The Eucharist and Human Dignity

When we read the stories of Jesuit priest Alfred Delp, celebrating mass in shackles in Tegel prison in Berlin in the fall of 1944, of Archbishop (later Cardinal) Francis-Xavier Nguyễn Văn Thuận, celebrating the Eucharist in solitary confinement in Vietnam with a drop of wine and a little bit of bread, or of Cardinal Sigitas Tamkevičius from Lithuania celebrating liturgy in secret in a Soviet labor camp—we begin to get a sense of the fundamental and life-giving power of the Eucharist and of some aspects of the relationship between the Eucharist and dignity. Delp, Nguyễn Văn Thuận, and Tamkevičius felt strengthened in their hope, self-respect, and experience of being in community, which are important aspects of human dignity.

Notes on Dignity

The Dominican economist Louis-Joseph Lebret developed the idea of “dignity-needs.” Dignity needs (like beauty) allow a person to live a dignified life. Lebret also mentions space—a space to which one can retreat and contemplate.[1] A dignity perspective moves us beyond so called “basic needs” and reminds us of the fact that even food and shelter have dignity-relevant dimensions. Dignity needs reflect important aspects of a dignified life; it is not a bold claim to say that a dignified life allows a person to express deep commitments as long as they do not harm other people. Being able to celebrate the Eucharist and receive communion can be called a dignity need by the standards of many. Being deprived of the Eucharist can be, in a non-trivial sense of the word, torturous.

Let us think of the experience of Jesuit Pedro Arrupe who will accompany us in what follows. Arrupe, General Superior of the Jesuits after the Second Vatican Council and a missionary to Japan since 1938, talked about his hunger for the Eucharist during the 33 days he spent in solitary confinement in Japan in 1941:

The war broke out in Japan on the feast of the Immaculate Conception, 1941, with the attack of Pearl Harbor. The military police immediately put me in jail, in a cell with an area of four square meters . . . I passed the days and nights in the cold of December entirely alone and without a bed, or table, or anything else but a mat on which to sleep. I was tormented by my uncertainty on why I had been imprisoned . . . But I was above all tortured by not being able to say Mass, at not being able to receive the Eucharist. What loneliness there was![2]

Being deprived of the Eucharist can be a torturous experience, precisely because deeply rooted dignity-needs are not met. The Eucharist is dignifying because it is a real encounter with God, a sacred celebration of community, a reminder of the real possibility of the human person entering an intimate relationship with God. The Eucharist can become truly identity-giving. This is why Pedro Arrupe could say: “The Eucharist is the center of my life. I cannot imagine a day without the celebration of the Eucharistic Sacrifice.”[3] The Eucharist speaks about needs beyond the tangible, beyond the “cash value.” It is a reminder of the truth that the person does not live by bread alone (Matt 4:4). This is clearly a statement about human dignity.

The idea of human dignity, prominently positioned in the preamble and article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is considered “the foundation of all the other principles and content of the Church's social doctrine” (Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church §160). The Universal Declaration of Human Rights left a number of questions open, including the justification of the statement that human beings have inherent dignity and the proper operationalization of dignity—what does it mean to “enact dignity” as a form of life?

The Christian tradition, culminating in the celebration of the Eucharist, can offer responses to these two questions: the justification of human dignity is firmly grounded in the creation story (Gen 1:27) and the theology of the incarnation (Phil 2:6-7) which offers new beautiful and redemptive beginnings to the human family. With regard to the operationalization the gospel has the strong message that encountering the poor and wounded is a privileged way to encounter Christ. When we read in Matthew 25:40, “Just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me,” the passage does not use metaphorical language (“it is as if you had done it to me”), but a plain and direct sentence. Encountering Christ cannot happen if one ignores the poor, those who suffer, those who are disadvantaged, those who are vulnerable, those who are wounded.

It is the same Christ whom we encounter in the Eucharist and whom we encounter in the poor. There is only one Christ, Dominus Iesus. In Arrupe’s words when he reflects on the Eucharist: “There is a relationship with the Gospels. We find in the Gospels a realistic, historical image of Jesus as he lived in Palestine. And in the Eucharist we find Jesus Christ living today among us.”[4] It is the same Christ; the same Christ whom we can encounter when we are touched by the lives of the most vulnerable and wounded. And this, in turn, says something about “image and likeness of God.” The kenosis of Christ who “emptied himself” (Phil 2:7) shows us a “poverty of God” that is embraced in a special way by those who are poor. It is crystal clear that the Eucharist commits us to the poor. And this commitment connects the Eucharist to our commitment to a deep practice of human dignity—making the effort and walking the extra mile of respecting a person’s dignity, even under adverse circumstances (e.g. circumstances of vulnerability, scarcity and duress, but also circumstances of moral poverty like violence, injustice, hatred). The Eucharist is a reminder that we are created in the image and likeness of God and that God’s real presence defines who we are and how we ought to live.

