” (Lumen gentium, 11). No one should argue with that. To the best of my knowledge, no Catholics ever did.  It’s what’s overlaid on that clear statement that confuses people.

Yes, the most important act we do as Catholics is to celebrate the Mass. It reenacts Christ’s sacrifice to the Father, and it forms Catholics in an unrepeatable way as a communio personarum. Everything else we do leads to or springs from that act; nothing can take its place.

That is Eucharist as verb.

But what we do at Mass leaves something/Someone behind. The Eucharist does not cease when “Mass is ended, go in peace” (even though there were some Protestant theologians who conflated the Lord’s Supper with its celebration). The fact that we reserve the sacrament in the tabernacle means that an objective reality perdures. And that existence is not dependent on our state of grace. The grace of Reconciliation may go away when we commit a mortal sin, but what the sacrament did does not: sins that are forgiven do not return like Harpies. And, in the Eucharist, quite independently of the grace in the individual soul, another objective reality exists and continues to exist as long as the Eucharistic species exist. That’s why we place those species in a tabernacle or monstrance … and adore.

That is Eucharist as noun.

Another thing I have seen time and again in my forty years around the theological block is the observation made by numerous thinkers on both sides of the aisle that Protestants are “either/or” types, Catholics “both/and.” For Protestants, it’s faith or good works, nature or grace, Scripture or nothing else. For Catholics, it’s faith and good works, nature and grace, Scripture and Tradition. Catholics prove that we can hold two complementary ideas together simultaneously without turning them into antitheses.

I fear that the Grillos and other Eucharistic minimalists find that idea challenging. That’s why they are fighting this rearguard effort to nail down their interpretations of the Council’s teaching.

Yes, the greatest miracle that happens occurs every day on altars in every corner of the world. But that miracle does not exclude or depreciate the various miracles that the Church has confirmed over the ages–miracles in which it seems Carlo Acutis was interested–that served to offer, at least by private revelation, divine warrant to the truth of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.

Those realities are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, one could argue that a domineering and excessive focus on Eucharist as verb, on celebrating the Eucharist to the neglect of Eucharistic adoration, is responsible for the very confusion the Pew Research Center identified about the Catholic understanding of the Real Presence (i.e., the objective reality of the Eucharist) and for which the bishops of the United States launched their three-year Eucharistic renewal program. Celebrating the Eucharist ought to make us more aware of Christ’s abiding presence with us, even after the Eucharist is celebrated.

Over the decades, I have noted that those most allergic to honoring the Presence of Christ in the Eucharistic host–be it by all priestly Communion ministers (who, by Church law ought to be ordinarily those distributing Communion) reposing remaining hosts after Communion or leading holy hours for the laity–are usually those who so accentuate the celebration of Mass that they are jaundiced towards Eucharistic worship outside of Mass. Yes, there can be abuses if Eucharistic adoration dominates Eucharistic celebration. But that hasn’t happened, I’d argue, for a good six decades. What has happened are attempts to sideline Eucharistic adoration outside of Mass (I remember a visiting deacon at a seminary once asking how to celebrate Exposition). Again, these forms of Eucharistic devotion are complementary. They reinforce each other.

Eucharistic minimalists will tell you that reservation of the Eucharistic species originated out of a practical need: having Communion (Viaticum) for the dying. That may be true, but the Holy Spirit did not stop inspiring the faithful at the end of the fifth century (the point after which some liturgists seem to think any subsequent developments automatically deform Christian liturgy). The fact that Eucharistic worship outside of Mass evolved in many forms (Corpus Christi, Exposition/Benediction, processions, 40 Hours, Eucharistic congresses) was not an aberration but a recognition that reservation of the Eucharistic species was not merely a utilitarian function.

Many Eucharistic minimalists also seem to have a very cramped notion of Church, focusing almost exclusively on this one “community” celebrating the Eucharist this morning in, say, New York. Yes, that is the Church. But the Church is also a lot bigger than that geographically and temporally–and that bigger Church has been constituted by the celebration of the Eucharist past, present, and future. Yes, what Catholics do at this moment here and now matters, but it cannot in practice be divorced from what Catholics are doing simultaneously at that moment somewhere else, nor what they have done or will do.

My concern is that the partisans of Eucharist-as-verb want to return us to 1969 (apparently the reset point at which the Holy Spirit returned to renew the Church following His hiatus after the fifth century). To 1969, with its attenuated Eucharistic spirituality that marginalized Eucharistic devotion outside Mass and, in the name of “noble simplicity,” imposed astringent rubrics that the faithful over the ensuing decades found inhibiting rather than facilitative of their Eucharistic piety. If we are indeed the “listening synodal” Church we are told we are, that insight needs to be evaluated against some hermeneutic of continuity.

“Backwardism” (indietrismo, one of Pope Francis’s favorite epithets) seems to be measuring 2025 by 1969 rather than 1969 by insights gained in the following 56 years. Eucharistic theology and spirituality did not begin in 1969. What preceded that year does not “contaminate” Vatican II Eucharistic theology but, in a genuine hermeneutic of continuity, needs to fit with it.

What is being advanced by the Grillos of the world as the “normative” interpretation of Vatican II is anything but. It is “normative” in the sense that interpretation was imposed, and its liturgical keepers refuse to consider its ongoing adequacy. But can one really believe that the Conciliar Fathers in 1965 intended worship of the Eucharist outside Mass to fade away? And that what is done with the remaining Eucharistic hosts after distribution of Communion should more reflect “clearing the table” than their respectful reposition?

As I’ve said, I accept the Novus Ordo Missae and am not interested in returning to the traditional Latin Mass. But today’s Eucharistic controversies go far beyond that debate. Their honest engagement requires recognizing that questioning what was done—especially by liturgists—“in the name of the Council” is not the same thing as questioning the Council itself, and that conflating that today is either theological sloppiness or dishonesty.