TOPIC: THE MYSTERY OF TRANSUBSTANTIATION

INTRODUCTION

This topic – the Sacrament of Eucharist – focuses on the body and blood of Jesus
transubstantiated in every Mass. This will also inform the students that the Most Holy
Eucharist is an incredible mystery.  It is, in fact, the mystery of all mysteries.

Element: Integrate personal objectives with organizational goals

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:

At the end of the learning session, the students will be able to:

1. Share their idea on the mystery of Transubstantiation.

2. Analyze a Bible verse.

TARGET VALUES: faith, love of God, active participation in the Mass

TIME FRAME: Two (3) hours

ACTIVITIES:

Activity 1: My Idea of Transubstantiation

Instruction: Share your personal idea as to what happen when the priest uttered the
words This is my Body over the bread and This is my Blood over the wine
during the Consecration part of the Holy Mass. Write your ideas inside the
box below and then answer the following questions.

What Happens During the Consecration

During the Consecration, Catholics believe that when they receive the Sacrament of
the Eucharist they are receiving the body and blood of Christ in the form of bread and
wine. During the consecration of bread and wine, Catholics believe that the bread and
wine become the body and blood of Christ through transubstantiation. This means that
Jesus Christ is truly present in the consecrated bread and wine. It is known as the real
presence. In a prayer of consecration, a Christian surrenders himself or herself to God in
order to allow Him to entirely sanctify his or her soul. A believer offers to God his time,
his plans, his possessions, himself in consecration.
When the priest uttered the words This is my Body over the bread and This is my Blood
over the wine during the Consecration part of the Holy Mass. The priest leads the
assembled community of believers in asking God to send His Holy Spirit upon the
proffered gifts of bread and wine. This is so that the gifts may become the Body and
Blood of Jesus Christ. To do this, the priest speaks the words of the Eucharistic prayer.
 Process Questions
1. Does the activity makes sense to you? In what way?
-This activity gives a lot of sense to me as to know the literal truth of Christ's presence while
emphasizing the fact that there is no change in the empirical appearances of the bread and
wine.

2. Do you believe that a miracle took place at the Consecration during the Holy Mass?
- It is possible and I believe but I cant explain because In general, reported Eucharistic miracles usually
consist of unexplainable phenomena such as consecrated Hosts visibly transforming into myocardium
tissue, being preserved for extremely long stretches of time, surviving being thrown into fire, bleeding, or
even sustaining people for decades.

3. What is the meaning of Christ’s words “This is my Body” and “This is my Blood” at the
Last Supper? Do we have to interpret it literally?

- The meaning of Christ’s words “This is my Body” and “This is my Blood” at the Last
Supper is that Jesus  takes the cup of wine, gives it to His apostles and says “This is my blood of the
covenant, which is poured out for many”. However, the main thing is that they don't believe
that Jesus was speaking literally when He said “This is my body”, meaning that the bread literally became
His body.

4. Do you have a personal encounter of Jesus in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass?
Elaborate your answer.

Yes as what I’ve stated in the Sacrament of Eucharist. I personally encounter Jesus
When I was in the church last 2019 if I’m not mistaken that time is the youth
Overnight prayer and that night I suddenly nap my eyes and like im dreaming that
I’m on heaven and feels so cold and unusual like I feel the spirit of Jesus Christ
invade in my soul.

Activity 2: Bible Verse Analysis: John 6:51-57

Instruction: Read the Bible verse. Re-read it and analyze it well. You may read too the
article below and then write your analysis inside the box below and
answer process questions.
 John 6:51-57 – My Analysis

