On June 8, 2004, Fr. Smiga (pronounced: Smeega) gave a lecture to members of FutureChurch at John Carroll University near Cleveland titled: “Biblical Roots of Eucharist.” First, notice that his title has no article before the noun “Eucharist.” That’s a subtle hint that Fr. Smiga doesn’t hold the same view of the Eucharist as you and I. If one is familiar with the modernist circuits within which Fr. Smiga travels, you know what kind of night it’s going to be when he adopts “B. C. E.” (i.e., “Before the Common Era”) rather than “B. C.” (i.e., “Before Christ”); as well as change “A. D.” to “C. E.” (i.e., “the Common Era”). This nomenclature is standard fare for liberal scholars, and it’s a telltale sign that one of them is speaking to you. If such should ever occur, run, don’t walk, to the nearest exit. Other such indicators are that Fr. Smiga writes for “Paulist Press,” one of the most theologically liberal publishers existing today, and pens articles with titles such as, “Pain and Polemic: Anti-Judaism in the Gospels” (implying that the New Testament writers were presumptuous in regarding Judaism as an obsolete religion opposed to Jesus Christ).

But liberal priests such as Fr. Smiga (and liberal nuns such as Sister Catherine who invited him to speak) are heartily welcomed at John Carroll University where the parishioners, after singing that syrupy Novus Ordo melody “One Bread, One Body” (a hymn which refers to the consecrated Host as a piece of “bread”), is followed by an opening prayer which pleads: “We are women, we are men, we are gay, we are straight...We are married, we are single, we are divorced, we are remarried,” and includes refrains after the Scripture readings such as: “I myself am the bread of life. You and I are the bread of life,” chanted three times for liturgical affect. Obviously, there was a symbiosis between Fr. Smiga and his audience, and it is representative of about 90% of the near 300 Catholic dioceses in America today. It is a virtual spiritual wasteland.

On June 8, it was Fr. Smiga’s job to put academic legs on what the people of FutureChurch already believed in their heart about “Eucharist.” Unfortunately for Fr. Smiga, there are still one or two true Catholics left who attend such lectures, and as one might expect, they didn’t take kindly to his instruction. One of them wrote to the bishop, Anthony M. Pilla, to complain. Providing us with a clear sign of his poor theological training, Reverend Pilla wrote back a six-paragraph letter stating all the reasons why he endorsed Fr. Smiga’s lecture, and that this concerned parishioner was merely “misunderstanding” what the poor priest was trying to say. As we will see, Bishop Pilla is the one who “misunderstood” Fr. Smiga’s lecture, since the complaint letter (of which I have a copy) clearly shows that the good bishop is attempting to cover Fr. Smiga’s unorthodox tracks. As such, Pilla takes full responsibility for what Smiga says, since he closes with “...I believe Fr. Smiga’s comments are a useful insight into biblical research and do not contradict the teachings of our faith which we all treasure.”1

Conversely, Fr. Smiga states in his lecture: “I do not speak as a representative tonight of Bishop Pilla or of St. Mary’s Seminary [where he teaches] or as pastor of St. Noel’s church [where he pastors].” That’s quite a disclaimer. We wonder, then, what is the true relationship between Smiga and Pilla, and who, indeed, does Smiga represent, besides himself. The concern is not without warrant, since Anthony Pilla was a recent president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

As we dissect Fr. Smiga’s lecture, this will be a good lesson for Remnant readers, for it will show us where the liberals obtained the idea that the Eucharist is little more than a “meal,” the common motif which we see in almost all Novus Ordo masses today. Fr. Smiga opens up his talk by asserting:

It is never completely clear whether the scenes of the Bible – the scenes such as the Last Supper – are describing what Jesus did or what was being done by the communities who followed Him. We must keep these limitations of our sources in view as we search for the roots of the Eucharist.

In other words, Fr. Smiga is suggesting that the events written in Scripture about Jesus might not have taken place, since they could have been made-up by the Christians who came after him. This is the typical liberal approach to Scripture, much of it based on the 1964 essay by the Pontifical Biblical Commission (PBC) on biblical interpretation. Suffice it to say that the 1964 PBC said no such thing,2 but as they did with Vatican II, the liberals twisted and distorted the PBC’s essay to their own liking, whereupon almost every institution of higher learning in Catholic academia today has adopted the same “it may not be what actually happened” approach to Scripture. They couch it in sophisticated terminology (Fr. Smiga uses the term “etiological”) so that it appears as if they’ve really studied the issue, but it is nothing more than pseudo-intellectualism passing itself off as biblical teaching. It is a sea of heresy; an outright denial of traditional rubrics in Scriptural exegesis.

