Preaching the Real Presence

If the idea is to improve the average church-going Catholic’s understanding of the Eucharist, I think it is a mistake to catechize on the subject in the homily. That, in any case, is what a distinguished liturgist once told me, and I suspect he was right. If you have to explain the fundamentals just before confecting the sacrament, you are fighting a battle already lost. That sort of instruction—or better yet, initiation—has to take place elsewhere. Admittedly, the “elsewhere” is harder to locate than it used to be, but that doesn’t make it any less necessary. Instead of using the Sunday homily to patch up a fraying sense of the Real Presence, it would be better for homilists to lean into the truly strange world made present in Scripture. We need more exegesis and less exhortation. What, for example, could be stranger to most contemporary American Catholics than stories of Jesus casting out demons? I certainly find them bewildering. But Mark’s Gospel depicts a truly foreign country filled with demons and exorcisms. If a homilist leaned into that testimony with honest curiosity as well as conviction, he might broaden our sense of what is possible, what is real, and what is truly present.