Transubstantiation: What Happens at the Consecration of the Mass

Quick Insights

Transubstantiation is the term the Catholic Church uses to describe the complete change of the substance of bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus Christ that occurs at the words of consecration during Mass.
The outward appearances of bread and wine, including their taste, smell, weight, and texture, remain exactly as they were before the consecration, while the underlying reality of what they are changes entirely.
The Council of Trent formally defined transubstantiation as a divinely revealed truth of Catholic faith in 1551, declaring it the most fitting term to describe the unique change that takes place at every valid Mass.
Transubstantiation is not a scientific claim about the molecular composition of the consecrated elements but a theological and philosophical claim about the deepest level of their reality, a level that no laboratory instrument can measure.
The change at consecration is caused entirely by the power of God acting through the words and ministry of the validly ordained priest, who acts in the person of Christ rather than in his own name.
After the consecration, the whole Christ, body and blood, soul and divinity, is fully present under each of the two species separately, so that a communicant who receives only the consecrated host receives Christ entirely and without diminishment.

Introduction

Transubstantiation stands as one of the most precise, most theologically rich, and most contested doctrinal formulations in the entire history of Catholic Christianity, a single word that carries within it an entire philosophical and theological tradition brought to bear on the central mystery of the faith. The Catholic Church teaches that at the words of consecration spoken by the priest during Mass, “This is my body” and “This is my blood,” something genuinely and objectively changes about the bread and wine on the altar, a change so total and so fundamental that the Church has called it a change of substance, meaning a change at the deepest level of what the elements are, rather than merely a change in how they appear, how they function, or what they signify. This change is what the word “transubstantiation” names: the Latin prefix “trans” meaning “across” or “complete transformation,” joined to “substantiatio,” meaning “the bringing into being of a substance,” together pointing to a total passage from one substance to another. The Catechism of the Catholic Church presents transubstantiation as the most appropriate term to describe what the Church has always believed happens at the consecration, affirming that the conversion of the whole substance of the bread into the body of Christ and the whole substance of the wine into his blood takes place at those words (CCC 1376). The doctrine is not an abstract theological puzzle invented by medieval scholastics; it is the Church’s best effort, using the most precise philosophical vocabulary available to her, to express faithfully the literal truth of Christ’s own words at the Last Supper and the consistent conviction of the Christian community from the apostolic age onward that in the Eucharist the faithful receive not a symbol but the Lord himself. Understanding transubstantiation in its proper theological context requires moving through its scriptural foundations, its historical development, its philosophical articulation, and its contemporary relevance, and this article undertakes that comprehensive presentation so that the reader may hold this doctrine with both intellectual confidence and eucharistic devotion.

The history of transubstantiation as a formally defined doctrine reflects a long process of theological clarification that moved from implicit apostolic belief through patristic articulation to medieval philosophical precision and finally to formal conciliar definition, with each stage responding to the specific intellectual challenges of its era. The earliest Christian communities believed without any apparent controversy that the Eucharist was genuinely the body and blood of Christ, as the consistent testimony of Saint Ignatius of Antioch, Saint Justin Martyr, Saint Irenaeus of Lyon, and all the major Fathers of the first four centuries confirms. The first serious controversy about the precise mode of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist arose in the ninth century when Paschasius Radbertus and Ratramnus of Corbie debated whether the eucharistic body of Christ was the same historical body as was born of Mary and crucified on Calvary, a debate that revealed the need for more precise terminology without resolving it definitively. The crisis that forced the development of the precise formulation came in the eleventh century when Berengar of Tours denied any substantial change in the eucharistic elements at the consecration, arguing that the bread and wine remained bread and wine while becoming signs and figures of Christ’s body and blood. Multiple local councils and ultimately Pope Gregory VII required Berengar to affirm a formula asserting the real and substantial change, and this controversy generated the theological reflection that produced, within a generation, the first use of the term “transubstantiation” to describe the change precisely. The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 incorporated the term into a formal conciliar text for the first time, and the systematic theological development of its meaning reached its apex in the work of Saint Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, whose treatment in the Summa Theologica remains the standard reference for Catholic theology on the subject. The Council of Trent’s formal definition in 1551, issued against the various Protestant positions that denied substantial change, incorporated the Thomistic framework while directing the definition against the specific denials of Trent’s own historical moment, and the Second Vatican Council and subsequent papal teaching have consistently reaffirmed both the doctrine and the term while contextualizing it within the broader theology of the Eucharist as sacrifice and communion.