My analysis in this Verse is that The final meal of Jesus before his death is given a
mystical significance in this. Avoiding any appearance of Jesus being a passive victim,
John portrays him as willingly offering himself as a sacrifice. The idea is related to the
lamb that was sacrificed in place of the first-born children of the Hebrews in Egypt and
ritually eaten on Passover. He offers his life as a substitute not literally for the lives of
others but for their salvation after death in the life to come. However, the imagery used
here would have been offensive to most Jews, since one of the earliest Jewish laws
forbade the eating of blood, and dead bodies were considered ritually unclean. The
concept of eating the body of the god was familiar to non-Jews from pagan rites,
however; and would have been more acceptable to them. Protestants generally see this
account as metaphorical, and consider the rite of the Last Supper to be a symbolic
memorial. For Catholics, the bread and wine and actually and miraculously transformed
into the body and blood of Christ, without, however, changing their apparent form.
Process Questions
1. What are your new learnings upon reading and analyzing the Bible verse?
- The New learnings that I get from this verse is to when you eat and drink the body and blood
of Jesus Christ you will be more blessed because Whoever eats of the bread will live forever,
and the bread that he will give for the life of the world is the flesh Jesus Christ.

2. What is the connection of the Bible verse above to the Last Supper and Calvary?
- The connection of the verse above to the last supper of cal;vary is a miracles of
feeding the five thousand and walking on water, the Bread of Life Discourse, popular
rejection of his teaching and Peter's confession of faith.

3. Do you believe that the bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Jesus after
the consecration? Elaborate your answer.

-Yes. The Catholic Church states that the Eucharist is the body and blood of Christ
under the species of bread and wine, it maintains that during the consecration, the
substances of the bread and wine actually become the body, blood, soul and divinity of
Christ

4. Do you believe that what you received during the Holy Communion is the Body of
Christ? Why?

- Yes. The Holy Eucharist refers to Christ's body and blood present in the consecrated

host on the altar, and Catholics believe that the consecrated bread and wine are actually
 the body and blood, soul and divinity of Christ. In other words, only those
who are united in the same beliefs are allowed to receive Holy Communion.

5. What important lessons you get from this topic?

-The important lesson I’ve learned ffrom this topic is we should always take a respect
when we having the holy communion because holy and it represent the body and blood
of Jesus Christ.

ASSESSMENT TOOLS

For all activities

Rubrics: (Score X 5)
4 The content is comprehensive and clear; and the ideas are organized.
3 The content is clear; and the ideas are organized.
2 The content is clear; but the ideas are so organized.
1 The content is not clear; and the ideas are not organized.
0 There is no attempt to do the task.

References: (APA format) 6th edition

Books:

Belmonte Charles (2006). Faith Seeking Understanding Volume 1. Summa

Theologiae Foundation. Manila

Ott, Ludwig (2018). Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma. Baronius Press. USA

______________ (2000). Catechism of the Catholic Church. Libreria Editrice

Vaticana

Journal/Article

Webpage without an author Uglas M. Beaumont (2019). Is Transubstantiation

Unbelievable?. Retrieved from https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/is-
transubstantiation-unbelievable
APPENDICES

IS TRANSUBSTANTIATION UNBELIEVABLE?
UGLAS M. BEAUMONT • 5/6/2019

The Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation states that the bread and wine, at the
moment of consecration during Holy Mass, actually become the body and blood of
Jesus Christ. The change, however, is not detectable by the senses. This has led some
Christians to question whether it is true. In order to understand what the doctrine of
transubstantiation teaches, and why so many arguments against it are misleading, we
need to understand the philosophy behind the doctrine.

About 350 years before Jesus’s incarnation, Aristotle offered a philosophical

explanation of change that would later be used by St. Thomas Aquinas to explain the
Eucharist. Aristotle said that there are two kinds of change: substantial and accidental.
Now, don’t confuse either of these terms with how they are used today! In philosophy,
“substance” refers to what a thing is at its core, while “accidents” are modifications of
that substance.
For example, people at the beach remain human when they go home because humanity
is their substance, but their location is just an accident. And if that person’s skin turns
red from being at the beach too long, that is accidental change. Skin color is not
determined by the substance of humanity, because it is a difference among humans.
Thus, to change skin color is not to go from being human to being non-human.