Tales About the Eucharist

The Eucharist commits us to dignity and to the poor. This commitment to the poor keeps the Eucharist “grounded,” as a celebration in the “here and now.” The above-mentioned statement that the person does not live by bread alone (Matt 4:4) also entails the message: the person does also live by bread.

That is why it will be difficult to claim that one has truly participated in the Eucharist if one does not live the commitment to Matthew 25. There are some hard questions that we have to ask ourselves, such as: “Why is it that in spite of hundreds of thousands of daily and weekly Masses, Christians continue as selfishly as before?”[5]

There is a temptation to reduce the Eucharist to an isolated island, to a “feel good”-experience, to a spiritual achievement, to a resource of one’s success, to a magic event. These illusions may reflect spiritual worldliness (Evangelii Gaudium §93-94) or a technocratic paradigm (Laudato Si §109-112) with its belief of a good life without deep and ongoing conversion. The Eucharist invites us to see dimensions beyond these misleading mindsets. It thus teaches us important lessons on dignity. When we come to the Eucharist in our liturgy we have gathered, we have acknowledged our sins, we have listened to the Word of God and its meaning, we have we have confessed our faith, we have prayed for the needs of the world. These moments are also tales about human dignity: the human person is part of a community, invited into a self-critical search for identity, open to the transcendent, called to enter commitments, member of the human family, and an example of humanity.

Similarly, when we look at four “Eucharistic moments” (a moment of transformation and disruption, a moment of mystery and sacredness, a moment of reality and presence, a moment of celebration and community) we can draw lessons about human dignity: The idea of new beginnings, freedoms, and the ability to deal with tragedy is part of an understanding of dignity; the connection between mystery and dignity can be established, based on the insight that there is always more to say about dignity. James Hanvey beautifully describes “mystery,” in theological discourse, as “not an intellectual dead end; it is a point of departure. Mystery is the capacity for inexhaustible meaning.”[6]

Dignity is a term that has this capacity. The idea of living our lives in particular circumstances and an encounter with the real is our human condition; we do not encounter the general, but the particular; we do not encounter humanity, but particular human persons. The commitment to reality is another way of honoring the human condition, thus confirming the dignity of those who enact the conditio humana. The We-dimension of our lives, finally, expressed in the “celebration and community-dimension” of the Eucharist, reflects the reality that we are social beings. “Being a person in the image and likeness of God . . . involves existing in a relationship . . . because God himself, one and triune, is the communion of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church §34).

The We-dimension of our lives is also dignity-relevant, especially with regard to the question of: who is included in the “we”? Mechanisms of exclusion create “the poor” we see described in Matthew 25. The Eucharist is deeply connected to the idea of human dignity because of its message of equality: we are all sinners; we come as sinners to the table of the Lord. There is a deep connection between the Eucharist and Penance (Redemptor Hominis §20). The response “I am a sinner” is a very good response to the question “Who are you?”. Pedro Arrupe led the thirty-second General Congregation of the Jesuits (1974-75) and the document gives a beautiful response to the identity question of the Jesuits: “What is it to be a Jesuit? It is to know that one is a sinner, yet called to be a companion of Jesus” (Decree 2). We are all sinners. This statement can shed some light on our understanding of dignity—we can never exhaust the moral invitation that comes with the dignity as persons created in the image and likeness of God (Matt 5:48: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect”). And we can never get there on our own. We depend on God’s mercy. These two aspects unite all of us as members of the human family. And the idea of “being full members of the human family” and “belonging to the human family” is central for the universal understanding of the inherent dignity of the human person.

