Well, I made the mistake of reading Just What is Transubstantiation? over at Perennis which led me to DL this article, Eucharistic Change, which starts off very nicely with the following words. He sums up perfectly the caricature that most people have of Transubstantiation (which to this day I don't understand well enough to evaluate intelligently). He also makes the point that TS is not "the official" doctrine of Rome:
Let us begin with some misconceptions
about what the Catholic tradition says
happens when bread and wine are consecrated.
The Council of Trent did not decree that
Catholics should believe in transubstantiation:
it just calls it a most appropriate (aptissime)
way of talking about the Eucharist,
presumably leaving open whether there might
not be other, perhaps even more appropriate
ways of talking. You could say that the
Council sanctioned and recommended this
theology whereas, for example, the Anglican
Thirty-Nine Articles are rather less liberal:
they forbid it its ‘repugnant to the plain words
of scripture’. It is likely, however, that the
authors of that document did not quite
understand the meaning of that doctrine and
fairly certain that a whole lot of Catholics do
not either.
Perhaps we could start with a caricature of
the doctrine which I think would be taken for
the real thing by a great many Christians,
whether they accept or reject it. The caricature
goes like this: at the consecration, the bread
and wine change into a different kind of
substance, flesh and blood, in fact the flesh and
blood of Christ; but this is disguised from us
by the fact that to all appearances the bread
and wine are unchanged.
--Herbert McCabe, OP
