I remember one sermon of Father Donovan, though he gave it some sixty years ago. He viewed the sermon as an occasion for instruction. Nothing like raising enthusiasm or making moral injunctions or encouraging conversion to the faith. In that sermon, he tried to explain the notion of transubstantiation, and for some reason I was actually listening (I was perhaps ten or eleven years old). He said that the bread and the wine in the sacrament of Holy Communion actually became the very body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, who had said, after all, at the Last Supper, ‘this is my body’ and ‘this is my blood’, when he distributed the bread and the wine to his companions at the supper. It is hard to think that anyone, even or especially a spin doctor, would have thought to invent that extraordinary saying after the event, or would have misremembered it. The most economical explanation is that Jesus did say it. But what could he have meant? (Click here for a discussion of the literal and the symbolic: about imperfectly understood beliefs.)