The Eucharist, as “the source and summit of the Christian life” (Catechism of the Catholic Church §1324) tells one of the most beautiful stories about human dignity; the Eucharist gives us the message that God considers us worthy to invite us into a celebration where “we already unite ourselves with the heavenly liturgy and anticipate eternal life, when God will be all in all” (Catechism of the Catholic Church §1327). “By celebrating and also partaking of the Eucharist we unite ourselves with Christ on earth and in heaven” (Redemptor Hominis §20). This is a beautiful message and invitation. Sinners being called to a redemptive union. This has been beautifully expressed by Pope Francis: “The Eucharist, although it is the fullness of sacramental life, is not a prize for the perfect but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak” (Evangelii Gaudium §47). Pope Francis quotes Saint Ambrose as well as Saint Cyril of Alexandria in this passage (footnote 51). This may be another way of saying: the Eucharist commits us to the poor, to those who are hungry. Pope Francis’ remark in Evangelii Gaudium is obviously not an invitation to “trivialize” the Eucharist, but rather a warning that the Eucharist should not be instrumentalized for purposes that do not serve the greater glory of God.

This is maybe what the Holy Father expresses in this passage: As much as we want to avoid an entitlement-attitude when it comes to matters of grace, we want to avoid the temptation to turn the Eucharist into an elitist celebration. This could be seen as yet another expression of spiritual worldliness. We want to avoid any possible impression of the kind of self-righteousness that Jesus warns against in Luke 18:10-14. Pope Francis introduces a category to approach an understanding of the Eucharist that is both helpful and precious: the idea of divine tenderness. In his address to participants in the pilgrimage organized by the Sisters Disciples of Jesus in the Eucharist on August 25, 2023, he said:

Let us not forget that tenderness is one of God’s features: God’s style is closeness, compassion and tenderness. Let us not forget this. To fill with tenderness the wounds and the voids produced by sin in man and society, starting by kneeling before Jesus in the consecrated Host, and remaining there for a long time . . . even when one seems to feel nothing, in silent and trusting abandonment, because—to repeat an expression particularly dear to him—“Magister adest,” “the Teacher is there” (cf. John 11:28).

If we think of the experience of adoration in front of the blessed sacrament—it is the experience of the tender presence of God. And all can say: “Magister adest.” The message of God’s tenderness, offered to all, is another aspect of the beautiful story the Eucharist tells about the human condition and human dignity—and about a deep and true hunger, a longing for the nourishment that will never make you hunger or thirst again (cf., John 4:4).[7]

Hunger, Dignity, and the Experience of the Eucharist

When we look at the experience of the Eucharist we can, very simply, distinguish two ways of experiencing the Eucharist—the experience of the well-fed and the experience of the hungry. A hungry person will have a different experience of “being invited to the Lord’s table,” of receiving Christ’s body in the bread, or of praying the Our Father with the petition for the daily bread. We pray for our daily bread in the Our Father. Alfred Delp, in his prison meditations, reflected on the Our Father and its petitions and describes the hunger for bread as a real sorrow; he also says that—in order to understand this petition—you have to have experienced hunger, you have to have experienced a piece of bread as a grace from heaven.[8] You have to have deep respect of bread and the experience that bread is precious is crucial for the development of this respect. Delp obviously wrote these reflections when he was hoping for bread in prison, where he was not properly fed and where a piece of bread was precious. His experience made it impossible for him to be indifferent to the petitions of the Our Father.

Indifference is indeed a major obstacle to a deep experience of the Eucharist. Archbishop Oscar Romero described in his journal (4 January 1979) how he tried to remember a community of religious sisters about the grave dangers of indifference: “I spoke to them about the presence of Christ in our midst, which he has revealed in diverse forms: in the Church community . . . especially, in the Eucharist; about how many times the Lord's loving presence is answered by indifference . . . atonement is necessary.”[9] Indifference is a sign of hardness of the soul, one of the opposites of tenderness; and tenderness cannot happen without vulnerability, probably not without wounds. It could make sense to say that it is more difficult for the well-fed person to break through the hardness of indifference than for the person who is hungry.

A deep way to break through the indifference that comes with comfort is suffering. Suffering speaks a language that can invite us to experience the Eucharist on a deep level. Priests celebrated the Eucharist in the concentration camp Dachau. They had the experience of “Christ coming to us in our Calvary.” The French philosopher Simone Weil offers many insights into the epistemic force of suffering. Consider the book of Job—as an existential wrestling with God it must have been written in intense pain. So, this is how it should be read. Read the book of Job with a migraine. Simone Weil, having suffered from migraines all her life, has insights on a deep and personal level into ways of knowing that comes through suffering. It is knowledge that breaks through the wall of indifference, or through, to use Franz Kafka’s famous words, “the frozen sea within us.”

