The question of how to understand what happens in Holy Communion, or the Eucharist, has divided the church universal for hundreds of years — at least since the Protestant Reformation of the 1500s and no doubt before then, too.

            Corpus Christi Sunday gives us a chance to learn from that history but also to recommit ourselves to being the body of Christ on Earth, which, in the end, is more important than being able to explain the intricacies of the doctrines about Communion.

            Many Catholics and non-Catholics alike are confused by what the Catholic Church means when it teaches that the Real Presence (capital R, capital P) of Christ is found in the Eucharist. In fact, across history, some baffled non-Catholics have accused Catholics of being cannibals by consuming what those non-Catholics believe Catholics think is the literal, physical body and blood of Christ.

            It’s a misguided charge. The Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation does not insist that the bread and wine turn into real flesh and real blood in the sense that if you ran them through a scientific test you could detect actual human blood cells in the wine and actual skin or bone cells in the bread.

            Rather, the doctrine is based on Aristotelian science, which divided the world into what Aristotle called “accidents” and “substance.” The word accidents refers to what we can see, taste, touch and otherwise physically experience, such as the bread’s color, its texture, its smell or the wine’s color and taste.

            The word substance, by contrast, refers to the core nature of something. In the case of the Eucharist, when we talk about the substance of the elements, we’re talking about the bread’s breadness and

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