A Note on the Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist

Extract

In an article on ‘St. John’s Witness to the Blessed Sacrament’ in a former number of Blackfriars, Fr. Vincent McNabb wrote as follows:

It was no main purpose of St. John to show that the Son of God was a worker of miracles. No evangelist records miracles so sparingly. But it remained for the last of the evangelists to remove the last of the misunderstandings about the Holy Eucharist by recording the transubstantiation of water into wine at the wedding feast (John ii, i-ii). As the Catholic doctrine of the Holy Eucharist is based on two miracles, Transubstantiation and Multiplication, and as the miracle of Multiplication had already been recorded by the three Synoptists, St. John’s mention of the miracle of Transubstantiation completed the necessary proof of the possibility of the Real Presence.

This passage seems to me to be misleading on several points, and also to contain, at least implicitly, views which it is difficult to accept. In view of the importance of its subject no excuse need be offered for discussing it here. I venture, therefore, to set down as clearly as I can some of the objections which, it seems to me, can be legitimately urged against it. I will deal first with what Fr. McNabb calls the miracle of Transubstantiation, and secondly with the miracle of Multiplication.