The deep hunger for the Eucharist is especially intense in moments of suffering, in moments where we reach our limits. Let me return to Pedro Arrupe: Four years after his imprisonment, on August 6, 1945 the atomic bomb was dropped over Hiroshima; Arrupe was leading the novitiate of the Jesuits at the outskirts of the city and established a rescue and medical treatment mission. They treated as many people as they could and took them in. Arrupe describes the celebration of the Eucharist:

The explosion took place in August 6. The following day, August 7, at five o’clock in the morning, before beginning to take care of the wounded and bury the dead, I celebrated Mass in the house. In these very moments one feels closer to God, one feels more deeply the value of his aid. Actually, the surroundings did not foster devotion for the celebration of the Mass. The chapel, half destroyed, was overflowing with the wounded, who were lying on the floor very near to one another, suffering terribly, twisted with pain . . . What a terrible scene! A few minutes later the One about whom John the Baptist said “There is one among you whom you do not recognize” (John 1:26) would descend on the altar.[10]

There is a hunger for the mystery born from suffering. And the mystery can offer, precisely because it is a mystery, a healing response to unspeakable suffering. The person does not live by bread alone. Arrupe describes another experience in the days after the atomic bomb over Hiroshima—he went with companions to the Jesuit priests’ house in the city center; and here is the description of their “way of doing things:” “We finally arrived at our destination and began our first treatments of the Fathers. In spite of the urgency of our work, we had first stopped to celebrated our masses.”[11] The person does not live by bread alone and there is a hunger only the Eucharist can respond to. This was also the experience of Archbishop Oscar Romero. On 2 March 1979 he noted in this diary:

In the evening, in the retreat house in El Despertar where Father Octavio and four young men were killed, we celebrated the Eucharist on the fortieth day after the tragic death of our brother . . . The size of the group assembled and their participation was very impressive. When it came time for the Offertory they gave a bouquet of red flowers to the mothers of each of the four young men. They also gave one to Father Octavio's father . . . and this was very moving for the people present.[12]

Again, we see that hunger for the Eucharist born from suffering. Hunger is a deep way to help understand the painful longing the Eucharist is responding to. And hunger for magis [the more[, hunger for the transcendent, hunger for what goes beyond the “Here and Now,” is an important aspect of human dignity. Dignity can be meaningfully connected with the imagination, a sense of the possibility of a different world; human freedom, a constitutive element of dignity, is based on a sense of possibilities, on the ability to imagine different pathways and “worlds.” This is another bridge between the Eucharist and dignity: the Eucharist widens and deepens our imagination, our way of thinking about ourselves, the world, and God’s relationship with us.[13] The Eucharist is nothing less than an invitation to experience the real presence of God.[14]

The imagination is an expression of a longing and also shaped by the experience of hunger that would not want to allow “the way things are” to have the last word. Because of its impact on our longing for the magis, I would like to suggest that the ability to suffer is an important aspect of human dignity. We would not have the discourse on human dignity, had we not the experience of vulnerability and woundedness. The hunger for justice is the result of the experience of injustice. The beatitudes praise this hunger: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled” (Matt 5:6). This hunger cannot be separated from the hunger that draws people to God’s real presence in the Eucharist.

The person does not live by bread alone, but bread is necessary. Pedro Arrupe celebrated the Eucharist in the midst of and a response to suffering, but he did work very hard with his hands and without denying the bitter realities with their demands. After 6 August 1945 he was busy with medical services that he described in no unclear words, far from any spiritualizing of the situation: “To cleanse the wounds it was necessary to puncture and open the blisters . . . his back was completely covered with wounds made by small pieces of glass. With a razor blade I removed more than fifty fragments . . . we had absolutely no anesthetics and some of the children were horribly wounded.”[15]

Yes, he did find himself in the presence of God: The first sight they caught from the city made them turn to God: “We did the only thing that could be done in the presence of such mass slaughter: we fell on our knees and prayed for guidance, as we were destitute for human help.”[16] But after the prayer they went to work including the cremating of dead bodies. You honor dignity by honoring the realities of human life. Arrupe even wrote: “From a missionary perspective, they did challenge us when they said: ‘Do not enter the city because there is a gas in the air that kills for seventy years.’ It is at such times that one feels most a priest, when one knows that in the city there are 50,000 bodies which, unless they are cremated, will cause a terrible plague.”[17] Again, to honor the dignity of the human person means honoring the life realities that have been embraced by God through the incarnation.