Fr. Smiga’s favorite tool to cast a shadow on the theological origins of the Eucharist is the “Greco-Roman banquet,” the creation of Dennis Smith, professor of New Testament at Phillips Theological Seminary, another bastion of liberalism. No, this is not Greco-Roman wrestling, although we could say that Fr. Smiga’s use of the term shows that he himself is “wrestling with the Scriptures to his own destruction” (2Pt 3:16). It is Fr. Smiga’s contention that the Last Supper and the Corinthians’ partaking of the Eucharist recorded in 1 Cor 11:17-34 is nothing more than the customary Greco-Roman banquet sprinkled with a few reminisces of Jesus’ death and resurrection for posterity’s sake. Why? Because Fr. Smiga’s overriding paradigm is ecumenical unity among Christians, not the confection of Christ’s body and blood for the forgiveness of our sins. According to Fr. Smiga, the early Christians had little or no concept that the bread and wine were transformed into Christ’s body and blood.

Fr. Smiga’s estimation of the first century view of the Eucharist is confirmed in the Q&A period of his lecture. Responding to a question about why St. Paul held to the practice of “not allowing lay ministers...to receive communion at the same time as the celebrant,” Fr. Smiga retorts: “They didn’t have the Eucharist at the Christian Greco-Roman banquets.” Thus, it is no surprise that Fr. Smiga’s obsession with food goes way beyond physical consumption, spilling over into the theological arena. It is his contention that St. Paul’s solemn warning of “sickness and death” to those who “eat the bread or drink the cup of the Lord unworthily shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord” and “eat and drink judgment upon themselves” (1 Cor 11:27-29) means nothing more than the sin of breaking up Christian fellowship and has nothing to do with confecting the sacred elements. In Fr. Smiga’s words:

That we must be answerable to the body and blood of the Lord, for most importantly in 29, ‘...for all who eat and drink without discerning the body,’ the body here being the symbol of unity for the Christians. So we have, most likely, this very important attestation of Jesus at the Last Supper because Paul needed this image of body as an authoritative statement by which he can say, ‘this is our sign of unity’ and ‘the Church is the body of Christ.’ So Paul draws a close connection between the unity of the community and the proper celebration of the community meal...His issue again is unity. He sees in the body and the bread the symbol, and I don’t use the word symbol here in a weak sense. It’s a powerful sense – a means of drawing the community to that insight.

So, for Fr. Smiga and the rest of the liberal entourage, the big sin of 1 Cor 11 is not what we have always been taught by our tradition. It is not the failure of the Corinthians to distinguish the bread and wine of their love feast over against the consecrated elements of the Eucharist, nor is it their failure to first confess their sins in order to be worthy before God before receiving communion. Rather, it is merely a transgression against unity, marked by some who were hoarding food and acting superior. In Fr. Smiga’s myopic world both can’t be true, and thus only the sin of disunity assumes the exegetical weight of the passage.

Sensing that Fr. Smiga was playing fast and loose with Catholic dogma, one parishioner queried: “Isn’t the body that St. Paul talks about the flesh of Jesus?” to which Smiga responded:

I think that it is an anachronism for us to joke too quickly at St. Paul saying, ‘without discerning the body,’ that what he was referring to, as the questioner said, the flesh of Jesus. Remember that our whole tradition of the real presence was something that developed over centuries...I think the early Christians believed that when they came together they achieved a certain unity with Christ, that they were the body of Christ.

Why does Fr. Smiga insist on this kind of interpretation? Because liberals always want to give the impression that the practices of the Middle Age Church up through the closing of Vatican II were mere theological accouterments; spiritual baggage created by those who were trying to make more out of “Do this in memory of me” than was warranted. As Sigma himself states: “...I think the whole issue of the Eucharist is that we believe that Christ is present with us, that we are the body of Christ.” Such revisionist history provides precedent for the modernist version of the Eucharist championed by such post-conciliar liberal icons as Karl Rahner and Edouard Schillebeeckx. Their claim to fame was that the Eucharist is merely a “transignification” (i.e., an elevated symbol, but nothing more than a symbol) and not the “transubstantiation” dogmatized by the Fourth Lateran Council.3 As we see Smiga project his modernist views onto the first century Church, the emphasis of today’s Catholic liberals is not on the confected Eucharist but on unity around a common meal. In the process, the Church after St. Paul and up until the mid-20th century is the odd man out, since it was too engrossed in protecting the Eucharist from unworthy parishioners and thus failed to open its arms to accept everyone into the “unity of the body.” After all, says Smiga, Jesus ate with sinners and “whether we share the Eucharist or not share the Eucharist across denominational lines is pretty much a decision of church discipline and how you read the biblical texts.” In his words, “the question, I think, for us to say is, ‘How do we feel about our tradition and how do we feel about how it is changing and how do we contribute to the process by which it is changing.” Make no mistake about it. Fr. Smiga’s “feel-good” religion, with the endorsement of Bishop Pilla, is out to change Catholic tradition regarding the Eucharist, and the most alarming fact is that he is representative of most of the post-conciliar Church.

