Old Ratzinger Sermon denies Transubstantiation

In a glowing review of the book, Fr. Paul Scalia describes its contents as follows:
For the purposes of this blog post, we will look at only one of these Ratzinger sermons, on the topic of the Holy Eucharist. Before we do so, however, it’s a good idea to familiarize people with the fact that the former Cardinal and Pope has the uncanny ability of putting out as catechetical material the most atrocious theological piffle. A single example shall suffice.

In a sermon preached for Lent 1981, the then-Archbishop of Munich and Freising taught a wholly novel concept of original sin, one that reeks of the existentialism of Martin Heidegger more than anything remotely Catholic. In any case, it is difficult to see how it wouldn’t escape the charge of heresy. See for yourself:


(We must point out here, as a matter of justice, that the awful inclusive language in this quote is that of the translator — it is not in Ratzinger’s original.)

Notice that the concept of sanctifying grace is entirely absent, as is any mention of soul. For the Modernist Ratzinger, original sin is a matter of damaged or disturbed human relationships, which every human being is necessarily confronted with — an entirely Naturalistic idea. The true Catholic understanding of original sin, on the other hand, is that it consists of the loss of sanctifying grace in the soul transmitted through natural generation to the children of Adam — a supernatural matter.

Pope Pius XI gave a very succinct refresher on original sin in his encyclical against the errors of the German National Socialists:
Apparently Fr. Ratzinger never got the memo. Or rather, he did get the memo and consigned it to the garbage can. No wonder, then, that in 1956 his second doctoral dissertation got rejected for Modernism, thanks to the watchful eye of Fr. Michael Schmaus, who recognized Ratzinger’s dangerous theology early on.

With this in the back of our minds, we are now properly prepared to look at one of the Ratzinger sermons on the Holy Eucharist contained in Signs of New Life. It is ominously entitled “In Bread and Wine He Gives Himself Entirely.”

For copyright reasons, we cannot simply reproduce the sermon here in its entirety. However, it is possible to read the entire text online for free by means of this Google Books preview:


As the preview edition does not show any page numbers, we cannot refer to a particular page, but the sermon can be found by navigating the table of contents. Also, we can reference the Kindle location for those who have the electronic version sold by Amazon (not that we encourage anyone to obtain this theological poison). The sermon begins at loc. 742.

What is wrong with Ratzinger’s discourse on the Eucharist? In a nutshell: It is filled with references to (natural) bread, makes no reference to the dogma of Transubstantiation (neither the term nor the concept), and everything he says is easily compatible with heretical notions of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, such as Luther’s Consubstantiation or Schillebeeckx’s Transignification.

Here are a few direct quotations taken from the Ratzinger homily:

• “Jesus, as a sign of his presence, chose bread and wine. With each one of these two signs he gives himself completely, not only in part…. He is a person who, through signs, comes near to us and unites himself to us.”

• “The prayer with which the Church, during the liturgy of the Mass, consigns this bread to the Lord, qualifies it as fruit of the earth and the work of humans.”

• “In this way, we begin to understand why the Lord chooses this piece of bread to represent him.”

• “…in some way, we detect in the piece of bread, creation is projected toward divinization, toward the holy wedding feast, toward unification with the Creator himself. And still, we have not yet explained in depth the message of this sign of bread.”

• “Through his gratuitous suffering and death, he became bread for all of us and, with this, living and certain hope.”
  

• “In a very similar way, the sign of wine speaks to us.”
  

• “On the feast of Corpus Christi, we especially look at the sign of bread.”

• [addressing God:] “Give men and women bread for body and soul!”

To understand these words in their context, the interested reader can peruse the entire homily at the link to Google Books given above. There he will read a lot about signs, bread, flour, grinding and baking, but nothing about the real and substantial Presence of Jesus Christ. Yet, the Catholic dogma is clear:
The fact that Fr. Ratzinger also speaks of a “consecrated Host” “through which [Christ] gives himself” is not proof that he is teaching Transubstantiation. Lutherans, Anglicans, and certain other Protestants also believe in the consecration of the host and the chalice at their “Lord’s Supper”, and that Christ is somehow received in and through the Eucharist, but they reject the dogma of Transubstantiation.

