Pastors & Principals Day, Waterview Homebush, 16 June 2026
1. Good News in the data—maybe…
Last month, nearly 21,000 students in Years 5, 7, 9 and 11 completed our Survey of Religious Attitudes and Practices—a response of over 90%. Nearly 8 out of 10 (78.33%) of them said they believed Jesus is truly God and truly man, a significant increase since 2022 when it was below 7 out of 10 (69.66%). Three-quarters (74.14%) now agree or strongly agree that Jesus is also truly present in the Eucharist, up from two thirds (66.92%) in 2022. This is somewhat surprising given the background level of 93% belief in the real presence amongst regular church-going Catholics in Australia, but only 51% of irregular Mass attenders and 26% of never-attenders[1]—for sadly, many of our students are in the irregular or never attender categories. If three in four of our young people now profess faith in the Real Presence that is a cause for genuine thanksgiving, and a tribute to the leadership, catechesis, liturgical formation and witness offered in our schools and parishes. And we should be very clear in our own minds that what our young people believe about the Eucharist is not just one conviction among many: the Second Vatican Council taught that it is at the heart of our faith, the “source and summit of the Christian life.”[2] Getting that right is fundamental if our schools are to be authentically Catholic.
Yet figures as uplifting as these can lull us into a false sense of security and so I offer three caveats. First, we have to be careful that the question isn’t shaping the answer. Back in 2019 a Pew Research Centre survey of the Eucharistic faith of American Catholics yielded the sensational headline that 69% did not believe in transubstantiation but thought Holy Communion was only symbolic.[3] Had the survey been in less theologically complex language, and simply asked ‘Do you believe it is Jesus?’, I suspect it would have produced much more comforting results.
Secondly, any such data requires further interrogation to know what they really mean. Are all the students telling us what they really believe, or are some of them telling us what they think is the ‘correct’ answer, that is what we—their teachers, family, Church—believe or want them to believe? Do they even understand what they are affirming when they say Jesus is ‘really present in’ the Eucharist, or might some of them be thinking of Jesus as present in some spiritual or sentimental sense, rather than body and blood, soul and divinity?
Thirdly, the risk of good results is that we take our evangelising, catechetical and liturgical foot off the accelerator and shift to auto-pilot going forward, as we’ve achieved all that can reasonably be expected. But in view of our upcoming International Eucharistic Congress in 2028, we cannot afford any complacency about the Eucharistic faith of our young people and our staff, and so today I would like to explore a bit more fully what it might mean for a student, teacher, school or system to profess that Jesus is truly present in the Eucharist and what we might do to ensure we are moving in the right direction.
2. Transubstantiation or Is it really Jesus?
I began my recent pastoral letter to the archdiocese for Corpus Christi[4] by recalling a story told by the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe in her essay On Transubstantiation.[5] One of her own children, then nearly three, had been introduced to the mystery of the Eucharist in simple language. When Anscombe returned from Communion the child asked, “Is He in you?” “Yes,” she responded, and to her amazement the child fell prostrate before her. What this infant had grasped, with childish innocence, was one of the Church’s central proclamations: this really is Christ’s Body and Blood; Christ really is present here in a way, with an intensity, with a substantiality, He is nowhere else on earth.
When the Church offers the host and says, “The Body of Christ”, it does not mean “This blessed bread is a symbol reminding you of Christ”. It does not mean “Here’s a nice metaphor: now let’s be the Body of Christ together.” No, the Church says, with an audacity only a revelation from Christ Himself could justify: this really is Jesus, whole and entire. When Christ first said it, people knew He meant it literally and some were appalled. In chapter 6 of his Gospel, John reports that many of Christ’s hearers grumbled, then argued, then declared His eucharistic teaching intolerable and stopped following Him. But Jesus doubled down, being more and more clear about what He was claiming and that He really meant it.
But how are we to explain that what was bread and wine, what still looks like bread and wine, is by Christ’s action no longer bread and wine, but now His Body and Blood? The Church’s best explanation is called Transubstantiation. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 declared that “in the sacrament of the altar there occurs by divine power a transubstantiation of the bread into the Body and the wine into the Blood of Christ.”[6] The Council of Trent in 1551 reaffirmed that “in the Blessed Sacrament the whole body, blood, soul and divinity of Christ are contained truly, really and substantially, and not just in sign, figure or effect,” and that “this wonderful conversion is most aptly called by the name transubstantiation.”[7]
In between these two great councils, the greatest theologian of the Eucharist, St Thomas Aquinas, did his best to make sense of the word and the idea behind it. The last treatise he completed before his death was on this very subject.[8] But he had written profoundly on the matter before, and not just theological texts but Corpus Christi hymns like Pange Lingua (Sing My Tongue the Saviour’s Glory) ending with the Tantum Ergo (Down in Adoration Falling), Panis Angelicus (Bread of Angels), and O Salutaris Hostia (O Saving Victim). On his deathbed Aquinas declared the Eucharistic presence the focal point and motivation for all his theology. Whether in scholarship or song, Aquinas answered some misunderstandings of the sacrament, filled out the metaphysics of the change from bread and wine to Body and Blood, and so brought faith and reason to appreciating this great mystery.
