Unlike the cardboard wafer and cheap boxed wine of today’s Mass, it had to actually deliver. When Pope Francis says the “precise objective” of the Eucharist is to “become one” with Jesus, I’m not sure what he means. Like many Catholics, I’ve taken Communion hundreds and hundreds of times in my life, and never once felt a fraction of the ecstasy reported in the art and literature of Ancient Greece. And never once did I taste the apotheosis that was promised to me in John 6:56: “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them.”