To be fair to Fr. Smiga, however, in the midst of all his stress on “unity” and “Greco-Roman meals,” he makes precisely one statement that gives us pause. After stating that “the early Christians believed that...they were the body of Christ,” he adds, “In time, that understanding deepened and the Church began to see and recognize in the Eucharist the body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus, in the end, explained by transubstantiation and other theories.” Although he adds the caveat: “But I think it’s anachronistic to see that clearly articulated by Paul...”

So, by the above statement, Fr. Smiga isn’t exactly denying Church dogma, at least not outwardly. Liberals often try to avoid ostensible denial of dogma, for they know that if they are caught doing so they will become a lightning rod for the few faithful Catholics, including those left at the Vatican, who are determined to unseat them. (Hans Küng is a good example). Instead, they couch their teachings as opinions (e.g., Fr. Smiga uses the phrase “I think” or “possibly” or “it seems” and other such terms about a hundred times in his forty-minute lecture); or they will state the traditional dogma but then do their best to overwhelm it with disclaimers and theological neutralizers so that its impact is minimized. Whatever his personal beliefs, we cannot forget Fr. Smiga’s clear words: “They didn’t have the Eucharist at the Christian Greco-Roman banquets.” In other words, the Corinthians of 1 Corinthians 11 were not partaking of the Eucharist as we know it today.

So what really is Fr. Smiga’s intention? I think it is to give the impression that the medieval Church exaggerated the meaning and practice of the Eucharist and that it is now time to reassess their view and make the necessary corrections. As Smiga himself states: “We trace the first Mass to the Last Supper, but Mass is a ritual that takes place in a church according to particular norms. The Last Supper was not in a Church.” Even in Smiga’s above admission that the Church “recognized in the Eucharist the body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus” he neither affirms this as the correct view anywhere in his lecture, nor does he state that it is a Catholic dogma that cannot be ignored. For Fr. Smiga, the medieval Church’s understanding is merely an afterthought but not necessarily what was taught or intended by Jesus and the Apostles. We can tell that Fr. Smiga leans in this direction since he says: “in the end explained by transubstantiation and other theories,” which makes it appear as if transubstantiation was, and still is, merely a competing theory along with other theories, but not settled Catholic dogma. In reality, “in the end” the Church entertained no theories other than transubstantiation, condemning even close approximations to it as utter heresy (e.g., consubstantiation, etc, see Council of Trent, Session 22).

Why might Fr. Smiga treat transubstantiation as just one competing theory? Because to Fr. Smiga, the Church is still evolving, and just as she “developed” her understanding about the Eucharist in a way that was substantially different than what Jesus and the Apostles taught, so the Church can continue to evolve into a better and different understanding than what we have today. As Pius X warned, this is the quest of all modernism: the evolution of doctrine.

But here, precisely, is the major problem with Fr. Smiga’s whole approach. If Jesus and the Apostles did not explicitly teach the same thing we understand the Eucharist to be today, then what we believe today is false, and even heretical. This, I believe, is Fr. Smiga’s hidden intent, although he is very careful to camouflage it, side-tracking the reader with aspirations of “unity.” Catholic dogma, which, as even the 1992 Catechism clearly teaches, is based on Apostolic tradition. That is, what the Apostles taught, either by oral teaching or written letters, is all that we believe today as dogma. If it was not taught by the Apostles, then it is not Catholic (cf., 1 Thess 2:15; Catechism paras. 80-83). But Fr. Smiga insists that the early Christians, as taught by St. Paul and the other Apostles, were merely gathering to eat together, but “they didn’t have the Eucharist at the Christian Greco-Roman banquets.” Accordingly, Fr. Smiga believes that Paul did not teach the theological basis of the Eucharist to the clerics and parishioners of Corinth. But if he didn’t teach them, then those doctrines were not part of Apostolic tradition, and thus Fr. Smiga, whether he knows it or not, is teaching that the theology of the Eucharist stemming from the early middle ages until today is an accretion, not a reiteration of first century beliefs. That, my friends, is heretical.

It is unfortunate that Fr. Smiga comes from an intellectual climate that regards data outside of Scripture with more veracity and relevance than it does the information within Scripture itself. But this will invariably happen as it did to a whole generation of Catholic exegetes beginning from the mid-1940s who, in their distorted interpretation of Divino Afflante Spiritu, demoted the Bible off its traditional pedestal. Imbibing the heretical ideas from earlier centuries of Protestant liberals, these exegetes came to the erroneous conclusion that Scripture, rather than being a purely objective and accurate record of the events it narrates, is full of historical mistakes, cultural biases and hidden agendas. The Bible becomes the wax nose of clerics who, for all intents and purposes, have lost the faith, and now read into Scripture their own doubts and prejudices.

