On the Blessed Sacrament

Dear N.,

Thank you for your wonderful query on the Real Presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. Although Anglicans formally reject the imposition of the Aristotelian metaphysical categories of accident and substance required by the doctrine of transubstantiation, we do affirm to the Real Objective Presence to be a Holy Mystery - truer and more real than our own reality, but beyond the capacity of human beings to understand or explain it. Anglicans assertively believe that in the Prayer of Consecration, by virtue of the very Words of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit, the priest, through his sacramental authority, causes the bread and wine to be converted and transformed into the living Body and Blood of Christ, the total Person of Our Lord, God and Man. Our Lord remains under the form of bread and wine in the Holy Mysteries, and under every particle of the Blessed Sacrament, so long as the outward signs of consecrated bread and wine exist. The Real Presence is supernatural, metaphysical, objective, abiding and mystical, utterly mysterious and inscrutable. As Anglicans, we do not venture to define the indefinable or to dogmatise this Mystery of mysteries, and hence we refuse to invoke the categorisation demanded by transubstantiation, a man-made theory imposed on a miracle. And yet Our Lord is there - in the Elements - not merely in a sign, symbol or figure, but in His humanity and divinity, Body and Blood, to nourish His people with His own self, His own Person, His own life.