As pronounced by Innocent III, from that moment on, the faithful would be required to believe that the consecrated elements in the Eucharist (i.e., the bread and wine) were literally changed into the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ. “His body and blood are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the forms of bread and wine, the bread and wine having been changed in substance, by God’s power, into his body and blood.”
If the council attendees had any gripes about these new decrees they apparently kept them to themselves. During the 16th century, however, the interpretation of biblical passages like those describing the Last Supper became pivot points for the controversies that arose between the Catholics and Protestants. In that regard, Martin Luther (leader of the Protestant Reformation) seemed to have more than a little problem with the whole idea of transubstantiation, beginning with the fact that the term did not appear in any biblical scriptures. Apparently, Hildebert of Lavardin, Archbishop of Tours, had coined the term, from the Latin transsubstantiatio, around 1079 CE. In 1520, though, Martin Luther referred to it as “an absurd and unheard-of juggling with words” and stated, “the Church had the true faith for more than twelve hundred years, during which time the holy Fathers never once mentioned this transubstantiation—certainly, a monstrous word for a monstrous idea.”
A decade later, the Incan king Atahualpa took issue with the concept of transubstantiation. In their entertaining book Eat Thy Neighbor, authors Daniel Diehl and Mark Donnelly recount the story of what took place after the capture of Atahualpa by conquistador Francisco Pizarro in 1533. Threatened with execution unless he converted to Christianity,
Atahualpa said he bowed to no man and told the Spanish exactly what he thought of their religion. His people, he said, only sacrificed their enemies to their gods and certainly did not eat people. The Spanish, on the other hand, killed their own God, drank his blood and baked his body into little biscuits which they sacrificed to themselves. He found the entire practice unspeakable. The Spanish were outraged and had Atahualpa publicly executed.
Unfortunately, other accounts of this incident offer a somewhat less cinematically heroic end to Atahualpa’s story. In an alternate version, the captured Incan king converted to Catholicism and was given the name Juan Santos Atahualpa. His fellow Catholics then celebrated Juan’s baptism by having him strangled with a garrote.
Back on the other side of the wafer, Roman Catholic leaders not only adopted the concept of transubstantiation but during the Eastern Orthodox Synod of Jerusalem (a famous get-together in 1672), they took a moment to thumb their collective noses at the upstart Protestants:
In the celebration of [the Eucharist] we believe the Lord Jesus Christ to be present. He is not present typically, nor figuratively, nor by superabundant grace, as in the other Mysteries, nor by a bare presence . . . as the followers of Luther most ignorantly and wretchedly suppose. But truly and really, so that after the consecration of the bread and of the wine, the bread is transmuted, transubstantiated, converted and transformed into the true body itself of the Lord . . . and the wine is converted and transubstantiated into the true blood itself of the Lord.”
Even as recently as 1965, Pope Paul VI made it clear that as far as he and the Roman Catholic Church were concerned, with regard to transubstantiation, their stance had not changed in the 400 years since the Council of Trent, one of the Church’s most important ecumenical councils.
But how many of the modern faithful ever think about the concept of transubstantiation when they’re taking communion? And similarly, how many Catholics are worried about being labeled heretics if they don’t really believe that they’re performing an act of theophagy as they consume the wine and wafer? Apparently not many. In fact they seem to take the same kind of “nod-nod, wink-wink” approach to transubstantiation as they do toward not eating meat on Fridays or, in the case of my relatives under the age of 85, the church’s ban on any form of birth control beyond the rhythm method—which several of them refer to as Vatican Roulette.