The Philosophical Framework: Substance and Accidents

To understand what the Church means by transubstantiation, one must first grasp the philosophical distinction between substance and accidents that the term presupposes, a distinction drawn from Aristotle’s analysis of reality and adopted by the medieval Scholastic theologians as the most useful available framework for articulating the unique change that occurs at the consecration. Substance, in the philosophical sense used here, does not refer to a physical ingredient or a chemical compound; it refers to the fundamental kind of being that something is, the underlying reality that makes a thing what it is rather than something else. A piece of bread is substance of bread because of its underlying nature as the kind of thing bread is; the same could be said of a stone, a tree, a human being, or any other object. Accidents, in this philosophical vocabulary, refer to the observable qualities and properties that belong to a substance without constituting its fundamental nature: color, taste, smell, size, texture, weight, and the like. These accidental properties can vary considerably while the substance remains the same, and they can also, in the unique case of transubstantiation, remain in their perceptible form while the underlying substance changes completely. In ordinary natural processes, change always involves either the accidents changing while the substance remains the same, as when bread becomes moldy, or the substance changing through a natural process that also produces a visible change in the accidents, as when bread is digested and becomes part of a living body. Transubstantiation is unique precisely because it involves the substance changing while the accidents remain, and this reversal of the ordinary relationship between substance and accidental change is what makes transubstantiation a wholly supernatural act that exceeds the power of any natural agent and can be accomplished only by the direct action of God.

Saint Thomas Aquinas devoted extensive and precise philosophical analysis to the question of how the accidents of bread and wine can subsist without the substance that normally underlies them, since in the natural order accidents depend on their substance for their existence. Thomas argued that God, who is not bound by the natural order he has established, directly sustains the accidents of bread and wine in existence after the consecration without any substance of bread or wine to support them, since the substance of Christ’s body and blood now underlies these accidents without making them its own accidents in the ordinary sense. This extraordinary mode of existence, in which the accidents of bread and wine subsist without their natural subject, is one of the ways in which the eucharistic presence differs from every other mode of existence, natural or supernatural. Thomas also addressed the question of what happens to the consecrated species when they are broken or consumed, arguing that the accidents of bread and wine continue to exist and to undergo the natural changes they would ordinarily undergo, including digestion and dissolution, but that these changes affect only the accidents, not the underlying substance, which is the body and blood of Christ. When the accidents are so completely dissolved that they no longer sustain the form of bread or wine, the Real Presence ceases in that particular portion, not through any new act of change but through the disappearance of the accidents that were its sacramental vehicle. This careful and precise philosophical analysis, whatever one thinks of the Aristotelian framework in which it is conducted, demonstrates the intellectual seriousness with which the Church’s tradition has approached the question of what exactly happens at the consecration, refusing to accept either a vague symbolic account or an account that fails to do justice to the genuine bodily presence of Christ that the faith has always proclaimed.

The Words of Consecration and Their Unique Power

The words of consecration, “This is my body” and “This is my blood,” spoken by the priest at the climax of the Eucharistic Prayer, are the most theologically charged words in the entire Catholic liturgy, and understanding their unique operative power is essential to understanding what transubstantiation means and why the Church teaches it. These words are not a prayer addressed to God requesting that he bring about the consecration; they are performative words that actually effect what they say, in the same way that a judge’s words “I sentence you to ten years” actually impose the sentence rather than merely describing it. The Catechism teaches that the efficacy of the words of institution rests on the authority of Christ himself, who speaks them through the priest, and that the change they effect is real and objective regardless of the personal holiness or even the personal faith of the minister (CCC 1375). This objectivity of the sacrament’s effect is one of the most important principles of Catholic sacramental theology, developed with particular force by Saint Augustine in his controversy with the Donatists in the fifth century: a validly ordained priest celebrating Mass with the proper intention, using the correct matter and form, effects the consecration regardless of whether he is in a state of grace, regardless of whether the faithful attending fully understand what is happening, and regardless of any subjective disposition on the part of anyone present. Christ acts through the priest as through an instrument, and the power of the action belongs entirely to Christ rather than to the human minister.