Likwise, Ratzinger’s comment in the same sermon that Christ “wants to transform us as he transformed the Host” is no evidence for belief in Transubstantiation. On the contrary, since man obviously cannot be transubstantiated (i.e., undergo a change in his substance while his accidents remain), it is yet another indicator that Ratzinger rejects this beautiful dogma of the Catholic Faith.

Now, to be clear: Ratzinger has affirmed belief in Transubstantiation in other places. In fact, in the other sermon on the Eucharist in the same book, entitled “Transformation Occurs in Prayer”, he speaks of “the bread that is consecrated, transformed, transubstantiated” (loc. 700).

Also, back in 1967, Ratzinger published an essay entitled “The Problem of Transubstantiation and the Question about the Meaning of the Eucharist” (Das Problem der Transubstantiation und die Frage nach dem Sinn der Eucharistie) in the journal Theologische Quartalschrift (vol. 147, pp. 129-158). It was translated into English and published as part of his Collected Works (vol. 2, Theology of the Liturgy [Ignatius Press, 2014], pp. 218-242).

And in his book God Is Near Us (Ignatius Press, 2003), he speaks of “the mystery of transubstantiated bread” (loc. 855) and notes that “the Church calls [the change that occurs in the Eucharist] transubstantiation” (loc. 1013) and that she “insists on ‘change of substance'” (loc. 1024).

Precisely what he understands by that dogma, however, is anyone’s guess:
Ratzinger’s words are particularly disturbing when we recall that Pope Clement XIII warned “that diabolical error, when it has artfully colored its lies, easily clothes itself in the likeness of truth while very brief additions or changes corrupt the meaning of expressions; and confession, which usually works salvation, sometimes, with a slight change, inches toward death” (Encyclical In Dominico Agro n. 2).

The dogma of Transubstantiation is not terribly complicated and can be explained quite straightforwardly. No, the Lord does not “take possession” of the bread and wine, nor does He “lift them up” into some “new order”. Rather, by His almighty power, He converts the substance of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ, such that bread and wine cease to exist entirely, their accidents (appearances) alone remaining. By “substance” here we do not mean what modern empirical science understands by the term (which is perceptible by the senses), but rather the scholastic-philosophical notion of substance as that which makes a thing to be what it is, that in which its accidents inhere, that which the accidents are accidents of (which is not perceptible by the senses but is known by the intellect).

What, then, do we make of Ratzinger’s position? Does he have a clear and consistent position? If he doesn’t believe in Transubstantiation, why does he purport to be teaching it in some places? And if he does believe in Transubstantiation, why does he undermine it with ambiguity and apparent denials in other places?

Ladies and gentlemen, these two questions can be answered very easily by calling to mind that in Joseph Ratzinger we are dealing with a Modernist. In 1794, Pope Pius VI condemned the proto-Modernists of the synod of Pistoia (a local council held in the Italian city in 1786). They, much like today’s innovators, promoted error using ambiguous language under the pretext of meaning to “reform” the Church. At times they were even content to contradict themselves so as to be able to claim that they had been but misunderstood and were in fact orthodox.

Pope Pius roundly condemned such shenanigans in the preamble to his celebrated bull Auctorem Fidei:
When perusing Ratzinger’s sermon “In Bread and Wine He Gives Himself Entirely,” it is not difficult to see that the principal focus of the entire discourse is bread. What is more, it is even blasphemously hinted that bread and wine are offered to God at Holy Mass and not the literal Body and Blood of Christ!

So, to sum up: In his sermon, Ratzinger does not teach the dogma of Transubstantiation. Nowhere does he unequivocally affirm it. In fact, if one takes his words in their natural sense, one will conclude that he is denying it. If an objective reader did not know that the author of these words claimed to be a Roman Catholic, he would probably infer that they were written by a Lutheran or an Anglican. The only way to reconcile Ratzinger’s words with the dogma of Transubstantiation would be to deliberately and artificially put a spin on them so as to “force” them into an orthodox sense.

