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In this episode, Trent examines a popular Jesuit priest’s controversial opinions about the purpose of the mass and the necessity of Transubstantiation.
Narrator:
Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey everyone, welcome to the Council of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker Trent Horn, and today I want to talk to you about America’s second most confusing Jesuit priest. Now, you’ve heard me talk about Father James Martin on the show a lot. He definitely gets the gold medal for the confusion he sows, but the subject of today’s episode easily takes the silver medal for most confusing and quasi, if not outright, heretical takes on Catholicism. But before I get to him, just a reminder that liking this video and subscribing to the Council of Trent podcast on YouTube really helps us a great deal to reach more people. And if you’re listening on Apple iTunes, we’re really close to getting 2000 reviews of the show. So if you could leave us a review on Apple iTunes, I would greatly appreciate it. All right, so today I’ll be talking about Father Thomas Reese, and in particular his controversial take on the Eucharist.
Well, first it’s important that I give you some of the backstory on Father Reese to see that this isn’t an isolated occurrence. So Father Reese was ordained in 1974, and a few years later served as an associate editor for America Magazine. This is a Jesuit publication that was founded in 1909. In 1985, the Vatican hosted the second Extraordinary General Assembly of the Senate of Bishops. It was 165 bishops present, and this led to the promulgation of things like the Eastern Code of Canon law in 1990, but even more importantly, to the publication of the Universal Catholic Catechism in 1992. Now, in the early ’90s, there were some people, even a few bishops, who were worried about the new catechism, and one of these Catholics who was worried was Father Thomas Reese. So in 1990, Father Reese oversaw a symposium, the papers presented there were later published as a book, that was extremely critical of the new universal catechism of the Catholic Church.
And what was interesting was that this symposium was being held in spite of the fact that the catechism at that time had only been released to the bishops in secret, sub secreto, in Latin, for them to review, but it ended up in the hands of dissident theologians like Elizabeth Johnson, who is a dissenting feminist theologian the USCCB would later have to admonish. Bishop Raymond Lucker, though, offered his take at the symposium. He was a notoriously dissenting bishop who said the catechism was oppressively sexist. Fortunately, their efforts to derail the publication of the catechism did not succeed, but Father Reese’s controversial work continued when in 1998 he became the editor in chief of America Magazine. During his time there, the magazine would publish very controversial pieces that challenge church teaching under the guise of giving both sides of an issue. This included publishing articles that would explore arguments defending the use of condoms.
There was even an article from a US congressman criticizing the withholding of communion from politicians who support legal abortion. However, pressure from the congregation for the doctrine of the faith and its prefect, Cardinal Ratzinger, led to Father Reese being asked to resign from being editor of America in 2005. And this happened shortly before Cardinal Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI. However, in the articles that were published after his resignation that Father Reese published on his own, these include things like criticizing the bishops for the support of politicians that helped to overturn Roe v. Wade. He’s called climate activist Greta Thunberg a prophet for Advent. He complained that Fratelli Tutti, the Popes and Cyclical Brothers all has a seemingly sexist title, and he has referred to defenders of contraception and abortion as, quote, “Those who promote women’s rights.” But in this episode, I want to focus on two of Reese’s pieces, ha-ha, or two of Reese’s articles that describe what seem to be quasi, if not fully heretical views on the Eucharist.
This will also be helpful if you encounter other Catholics who have similar dismissive views towards the Eucharist. All right, let’s get started. In his 2019 article, Father Reese was commenting on a Pew Forum poll at that time that showed 70% of self-identified Catholics only thought Christ is symbolically present in the Eucharist. Father Reese calls this a failure of catechetics, but he goes on to complain about what he considers to be the real problem, Catholics who focus too much on Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist. He thinks that’s the real problem. He writes, “The mass is not about adoring Jesus or even praying to Jesus. The mass is more about us becoming the body of Christ than it is about the bread becoming the body of Christ. The Eucharist is about making us more Christ-like so that we can continue his mission of establishing the kingdom of God, of bringing justice and peace to the world,” end quote.
Oh Brother, or oh Father. Instead of stamping IHS on the Eucharistic host, that’s the first three Greek letters of Jesus’ name in Greek, Iesus, it seems like Father Reese would have us stamp SJW, or Social Justice Warrior on them instead. But the real problem with Father Reese’s argument is that it creates a false dilemma. One either adores Christ in the Eucharist at mass or sees the Eucharist as the means to grow in holiness, to be like Christ, but the latter is impossible without the former. And when the former ceases to be important, the latter becomes just another empty ritual. That’s why the catechism says, quote, “In the liturgy of the mass, we express our faith in the real presence of Christ under the species of bread and wine, by, among other ways, genuflecting or bowing deeply as a sign of adoration of the Lord.” Pope Francis says that, “Silence in the liturgy is necessary,” because it, quote, “Disposes us to adore the body and blood of Christ. And the catechism quotes the following exhortation from Pope St. John Paul II.
It says, “The church and the world have a great need for eucharistic worship. Jesus awaits us in this sacrament of love. Let us not refuse the time to go to meet him in adoration, in contemplation full of faith, and open to making amends for the serious offenses and crimes of the world. Let our adoration never cease.” Father Reese followed up his 2019 article with a similarly titled one from 2023, where he says this: “Since my critics often accuse me of heresy,” that’s never a good sign, “before I go further, let me affirm that I believe in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. I just don’t believe in transubstantiation, because I don’t believe in prime matter, substantial forms, and accidents that are part of Aristotelian metaphysics.” What? This is like saying, “I believe God became man. I just don’t believe in hypostatic union, because I don’t like the technical vocabulary being used.” Father Reese claims that the doctrine of transubstantiation is just an awkward import from Aquinas’s synthesis of Greek, in particular Aristotelian philosophy.