The same exegetical mentality presides in Fr. Smiga’s attempt to confuse the roles of the genders. He states:

...the ordination question is not a scriptural question in the sense that, just like we don’t believe we have the Eucharist as we know it in the scriptures, we don’t have ordination as we know it in the scriptures. We have the roots of ordination in the scriptures. The roots of ordination are roles of authority that eventually took on a structure. Those were decisions made after the New Testament time and they continued to develop.

In Fr. Smiga’s flippant disregard for St. Paul’s admonitions, he summarizes the commands in 1 Cor 11:1-16 for a woman to wear a head covering to show that she is under the authority of the man as “...we can’t figure out what he was discussing, something about either hairdos or headdresses in the assembly,” thereby dismissing the entire account as superfluous ramblings.

Fortunately for us, however, Fr. Smiga’s thesis is dead wrong. Just as Jesus held Nicodemus to the doctrine of Baptism (John 3:3-8) and the Jewish crowds to the doctrine of eating His flesh (John 6:35-66), St. Paul wasted no time in telling the Corinthians about baptism and the gospel of “Christ crucified” (1Co 1:23; 2:2). He warned those who laid any other foundation that they would be “destroyed” (1 Co 3:17). He taught them against sexual immorality and divorce and remarriage in painstaking detail (1 Co 5-7). He reminded them how God destroyed Israel for their sins, and that the same could happen to the Corinthians if they didn’t stop sinning (1 Co 9-10). In 1 Cor 10:14-22 (the chapter Fr. Smiga avoids), St. Paul gives a most explicit teaching on the nature of the Eucharist and of sacrificial offerings, stating: “Flee idolatry...is not the cup of blessing...a sharing in the blood of Christ? Is not the bread...a sharing in the body of Christ”.

Having already taught them this vital truth, we can now see why in 1 Cor 11:27-29 St. Paul promises either sickness or death to those who wish to remain ignorant of the true nature of the Eucharist. Moreover, whatever he didn’t tell them in the Corinthian epistle about the Eucharist, he told them face to face, for he says in the last verse of the chapter: “...the remaining matters I shall discuss when I come.” We can imagine that St. Paul gave them everything they needed to know about the nature of the Eucharist, for how could he not, considering the severe punishment for those who transgressed its sacred boundaries?4 St. Paul reiterated these same teachings and warnings regarding the Eucharist in other epistles (cf., Gal 3:1f; Heb 9:23-24; 10:26f; 13:10).

That St. Paul and the Apostles taught these things is confirmed by the fact that all of it was passed down to the early Fathers of the Church, for the Fathers do not claim to be inventing anything that wasn’t already given to them. Contrary to what Fr. Smiga asserts, the concept of the Eucharist as the body and blood of Christ was not a theological accretion of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. The only reason the Church, at that particular time, finally decided to dogmatize the teaching into “transubstantiation” was that just prior to their decision a major objection to its reality was voiced for the first time in a thousand years by a man named Berengarius of Tours (d. 1080), followed by a few more miscreants. Long prior to this controversy, the Fathers, taking what was passed down from the Apostles, had coined a dozen Greek and Latin words signifying the same principle as transubstantiation.5 By the 11th century, the Latin transsubstantiari became the preferred word, appearing in the writings of Hildebert of Tours (c. 1079), Stephen Autun (d. 1139), Peter Blois (d. 1200) and Pope Innocent III.6 Suffice it to say, there was an ancient pedigree of concepts and terminology stemming from the very early centuries of the Church. Anyone who would suggest that the early Church did not know and preach these same concepts, or that such ideas only appeared late in the Church’s history, is either ignorant of the truth or is choosing to distort the truth for his own purposes.

Return to Main Page

Footnotes

1 Bishop’s letter of June 30, 2004, addressed to D. Webster.

2See my series of articles in Catholic Family News titled “Fr. Raymond Brown and the Demise of Catholic Biblical Scholarship” in 2003-2004.

3See my book, Not By Bread Alone, pages 397-418 for a thorough analysis of the concept of “transignification” and the theology that led up to it.

4 See my book Not By Bread Alone, pages 153-164.

5 The strongest word used by the Greek Fathers, identical in meaning to transubstantiation, was metaousious, meaning “change in substance.” Other such words were metaballein (“to change”) used by Cyril and Theodore; metabebletai (“to change or transform”) used by Cyril; metapoiein (“to alter”) used by Gregory of Nyssa and John Damascene; methistesin (“to transmute”) used by Cyril; metastoicheioun (“transelemented”) used by Gregory of Nyssa; metarruthmizein (“to change the form or fashion”) used by Chrysostom; metaskeuaxein (“to transform or disguise”) used by Chrysostom. The Latin Father had five such words in common usage: transmutare, transformare, transfigurare, transfundere, and convertere.

6see Denzinger 416, 784 and Not By Bread Alone, pages 141-142.