The theological tradition has distinguished carefully between the words of institution as historically reported in Scripture, meaning the words as a quotation of what Jesus said at the Last Supper, and the words of institution as consecratory, meaning the words as the operative formula through which the consecration is effected at each Mass. The Catechism grounds the consecratory power of these words in the authority of Christ, who gave this power to his Apostles with the command “Do this in memory of me” (Luke 22:19), and who acts through every validly ordained priest who repeats these words in the context of the Eucharistic Prayer. The specific wording of the consecratory formula has been the subject of careful attention throughout the tradition, with the Church specifying the essential minimum required for validity while surrounding it with the rich context of the full Eucharistic Prayer that expresses the theological meaning of what the words accomplish. Eastern Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions have sometimes emphasized the epiclesis, the invocation of the Holy Spirit, as the consecratory moment, while the Western tradition has generally emphasized the words of institution as the decisive moment, but this difference of theological emphasis does not constitute a difference of faith about what happens at the consecration; all hold that through the priest’s action in the Eucharistic Prayer, the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ. The theology of the priest acting “in persona Christi,” meaning in the very person of Christ, is the key to understanding how human words spoken by a finite, fallible person can accomplish an infinite and miraculous change: they accomplish it not by virtue of the person speaking but by virtue of the One whose person the ordained priest represents and embodies at the altar.

Transubstantiation and the Council of Trent

The Council of Trent’s treatment of transubstantiation in its thirteenth session in October 1551 represents the most complete and most authoritative magisterial statement on the subject ever issued, and understanding the historical and theological context of this definition illuminates both its specific content and its lasting significance for Catholic doctrine. Trent addressed the Eucharist in the context of the Protestant Reformation, which had produced three distinct and mutually contradictory positions on the nature of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist: Zwingli’s symbolic view, in which the bread and wine are signs of Christ’s body and blood with no substantial change; Luther’s view, sometimes called consubstantiation, in which Christ’s body is present “in, with, and under” the bread and wine without any change of substance; and Calvin’s view, in which Christ is spiritually present in the Eucharist received by faith but not bodily present in the elements. Trent’s response rejected all three positions and defined the Catholic doctrine with the precision these challenges demanded, issuing canons anathematizing those who deny that Christ is truly, really, and substantially present in the Eucharist; those who deny that the whole Christ is present under each species; and those who deny that a wonderful and singular conversion of the whole substance of bread into the body and the whole substance of wine into the blood takes place, retaining only the species of bread and wine, which conversion the holy Catholic Church calls transubstantiation. The word “conversion” in this definition is carefully chosen: it is a conversion, meaning a complete turning or change, not merely an addition or a presence alongside what was already there, and it is a conversion of substance, meaning the deepest level of what the elements are, not a change of accidents that would leave the bread and wine essentially unchanged.

Trent’s definition drew explicitly on the philosophical vocabulary of substance and accidents that the Scholastic tradition had developed, and the Council’s use of this vocabulary has sometimes been questioned by theologians who wonder whether doctrinal truth is being bound too tightly to a particular philosophical framework that other cultures and other ages might not share. The Church’s consistent response to this concern has been that while the philosophical vocabulary of substance and accidents belongs to a particular intellectual tradition and is not itself revealed truth, it accurately expresses the underlying truth of faith that is revealed, namely that the bread and wine are genuinely and completely changed into the body and blood of Christ at the consecration, and that this change is real and objective and not merely a matter of how the elements are perceived, valued, or used. Pope Paul VI, in his encyclical Mysterium Fidei of 1965, specifically addressed the concern that newer modes of expressing the eucharistic presence, sometimes called “transignification” or “transfinalization,” the view that the meaning or purpose of the bread and wine changes at the consecration without a change of substance, could adequately express the Catholic faith. Paul VI judged that these approaches, while containing some genuine insights, do not adequately capture the full reality of the change the Church has always believed occurs at the consecration, and that the term “transubstantiation” remains necessary and irreplaceable precisely because it points to an objective change in what the elements are and not merely in how they are understood or used. This magisterial judgment has shaped all subsequent Catholic theology on the subject, and the Catechism of John Paul II reaffirmed it explicitly in its treatment of the Eucharist (CCC 1376).