That it isn’t a part of the faith itself, it only confuses modern people, so we should just get rid of it. Now, it’s true that the term transubstantiation is not a part of the deposited faith. It’s a theological tool to help us understand the faith. Similar terms that don’t come from the deposited faith would include hypostatic union, or even Bible. They could be substituted with other words, but the dogmas and revelation they represent absolutely cannot be rejected.
Also, transubstantiation is not a holdover from Greek philosophy. It’s a Latin term, and it was used 200 years before St. Thomas Aquinas was even born. You could find in the writings of Bishop Hildebert of Tours, and dissenting theologians like Berengar of Tours, during the Eucharistic controversy of the 11th century. The Fourth Lateran Council used the term transubstantiation 10 years before Aquinas was even born, when it spoke of Jesus Christ whose body and blood are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar, under the forms of bread and wine, the bread being changed, transubstantiatio, by divine power into the body, and the wine into the blood, so that to realize the mystery of unity we may receive of him what he has received of us.
And the Fourth Lateran Council didn’t even use Aristotelian ideas like prime matter or accidents in order to explain this change that happens at mass. Finally, the Council of Trent infallibly defined that one must believe in that quote, “Wonderful and unique change of the whole substance of the bread into his body, and of the whole substance of the wine into his blood, which is fittingly called transubstantiation.” My colleague Jimmy Aiken, who’s written an entire book on interpreting magisterial documents, soberly analyzes the peril in Father Reese’s rejection of the term transubstantiation. Here’s what Jimmy says, “The term transubstantiation was coined in the 1000s, so it is not part of the deposit of faith, and not divinely revealed.” Reese would not be a heretic for denying this term, but in rejecting transubstantiation, Reese said that quote, “Christ’s presence in the Eucharist is an unexplainable mystery.”
On its face, that appears to be a doubt of or a refusal to believe the explanation provided by the Council of Trent, that the whole substance of bread and wine are changed into the whole substance of Christ’s body and blood. Reese thus should clarify whether he actually accepts this change, which is divinely revealed and was made a dogma by Trent. By of course, the Trinity Council, not this Council of Trent. Now, what’s interesting is that Father Reese’s complaints about transubstantiation actually echo Martin Luther’s complaints about the doctrine. Luther said this, “It is an absurd and unheard of juggling with words to understand bread to mean the form or accidents of bread, and wine to mean the form or accidents of wine. Why do they not also understand all other things to mean their forms or accidents?” The answer to Luther’s question is that Jesus referred to bread as his body and the wine as his blood. Jesus did not say, “This bread contains my body,” or, “I am in this wine.”
Jesus just said the bread and wine were his body and blood, but because we still perceive the bread and wine at mass to be bread and wine, and because Jesus says this is not bread and wine but his flesh and blood, then the only logical conclusion is that although the accidents of the bread and wine, the things that we perceive with our senses, have remained, the substance, the metaphysical core of what these things are, has changed into Christ’s body and blood. Finally, I want to note that Father Reese has a habit of being needlessly confused about doctrines that really aren’t that confusing. In a 2015 article on not giving boring homilies, he said the following, which I find to be truly astounding.
He writes, “As a young priest, I did make a promise to myself that I would never use words in a homily that did not make sense to me. As a result, I usually avoid phrases like saving souls, God’s grace, and transubstantiation, because I’m not sure what those words mean. They are abstractions that don’t touch me. On the other hand, love, compassion, and mercy are words that I can connect with,” end quote. What? Your job as a priest is to save souls. That’s literally your one job. Hebrews 13:17 says, “Of the leaders in the church, obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as men who will have to give account.” The central mission of a priest is to help people receive God’s grace and so inherit eternal life. Obviously, part of that mission involves showing people love, compassion, and mercy, but not to the exclusion of helping them enter into communion with God who just is love itself through His grace that makes that even possible. I’ll end with three thoughts.
First, pray for Father Reese, and for every priest that he will have a clear understanding of his vocation, and always be faithful to it. Second, the point of this episode was not just to bash on a priest, on a very liberal priest. Father Reese puts his arguments out into the public square, and in doing so, he opens them up to criticism, which can be quite pointed, if the conclusions he’s reaching are tiptoeing into heresy. The point of this episode is to highlight how we can engage these kinds of arguments when we hear other people sharing them and copying and pasting them from someone like Father Reese. And finally, three, the fact that there are priests and even bishops who fail to defend the faith as clearly as we’d hope or even try to undermine it, does not disprove the indefectibility of Christ’s church as a whole. The leaders of Christ’s church will never formally bind the church to heresy, but that doesn’t mean the leaders are always going to respond to heresy and ambiguity as they should. The charism of infallibility keeps the church’s leaders from formally teaching the wrong answers.
It doesn’t guarantee they will always prudently or courageously speak the right answers or even discipline those who have the wrong answers, frankly. But I actually see this as evidence for the church being guided by the Holy Spirit that is survived in spite of human incompetence. There’s a story, perhaps apocryphal, of a cardinal speaking to Napoleon, Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon tells him, “Your eminence, are you not aware that I have the power to destroy the Catholic Church?” To which the cardinal tells Napoleon, “Your majesty, we Catholic clergy have done our best to destroy the church for the last 1800 years. We have not succeeded, and neither will you.” So the fact that the church has withstood attacks from without and even within for over 2000 years, is one of the motives of credibility, one of the pieces of evidence that St. Thomas Aquinas spoke of when he presented his case for the church having a divine foundation. All right, so I hope that today’s episode was helpful for all of you. And yeah, I just hope that you all have a very blessed day.
Narrator:
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