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In rethinking eucharistic doctrine, the theologians speak of the "signchange" that takes place in the elements in existential categories rather than sticking to the static, mechanistic terms of the Scholastics. Their basic point is that the change takes place amid what they call an "inter-person activity": the encounter of man and God at the Mass. There Christ gives himself, makes himself present, to his people. Father Smits compares Christ's giving himself to the gesture of a Dutch housewife who offers her guests tea and cookies. Just as the housewife offers not food itself but her welcome "incarnated" in the gift, Christ also offers himself, incarnated in the bread and wine. Adds Jesuit Schoonenberg: "I kneel not for a Christ who is supposed to be condensed in the host, but for the Lord who through the host offers me his reality, his body."
Ecumenical Consequences. While this new way of eucharistic thinking is intended primarily to express the faith of the church in modern terms, the theologians admit that their approach has ecumenical consequences. Capuchin Smits, whose own thinking owes much to Protestant Theologian F. J. Leenhardt, points out that "the possibility is open for a new sort of ecumenical conversation with Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans and Orthodox."
Until recently confined to footnote-marbled pages of scholarly journals, the new eucharistic thinking has just recently seeped out into the open—and led to predictable whispers of heresy. In May, the Dutch bishops issued a joint pastoral letter warning Catholic conservatives to distinguish between the unchangeable truths of eucharistic doctrine and the theologians' right to interpret them. Last month, at Italy's National Eucharistic Congress in Pisa, Paul VI warned against "elusive interpretations" of the traditional doctrine. While willing to heed the edicts of the Pope and the criticism of other theologians, the eucharistic innovators are confident that they have found a way to escape the inadequacies of Scholastic teaching. "With transubstantiation we can't go forward," says Smits. But transignification? "Now it is possible to be a Catholic in the modern world."
* Which are both received by the laity in Protestant and Anglican churches. Since the Middle Ages, the consecrated wine is consumed only by the priest in Roman Catholicism, although the liturgical reforms of the Vatican Council now allow it to the laity on special occasions such as nuptial masses.