Transubstantiation and the Real Presence: Their Inseparable Connection

The doctrine of transubstantiation and the doctrine of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist are not two separate doctrines but one connected truth seen from two different angles, and understanding their relationship is essential to grasping the full theological significance of either. The Real Presence is the truth that Christ is genuinely, truly, and substantially present in the Eucharist after the consecration; transubstantiation is the explanation of how this presence comes about, namely through the complete conversion of the substance of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. One could in principle affirm the Real Presence without accepting the specific philosophical vocabulary of transubstantiation, as Luther did, but the Church teaches that transubstantiation provides the most accurate available account of what the Real Presence actually consists in, and that alternative accounts such as the Lutheran “consubstantiation” fail to do full justice to the completeness of the change and the uniqueness of the presence. The Real Presence is not a presence of Christ alongside the bread and wine, as though Christ’s body occupied the same space as the bread and wine while they continued to exist as bread and wine; it is a presence that exists because the bread and wine no longer exist as such, having been entirely converted into the body and blood of Christ. The accidents of bread and wine that remain after the consecration are not accidental to bread and wine that still exist; they are accidental qualities that subsist by God’s power while pointing to and containing the body and blood of Christ that now underlies them.

The Catholic teaching that the whole Christ is present under each species separately, so that communicants who receive only the consecrated host receive Christ entirely and not partially, flows directly from the doctrine of transubstantiation. If the substance of bread has been entirely converted into the body of Christ, and if Christ is a whole and indivisible person, then the whole Christ, body and blood, soul and divinity, is present under the species of the consecrated host; similarly, the whole Christ is present under the species of the consecrated wine. The separation of the two species in the Eucharistic prayer, in which the body and blood are consecrated separately, represents the sacramental enactment of the sacrificial death of Christ in which the separation of body and blood occurred, but it does not mean that the communicant who receives the host receives only the body without the blood, or vice versa. The Catechism expresses this with the technical term “concomitance,” meaning that the whole Christ accompanies each species because the risen and glorified Christ is not a partial or divided being but a whole person whose body and blood, soul and divinity, are inseparable in the resurrection (CCC 1377). This teaching has important practical consequences: it grounds the Church’s practice of giving communion under one species alone when circumstances warrant, since the communicant receives Christ entirely under either species, and it explains why the Church has always regarded the reception of the consecrated host as a full and complete reception of communion rather than a diminished one.

Protestant Views and the Catholic Response

The Protestant Reformation’s rejection of transubstantiation produced a diversity of alternative positions on the eucharistic presence that have shaped Christian thought for five centuries, and engaging these positions honestly and precisely helps clarify by contrast what the Catholic doctrine actually teaches and why the Church holds it with such doctrinal firmness. Martin Luther’s rejection of transubstantiation was motivated primarily by his philosophical conviction that Aristotelian categories of substance and accident had no place in theology, but his rejection of the philosophical vocabulary did not lead him to deny the Real Presence; on the contrary, Luther maintained a stronger doctrine of Christ’s bodily presence in the Eucharist than most of his Protestant contemporaries, insisting against Zwingli that Christ’s words “This is my body” must be taken with full and literal seriousness. Luther proposed what he called sacramental union, sometimes called consubstantiation by his critics, in which the body of Christ is present “in, with, and under” the bread, without the bread ceasing to be bread. The Catholic objection to this view is not that it takes Christ’s presence too seriously, but that it fails to do full justice to the completeness of the change indicated by Christ’s words: when Christ says “This is my body,” the natural reading of the Greek and Aramaic is that what he holds is his body, not that his body is present alongside what remains bread. The presence described in Luther’s account is less intimately connected to the eucharistic elements, leaving open the question of what relationship exactly exists between the bread and Christ’s body, while the Catholic account of transubstantiation specifies that the relationship is one of identity achieved through complete conversion of substance.

