Berengarianism

In anticipation of her being confirmed next Spring my granddaughter’s parish provided her with an abundance of materials about the sacrament. Included among them is the YouTube link to Bishop Robert Barron’s address to the 2020 Los Angeles Religious Education Congress titled “The Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist”.

Readers who click onto it will understand why it is so highly recommended. Bishop Barron tracks the Church’s unaltered stand on the Real Presence from the very beginning with Jesus at the Last Supper up until the present. His enlightening review takes us through Saint Ignatius of Antioch in the first century, through various Church Fathers in the next several centuries, through Saint Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth, the Council of Trent in the sixteenth, up until the Second Vatican Council of our own time.

In the eleventh century we meet Berengarius of Tours, the Archdeacon of Angers, who opposed the doctrine Aquinas would later articulate as transubstantiation. Berengarius ultimately recanted his heretical claim that the Eucharist was only the spiritual or symbolic presence and not the real presence of Christ.  However, his name has since been associated with the heresy. In his prominent 1965 encyclical “Mysterium Fidei” Pope Paul VI (now canonized) refers to ‘berengarianism’, the belief that Jesus is merely symbolically present in the Holy Eucharist. The term may not be well known, but the condition it describes is commonplace.

Bishop Barron, citing the 2019 finding of the Pew Research Center, includes in his remarks the astonishing fact that almost 70% of Catholics in this country do not believe in the Real Presence. This alarming statistic, the bishop points out, is not the result of the rejection of the doctrine but of ignorance of it. I find his conclusion credible. What properly informed (and, as important, formed) Catholic would not rush to embrace such a belief? Catechetics in this country – especially since Vatican II – has been less than fully effective. To be sure, there are many explicable reasons for this. Nevertheless, the majority of us are berengarianists who need to be educated.

That our berengarianism is so prevalent isn’t too surprising. Not just as Catholics but as a society we seem to have a problem believing deeply in anything. The level of our trust in the institutions which have traditionally held our respect, institutions such as the government, the press, the police, even the Church, is low if extant at all. Intellectual concepts that require even mildly rigorous cogitation, such as the Trinity, the Incarnation or Natural Law, prove too much for our otherwise, less fruitfully, absorbed minds. Such indifference to the moorings that have stabilized us as a civilization is precarious as it allows our liberty to become libertinage and our journey forward to become a descent downward, a descent into barbarism. Heirs of the Enlightenment though we may be, we should pay due obeisance to what was once praised as the ‘Queen of the sciences’, Theology.

It is interesting to note that over the past twenty-four years the donors who have funds with us at NCCF have requested distributions in excess of $25 million to disparate organizations in this country and around the world – all engaged in exemplary works of mercy, corporal and spiritual. Significantly, however, very few requests have been made for catechization. Donors who read this and listen to Bishop Barron’s presentation might want to consider the pressing need for this apostolate.

The Archdeacon of Angers got things straight before his death. Let us do as well.