Dignity, Real Presence, and Real Hunger

When we talk about hunger as a necessary aspect of a deep experience of the Eucharist there is a danger to unnecessarily spiritualize the understanding of “hunger” and to use terms like “spiritual hunger” or “hunger for God.” Even though this certainly has its place, we should not underestimate the power and force of physical hunger, hunger for real bread; we should not underestimate the power of the experience of the Eucharist of poor people. The risk of indifference is clearly higher in the case of people living comfortable lives. I need to ask myself as a person with a comfortable life: Where is your hunger? Where is your hunger for bread, for justice, for the bread of life?

The tendency to spiritualize this hunger and disconnect it from actions of solidarity, and experience of suffering can feed into the kind of indifference Archbishop Romero warns against. Pedro Arrupe’s famous “Letter on Poverty”[18] reminds the Jesuits of the power of material poverty; it can teach lessons other forms of poverty cannot. The same can be said about “hunger for bread.” There is a way only poverty can help us understand the kenosis of the self-giving Christ; an encounter with Christ in the Eucharist commits to a perspective of the world and the insight that God is present in a special way in the poor.

A deep experience of the Eucharist can come from a place of want where people live their dignity centered around the dignifying force only the Eucharist can bring. Pedro Arrupe experienced the power of the poor in a Eucharist he celebrated in a favela:

A few years ago I was visiting a Jesuit province in Latin America. I was invited, with some timidity, to celebrate a Mass in a suburb, in a “favela,” the poorest in the region as they told me. There were around a hundred thousand people living there in the midst of mud since the town had been built along the side of a depression and became almost completely flooded whenever it rained . . . The Mass was held in a small structure all patched together and open. Since there was no door, cats and dogs came and went without any problem. The Mass began . . . Those people, who seemed to have nothing, were ready to give themselves to share their joy and happiness. When we arrived at the consecration and I raised the Host in the midst of an absolute silence, I perceived the joy of the Lord who remains with His beloved. As Jesus says: “He has sent me to bring the good news to the poor,” “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” Soon after, when I was distributing Communion and was looking at their faces, dry, hard, and tanned by the sun, I noticed that large tears like pearls were running down many of them. They were meeting Jesus, their only consolation. My hands trembled.[19]

There are lessons on dignity only people living in poverty can bring; there are lessons on the hunger for the Eucharist only those who may not be fed every day, can bring. There are lessons on the love of God only “the poor in spirit” can bring.

Pope Benedict called the Eucharist a “school of charity” (Angelus, 25 May 2008). It is a school where we learn about God’s love for us, and the two great commandments. We may conclude that the ability to love is probably the true center of human dignity; being invited into God’s love is a foundation for the dignity of the human person that is “inherent,” but also an invitation to “go out of oneself” and encounter the world with love. This love is nourished by the experience of God’s life. And the hunger for God’s love and the hunger for the Eucharist coincide. And this hunger is, theologically speaking, an expression of human dignity that no misery can take away.

I want to conclude with a moving experience from Pedro Arrupe. He has described the hunger for the Eucharist and for the real presence of God in an encounter on August 7, 1945:

One day after the explosion of the atomic bomb, I was passing through streets clogged with masses of ruins of every kind. On the spot where her house had formerly stood, I found a kind of hut supported by some poles and covered with pieces of tin. I went up to it . . . I tried to enter but an unbearable stench repelled me. The young Christian, her name was Nakamura, was lying stretched out on a rough table raised a bit above the ground. Her arms and legs were extended and covered with some burned rags . . . Her burned flesh seemed to be little else but bones and wounds. She had been in this state for fifteen days without being able to take care of herself or clean herself, and she had only eaten a little rice which her father, who was also seriously injured, gave her . . . Appalled by such a terrible sight, I remained without speaking. After a little, Nakamura opened her eyes and when she saw me near, and smiling at her, she looked at me with two tears in her eyes and sought to give me her hand which was only a purulent stump and she said to me with a tone that I shall never forget: “Father, have you brought me Communion?”[20]

EDITORIAL NOTE: This essay was first delivered as the first lecture in the "The Only Solution is Love: The Eucharist and Catholic Social Teaching" series hosted by Michael Baxter for the McGrath Institute for Church Life. Here is information about the third and upcoming installment of the series:

The Eucharistic Sacrifice and the Mission to the Poor