Transubstantiation, unwrapped and unwound, is probably the greatest revelation of scientific truth ever handled or perceived, guarded or intuited, by any of the sons of man. All of mankind will one day thank Pope Paul VI for protecting the doctrine from the watering down attempted prior to his encyclical, Mysterium fide, through which the original dogma is guarded.
Trent dogmatized transubstantiation---change from one substance to another. Trent did not dogmatize Aristotle.
The basic objection to the Catholic doctrine of the real presence is not that it is against Scripture, but that it is against reason. The words of Jesus seem plain enough. “This is my body.” This is my blood.” “Unless you eat the flesh of the son of man and drink his blood, you do not have life in you.” “My flesh is real food, my blood is real drink.” When some of his disciples complained, “This is a hard saying; who can accept it?”, he didn’t explain that he had not been speaking literally in saying he would give his body to eat and his blood to drink. Instead he let them go. As St. John tells us, many left him because they would not accept this teaching.
Jesus words are not interpreted non-literally because that is the obvious way to interpret them, but because a literal interpretation seems to be repugnant to reason.
The dogma of transubstantiation teaches that the whole substance of bread is changed into that of Christ’s body, and the whole substance of wine into that of his blood, leaving the accidents of bread and wine unaffected. Reason, of course, can’t prove that this happens. But it is not evidently against reason either; it is above reason. Our senses, being confined to phenomena, cannot detect the change; we know it only by faith in God’s word.
Transubstantiation and Reason (therealpresence.org)
In progressive Roman Catholic theologians, a few like Edward
Schillebeeckx suggested alternatives to transubstantiation. Transfinalization, originally proposed under this terminology by Protestant theologian Franz Leenhardt, looked at the reality of a thing according to the finality of the thing as intended by its creator!
Another theory, that of transignification!
The basic philosophical idea behind it was that significance or meaning is a constitutive element of reality as it is known to human beings, and this is especially true of human realities like attitudes and relationships! Such human realities are known through the meaning those actions have for people! with this background, it was suggested that Christ, at the Last Supper, changed the meaning, or significance of both a Jewish ritual as well as that of the bread and wine! and since meaning is here conceived of as a constituent element of such human realities, the bread and
wine have a new objective reality embodying the presence of Christ! under this theory, the reality of the bread and wine is changed during the mass not in any physical way but in a way which is nonetheless real, for as soon as they signify the body and blood of Christ they become sacramental, embodying and revealing Christ's presence in a way which is experienceably sic real! In other words, when the meaning of the elements
changes, their reality changes for those who have faith in Christ and accept the new meaning that he gave them, whereas for those without faith and who are unaware of their divinely given meaning, they appear to remain bread and wine!
It was in response to these and other theologians that in September of 1965, Pope Paul VI promulgated his encyclical Mysterium fidei
in which he set clear limits to these new theories concerning the Eucharistic change and proposed the perennial validity of the traditional categories! The Pope writes;
We can see that some of those who are dealing with this Most Holy Mystery in speech and writing are disseminating opinions. . .on the dogma of transubstantiation that are disturbing the minds of the faithful and causing them no small measure of confusion about matters of faith, just as if it were all right for someone to take doctrine that has already been defined by the Church and consign it to oblivion or else interpret it in such away as to weaken the genuine meaning of the words or the recognized force of the concepts involved. To give an example of what We are talking about, it is not permissible. . . to concentrate on the notion of sacramental sign as if the symbolism—which no one will deny is certainly present in the Most Blessed Eucharist—fully expressed and exhausted the manner of Christ's presence in this Sacrament; or to discuss the mystery of transubstantiation without mentioning what the Council of Trent had to say about the marvelous conversion of the whole substance of the bread into the Body and the whole substance of the wine into the Blood of Christ, as if they involve nothing more than "transignification," or "transfinalization" as they call it. . . .
(DOC) The Sacramental Theology of Edward Schillebeeckx | Mike Brummond - Academia.edu