Now, inevitably someone will object that since the homilies in Signs of New Life are all from Ratzinger’s pre-Benedict period, with most of them probably preached in the late 1970s (he occupied the diocese of Munich-Freising from 1977 until 1982), we should assume that Ratzinger “has changed”, that he no longer holds any heretical views expressed therein.

This, however, is definitively ruled out by what the book’s editor writes in his foreword, namely, that Benedict XVI “reviewed once again the previously unpublished texts and with his characteristic generosity agreed to their publication…” (loc. 42). In other words, Ratzinger just placed his stamp of approval on them once more, so that dog won’t hunt.

Also, some may be tempted to argue that perhaps Ratzinger considers Transubstantiation to be one of several legitimate ways of “interpreting” the Holy Eucharist. But even that idea is condemned by the Catholic Church. There is only one truth about the Eucharistic Presence, and it is that which has been defined dogmatically by the Church at the Council of Trent under the most appropriate label “Transubstantiation.”

Again we turn to Pope Pius VI’s denunciation of the robber synod of Pistoia (its parallels to Vatican II are enormous, by the way). One of the many errors condemned by the Pope was its doctrine on the Holy Eucharist, even though it correctly affirmed the content of the dogma of Transubstantiation. What, then, was the Pius VI’s reason for rejecting it? It did not use the word “Transubstantiation”. See for yourself:
The significance of this papal judgment cannot be overstated. Pius VI condemned failure to use the term “Transubstantiation” in the explanation of the Real Presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament, and he also denounced attempts to dismiss the issue as merely an academic (scholastic) matter.

Denying Transubstantiation is quite the fad in Novus Ordo Land, not just among the clueless pewsitters — most of whom truly don’t know better because they were never taught — but also among academics and high-ranking clergy. For example, Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, whom Ratzinger (as Benedict XVI) appointed head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 2012, is another Transubstantiation denier. The doctrine he teaches may be called “Transcommunication”; and he goes so far as to affirm that the question at what precise moment Christ becomes present in the Holy Eucharist does not even make sense. We have exposed and refuted his pseudo-intellectual bunk in the following post:

The Heresies of Cardinal Muller, Part 1: Denial of Transubstantiation

It makes sense, then, that Müller was chosen to be the editor-in-chief of the German original editions of Ratzinger’s Collected Works. He doesn’t believe in Catholicism either.

Since Catholic belief underlies Catholic practice, false theology will always, before long, result in a corruption of Catholic practice. The “New Mass” of Paul VI and his entire liturgical revolution is the most visible fruit of the changes in theology introduced by the Second Vatican Council.

We must not be surprised, then, by how Fr. Ratzinger spoke about the beautiful and pious Catholic practice of making a visit to the Blessed Sacrament, in a lecture given in 1965:
Got it?! So much for Fr. Francis X. Lasance’s Prisoner of Love dwelling in the tabernacle.

Ratzinger’s theology is what Pope St. Pius X was talking about, in essence, when he wrote that “all terms smacking of an unhealthy novelty in Catholic publications are condemnable, such as those deriding the piety of the faithful, or pointing out a new orientation of the Christian life, new directions of the Church, new aspirations of the modern soul, a new social vocation of the clergy, or a new Christian civilization” (Encyclical Pieni L’Animo, n. 12).

Keep in mind that an immense amount of the official (and magisterial) “Catholic” theology since Vatican II has been shaped by the mind of Joseph Ratzinger, who was not only a mover and shaker at the council itself and, of course, Pope from 2005 until 2013, but was also the head of the Vatican’s doctrinal office well over 20 years, from 1982 until 2005.

Our Blessed Lord had instructed us on how to spot the enemy within:

[Red font emphasis mine, all other emphasis in the original.]