Of God and His Creatures
Of the kind of Bread and Wine that ought to be used for the
Consecration of this Sacrament
THOSE conditions must be observed which are essential for bread and
wine to be. That alone is called wine, which is liquor pressed out of
grapes:* nor is that properly called bread,
which is not made of grains of wheat. Substitutes for wheaten bread
have come into use, and have got the name of bread; and similarly other
liquors have come into use as wine: but of no such bread other than
bread properly so called, or wine other than what is properly called
wine, could this Sacrament possibly be consecrated: nor again if the
bread and wine were so adulterated with foreign matter as that the
species should disappear. A valid Sacrament may be consecrated
irrespectively of varieties of bread and wine, when the varieties are
accidental, not essential. The alternative of leavened or unleavened
bread is an instance of such accidental variety; and therefore
different churches have different uses in this respect; and either use
may be accommodated to the signification of the Sacrament. Thus as
Gregory says in the Register of his Letters*:
"The Roman Church offers unleavened bread, because the Lord took flesh
without intercourse of the sexes: but other Churches offer leavened
bread, because the Word of the Father, clothed in flesh, is at once
true God and true man." Still the use of unleavened bread is the more
congruous, as better representing the purity of Christ's mystical Body,
the Church, which is figured in a secondary way (configuratur)
in this Sacrament, as the text has it: Christ our passover is
sacrificed: therefore let us feast in the unleavened bread of sincerity
and truth (1 Cor. v, 7, 8).
This shuts out the error of some heretics who say that this Sacrament
cannot be celebrated in unleavened bread: a position plainly upset by
the authority of the gospel, where we read (Matt. xxvi, 17: Mark xiv,
12: cf. Luke xxii, 7) that the Lord ate the passover with His
disciples, and instituted this Sacrament, on the first day of the
azymes, at which time it was unlawful for leavened bread to be found
in the houses of the Jews (Exod. xii, 15); and the Lord, so long as He
was in the world, observed the law. It is foolish then to blame in the
use of the Latin Church an observance which the Lord Himself adhered to
in the very institution of this Sacrament.*
4.68 : The Explanation of a Text
4.70 : That it is possible for a man to sin after receiving Sacramental Grace