Substantial change means something is no longer what it was before. The most

common example of this is when a living thing dies, it is no longer that thing, but merely
a deteriorating combination of the physical features that composed it, as when a cow
dies and its parts used for various purposes. Although things often undergo accidental
and substantial change at the same time, it doesn’t have to happen that way. A thing
may undergo accidental change without substantial change (a skinny dog can grow into
a fat dog), and a thing might also undergo substantial change without immediately
noticeable accidental change (as when a sleeping cow dies). There is more to the
distinction between substantial and accidental change, but this is enough to get us
started.

“Transubstantiation” is an English term based on the Latin words for the process of
change in substance, as “transportation” is for the process of changing location. In
Catholic theology, “transubstantiation” indicates the change that the elements of
communion undergo when they change from bread and wine into the body and blood of
Jesus Christ. This change is utterly unique because this substantial change occurs
without any accidental change. With the exception of some remarkable Eucharistic
miracles, transubstantiation does not result in a change that is empirically detectable or
scientifically provable. The doctrine is thus not believed because of any perceived
change, but it is believed to be the best explanation for biblical statements that identify
the communion meal with Jesus’ body and blood (John 6:53-58; Luke 22:19-20; 1 Cor.
11:26-27), as well as the testimony of the historic church.

Those complaining that the bread and wine do not appear to be flesh and blood, then,
are not only expressing common sense, but they affirm the teaching of the Church. A
skeptic who tries to disprove transubstantiation scientifically on these grounds, however,
would be wasting his time, for there is no physical means to prove or disprove such a
change. It would be like trying to mathematically prove which perfume smells better.

Furthermore, Catholics are prepared for their First Holy Communion precisely by

being taught what the Eucharist truly is (cf. Canon Law 913). So, because the Church
explains this miracle, it is not a case of God deluding or deceiving believers as some
have argued. For example, Evangelical apologist Norman Geisler complains that
transubstantiation “undermines belief in the resurrection because if our senses are
deceiving us about the consecrated host, then how do we know they are not deceiving
us about the resurrection appearances of Christ?” If transubstantiation is true, however,
then our senses are not deceiving us at all. Rather, they are correctly delivering
sensation of the accidents of bread and wine. St. Paul’s requirement is that the body
and blood be discerned, not sensed (1 Cor. 11:29).

Christians who fail to discern Jesus’ body and blood in the Eucharist have been
tragically misled. All Christians believe in an omnipotent God who could perform the
miracle of transubstantiation if He willed it to happen. That same God inspired scriptures
that (if taken literally) teach that the communion meal is truly Jesus’ body and blood.
That God who inspired the Scriptures built a Church based on the Eucharist, and that
Church taught the dogma for 1,200 years before Aquinas explained it philosophically,
and it remained virtually unquestioned until the sixteenth century, during the
Reformation. Denial of the dogma of transubstantiation is contrary to both sacred
Scripture and Tradition.

As Thomas Aquinas wrote:

Does any unbeliever profess that the changing of bread and wine into the Body and
Blood of the Lord is impossible? Then let him consider God’s omnipotence. Admit that
nature can transform one thing into another, then with greater reason should you admit
that God’s almighty power, which brings into existence the whole substance of things,
can work not as nature does, by changing forms in the same matter, but by changing
one whole thing into another whole thing. (Concerning Reasons of Faith, 8)

What is perhaps an even larger problem, though, is that arguments against

transubstantiation based on appearance seem to work equally well against the
Incarnation of the Son of God. Being made in the form of a man (Phil. 2:5-8), Jesus’
divinity could not be detected by any empirical means, and one could say that his dual
nature is even harder to believe than a transubstantiated communion meal! Jesus was
clearly a human being with all the limitations of humanity, yet Christianity teaches that
he was also God, the second person of the Holy Trinity. These are not just big
differences – without the faith as authoritatively taught by the Church since its origin,
they can appear to be logically contradictory.

Which is more difficult to believe: that one finite, material thing can be changed into
another thing spiritually while retaining its physical properties, or that apparently
contradictory properties can coexist in one person? If one cannot accept
transubstantiation simply because it seems counter-intuitive or implausible, it is difficult
to see how one could remain a Christian at all.