Zwingli’s purely symbolic account, and Calvin’s more sophisticated spiritual presence view, represent a different trajectory that has been enormously influential in the Protestant and evangelical traditions. Zwingli argued that the words of institution use a figure of speech in which “is” means “signifies,” so that “This is my body” means “This represents my body,” and he supported this reading partly by pointing to other biblical passages where “is” appears to have a figurative meaning. The Catholic response to Zwingli draws on the context and the tone of the entire discourse in which Jesus established the Eucharist, including the Bread of Life Discourse in John 6, in which Jesus repeatedly and emphatically insists on the literal eating of his flesh and drinking of his blood in a way that provokes offense and causes disciples to leave, and in which Jesus never retreats from the literal force of his language to offer a merely metaphorical explanation. The consistent testimony of the Fathers, who without exception take the eucharistic presence as real and substantial rather than merely symbolic, provides a further powerful argument against the symbolic interpretation, since it is extraordinarily difficult to explain how a symbolic interpretation that was purportedly always the correct meaning of Christ’s words was not articulated by any major figure in the first fifteen centuries of the Church’s life. Calvin’s position, which acknowledges a genuine but spiritual presence of Christ in the Eucharist received by faith, represents a more nuanced and more challenging position for Catholic theology to engage, and the Catholic response acknowledges the genuine insight that faith is necessary for the fruitful reception of the Eucharist while insisting that Christ’s objective presence in the consecrated elements does not depend on the faith of the recipient, since the change at the consecration is an objective divine act and not a subjective spiritual experience conditioned on the communicant’s disposition.

Transubstantiation and Modern Science

A question frequently raised in the contemporary world concerns the relationship between the doctrine of transubstantiation and the findings of modern science, and addressing this question honestly requires careful attention to what the doctrine claims and what it does not claim. Modern scientific analysis of a consecrated host would find exactly what scientific analysis would find in an unconsecrated host: the same chemical composition, the same molecular structure, the same proteins, starches, and water that constitute ordinary bread. This finding does not contradict the doctrine of transubstantiation, because the doctrine specifically teaches that the accidents of bread remain after the consecration, meaning that all the physically observable properties of bread continue to be exactly what they were before. Science investigates the observable properties of things, which are precisely the accidents in the philosophical vocabulary the doctrine employs, and transubstantiation teaches that those observable properties do not change at the consecration. What changes is the substance, the underlying reality that makes the thing what it is at its deepest level, and this level of reality is by definition inaccessible to any instrument that measures only the observable properties of things. The doctrine of transubstantiation therefore does not contradict science but operates in a different register entirely, making a metaphysical and theological claim about the deepest level of what the consecrated elements are rather than a physical or chemical claim about their measurable properties. A person who dismisses transubstantiation on the grounds that scientific analysis reveals only the chemical composition of bread has misunderstood what the doctrine claims, just as a person who dismisses the significance of a wedding ring on the grounds that chemical analysis reveals only gold would have misunderstood what the ring means.

The Eucharistic miracles reported throughout the Church’s history, in which consecrated hosts or the contents of the chalice have been reported to take on the physical properties of human flesh and blood in ways that scientific investigation has sometimes confirmed as genuinely extraordinary, raise a different set of questions about the relationship between transubstantiation and observable physical reality. The most studied of these phenomena, including the miracle of Lanciano in eighth-century Italy and several others investigated with modern forensic techniques, have produced reports of what appears to be human cardiac tissue and human blood of a specific type present in the consecrated elements. The Church does not require belief in any particular Eucharistic miracle as a matter of faith, and she approaches such reports with both openness and critical caution, requiring thorough investigation before pronouncing on their authenticity. What these miracles, if genuine, would represent is not a change in the doctrine of transubstantiation but an extraordinary divine intervention in which God allows the underlying physical reality of the body and blood of Christ, normally concealed beneath the accidents of bread and wine, to become perceptible to the physical senses in an exceptional and temporary way for a particular purpose, typically the strengthening of faith in those who encounter the phenomenon. The doctrine teaches that this bodily reality is always present in the consecrated elements; the miracle makes it briefly visible in a way that the normal mode of the sacrament does not.

