I recently read that one can refer to the
blessed Mother as "Mother of the Eucharist." We also refer to her as
"Mother of God" but may not refer to her as "Mother of the Trinity."
From this it would seem that when one receives the holy Eucharist, one
is receiving the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus, but one is
not receiving the Father and the Holy Spirit. Yet I have been reading
that because God is one, we must be receiving the father and the Holy
Spirit as well as the Son when we receive the Eucharist. this makes
sense but I'm confused as to why Mary can be called "Mother of the
Eucharist" but not "Mother of the Trinity" if we receive the Trinity
when we receive the Eucharist. Can you clarify this? Thank you. |
Dear Thomas, When we receive Christ in
Holy Communion, we receive his body and blood, soul and divinity. His
body, blood and soul are human. He is divine because he has the nature
of the One God. Mary is the Mother of God because Christ has both a
human and a divine nature. The Father and the Son do not have a human
nature. So Mary cannot be the mother of the Trinity. All of the above
are human words to describe what Christ, who knows everything about God
and reality by his own personal experience, has revealed to us through
the Apostles. Christ certainly gave them the basic message about who he
was and who the Holy Trinity was but not in the exact words the later
Church councils used. The councils had to come up with new distinctions
because they were dealing with heretics whose interpretation of the
Apostles' words would have taken the heart out of the original
revelation given to the Apostles by Christ. That is why the Church
makes distinctions, not to create a new doctrine but to preserve the
original doctrine. Thus all of the above distinctions about the One God
in three divine persons or the divine and human nature of the Person of
Christ have been formulated by the Church in her efforts to combat
heresy as in the the first four centuries. So nobody in the Church,
even the Pope, sees what Christ sees. All the Popes and Bishops can do
is to pass on the substance of what Christ told the Apostles about the
great mysteries. Thus when the hierarchy in the great Councils of the
past made distinctions in words that were not literally in the Bible,
it did so, not because it had any special vision from Christ nor
because it had direct sight into the mystery (only Christ does). It did
so because it needed new words to safeguard an original teachings, not
to create a new teaching. If the Church did not have this power as a
living interpreter of Christ's message, it would have fallen apart
centuries ago because there are all kinds of ways that men can read the
Bible and come up with all kinds of plausible explanations that make
sense to one party but not to another, thus generating a fight which
leads to a dozen more parties until Christianity simply falls apart
under all the fighting. The Holy Bible alone cannot defend itself
against the interpretions that the human mind, especially of the
intellectuals, can invent. To deal with the fertile wits of man making
distinctions one needs, not Popes and Bishops who are intellectual
giants, but men humble enough to stick to what the Apostle's taught
them. And everything that Christ taught the Apostles was not written
down in the Gospels, which were organized by the Church four hundred
years later. Many Protestant do not agree with this notion of
tradition, a point I mention so that Catholics will know where they are
coming from. The first question is whether the Bible needs an
interpreter or not? Assuming that it needs some kind of interpreter,
who is that interpreter? Some individual or group of individuals or the
Catholic Church? That is one way to frame the issue. Dr. Geraghty
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