A recent survey of US Catholics concluded that two thirds do not believe in the Real Presence of Our Lord in the Eucharist. In a Church not short of bad news, this statistic doesn’t appear to have caused much reaction. Perhaps that’s because to anyone working in a pastoral setting it is hardly a surprise. As a non-Catholic friend of mine remarks, you would be hard-pressed to deduce that it was the Real Presence from the way the Blessed Sacrament is treated in many Catholic churches.
I have my own theories as to what brought about this frightening loss of faith. They centre on the liturgical treatment of the Blessed Sacrament and the poverty of catechesis over many years. Since the 1990s, catechesis has been dominated by something called the Pastoral Cycle, a pedagogical method which says that teaching has to start from the child’s experience. You consider special celebrations such as birthday parties. So children are taught that Mass is a special meal, the celebration of God’s family, the Church. Sadly, human experience doesn’t prepare us for the Real Presence, so I am unsure how such an approach can differentiate the essence of the Mass from any other horizontally referenced social gathering.