The Devotional Consequences of Transubstantiation

The doctrine of transubstantiation, received with genuine faith and properly understood, generates a whole range of specific devotional practices and attitudes that have shaped Catholic piety, Catholic architecture, Catholic art, and Catholic pastoral life in ways that would not exist or make sense without the underlying conviction that the substance of bread and wine genuinely becomes the body and blood of Christ at the consecration. The practice of genuflection before the tabernacle, in which the Catholic lowers one knee to the ground as an act of adoration in the presence of the reserved Blessed Sacrament, expresses in bodily form the theological conviction that the person present in the tabernacle is genuinely Christ himself, the Lord of the universe, deserving the deepest possible reverence of body and soul. This practice differs fundamentally from a bow or a nod of respectful acknowledgment before a symbol; it is the posture of a creature before its Creator, of a subject before the King of kings, a posture the whole body makes in response to a presence that the doctrine of transubstantiation establishes as genuine, real, and substantial. The design of Catholic churches, with the tabernacle placed at or near the center of the sanctuary and accompanied by a burning sanctuary lamp indicating the presence of the Blessed Sacrament, reflects the same conviction architecturally: the building is arranged around the presence of Christ in the Eucharist as the home is arranged around the presence of the person who gives it life.

Eucharistic adoration, in which the Blessed Sacrament is exposed in a monstrance and venerated by the faithful in an act of silent, prayerful contemplation before the Lord, makes no sense whatsoever apart from the doctrine of transubstantiation. If the consecrated host were merely a symbol of Christ or a memorial of his sacrifice, exposing it and kneeling before it would be a form of idolatry, adoring a creature rather than the Creator. The entire practice of eucharistic adoration, which has been part of Catholic piety since the thirteenth century and which has flourished with renewed vigor in the contemporary Church, rests on the conviction that the host exposed in the monstrance is genuinely Christ himself, that kneeling before it is kneeling before the Lord, and that the hours spent in silent prayer before the Blessed Sacrament are hours spent in the most direct personal encounter with the living God that the sacramental order makes available to the faithful. Pope John Paul II, who spent long hours in personal adoration before the Blessed Sacrament throughout his life, described this practice in his encyclical Ecclesia de Eucharistia as an indispensable dimension of eucharistic faith, arguing that the adoration of the Eucharist is the natural response of a faith that genuinely accepts what the Church teaches about what happens at the consecration. The feast of Corpus Christi, the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ celebrated each year in the weeks after Pentecost, with its processions of the Blessed Sacrament through streets and public squares, represents the most visible public expression of the conviction that transubstantiation is true and that the Christ present in the Eucharist deserves the worship of the entire city.

What the Doctrine of Transubstantiation Means for Catholics Today

The doctrine of transubstantiation, far from being a dry philosophical formula belonging to the academic disputes of a medieval university, is one of the most personally transforming truths the Catholic faith offers, because it answers with absolute directness the most fundamental question a Catholic can ask about the Mass: is Christ really there? The answer the Church gives through this doctrine is yes, truly, really, and substantially there, not in a vague spiritual sense, not merely in the hearts of the faithful who bring him there with their faith, but objectively, physically present in the consecrated host and chalice in a way that does not depend on the faith of the recipient, the fervor of the celebration, or the holiness of the priest. This conviction should shape the way a Catholic approaches every Mass, every communion, every moment spent in the presence of the tabernacle, and every occasion of eucharistic adoration. The person who genuinely believes what the doctrine teaches will approach communion with a reverence, a preparation, and a gratitude that reflects the immensity of what they are about to receive, and will approach the tabernacle with the instinctive attentiveness that one gives to the presence of a person one deeply loves and whom one knows to be truly there.

The practical call of transubstantiation for Catholics today extends into the whole of their sacramental and moral lives. The reception of communion in a state of mortal sin, a state of grave and deliberate turning away from God that the sacrament of Reconciliation can heal, is precisely the “unworthy reception” that Saint Paul warns against in his first letter to the Corinthians (1 Corinthians 11:27-29), and this warning only carries the weight it carries if the Eucharist is truly the body and blood of Christ rather than a mere symbol. A Catholic who regularly examines their conscience, who approaches the sacrament of Reconciliation with genuine contrition and a firm purpose of amendment, and who receives communion with the attentive faith that the doctrine requires, is living the full logic of what transubstantiation means in the practical order of their life. The encouragement to make visits to the Blessed Sacrament outside of Mass, to participate in benediction and eucharistic adoration, and to develop a personal relationship with Christ present in the tabernacle represents a direct pastoral application of the doctrine, an invitation to allow the truth of transubstantiation to shape not only the hour of Sunday Mass but the whole of daily life oriented around the presence of the Lord who remains with his people in the tabernacles of every Catholic church throughout the world.

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