St Thomas was quick to correct any overly figurative view of the Eucharist. He did not deny the sign value of the sacrament, but insisted it is more than a sign or symbol: “Catholic Faith makes it absolutely necessary to profess that the whole Christ is in this sacrament,”[9] he said. Nor can the one substance be both bread and Christ’s body or wine and Christ’s blood at the same time: if Christ says it is now His body (or blood), then that is what it is, even if it still looks like bread and wine. Rather than reduce the bread to nothingness and create Christ’s body in its place, God does something less destructive but more wonderful: transforming the underlying reality or substance while maintaining the appearances. And that is much more than a change of belief on the part of the recipient or of interpretation by the community: the change is real whether or not anyone present recognises it.
If St Thomas contended with some overly symbolic interpretations of the Eucharist, he had also to deal with some overly literal ones too. Even before microscopes some went looking for something observable happening at the consecration or complained when nothing observable occurred. Others demanded extraordinary miracles to accompany the ordinary one at Mass: they looked for bleeding hosts, or chalices bubbling over with warm blood. Aquinas explained that we should expect normally to see no change at all at Mass: the wonder of transubstantiation is precisely that everything observable about the bread and wine endures despite a change of underlying substance. God intends that we believe in the Real Presence by faith, not observation. And so Christ was not exciting the apostles to cannibalism but offering them a way to receive Him “in a certain spiritual way”, “under sacramental species.”[10]
Aquinas knew he was stretching the philosophical categories of ‘substance’, ‘accidents’ and ‘change’ to make sense of something unique. He was humble enough to recognise that God works in this sacrament with a greater sublimity and secrecy than our faith and reason can ever search out. “This conversion is not like any natural change” we have ever known, he wrote, “but entirely beyond the powers of nature and brought about purely by God’s power.”[11]
Aquinas’ convictions about transubstantiation have been affirmed many times by the Church. We find them echoed in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1994, §§1373–77 & 1413) and the Compendium of the Catechism (2005, §§282–85). In Mane Nobiscum Domine (2004), St John Paul II insisted that faith demands we approach the Eucharist “fully aware that we are approaching Christ himself,” a presence whose significance goes far beyond mere symbolism.[12]
In his 2007 exhortation, Sacramentum Caritatis, Pope Benedict XVI described transubstantiation as “a sort of ‘nuclear fission’ which penetrates to the heart of all being”, a change meant to transform all reality.[13] And in his Homily for Corpus Christi 2025, Pope Leo XIV declared that “by offering himself completely, the crucified and risen Lord delivers himself into our hands, and we realise that we were made to partake of God.”[14]
Limited, but nonetheless explanatory: transubstantiation helps us grasp something of the mystery of the Blessed Sacrament. The idea highlights that our profession and reception of the Eucharist, our consecration and adoration of it, as truly Christ’s Body and Blood, are reasonable.
3. Adoration as the appropriate response
If all of that is true, if after the consecration what was bread is no longer bread but Christ whole and entire, then a question follows: what response does such a Presence deserve? A senior Protestant cleric in Australia was asked in an interview, “What would you rather die than do?” and answered, “I’d rather die than celebrate the blasphemy of the Mass.” While we flinch at this response, he was surely right to think that if the Eucharistic elements are only symbols, then much of what Catholics do around them is on the face of it superstitious. We would be literally worshipping bread and wine!
But as we have just heard from Jesus, St Thomas, the popes and the great Church councils, the bread and wine are more than just symbols. In the early Church it seems that the Blessed Sacrament was ‘reserved’—that is, some consecrated Bread was kept aside after Mass was over—so that it could be taken to the sick and dying. But that reservation in a tabernacle “led to the praiseworthy practice of adoring this heavenly food in the churches… Faith in the real presence of the Lord leads naturally to external, public expression of that faith.”[15] So Eucharistic Adoration is not pious excess but public expression of what we hold most dear. If Christ is really present Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity, under the appearances of bread and wine, people adoring the Sacrament is exactly what we should expect.
The Magisterium has said as much, consistently and warmly, for many centuries. In Sacramentum Caritatis Pope Benedict recalled St Augustine’s saying that “No one eats that flesh without adoring it; we should sin were we not first to adore it.”[16] Benedict explained that:
Eucharistic adoration is simply the natural consequence of the Eucharistic celebration, which is itself the Church’s supreme act of adoration. Receiving the Eucharist means adoring him whom we receive. Only in this way do we become one with him, and are given, as it were, a foretaste of the beauty of the heavenly liturgy. The act of adoration outside Mass prolongs and intensifies all that takes place during the liturgical celebration itself. Indeed, only in adoration can a profound and genuine reception mature.[17]
Thus adoration outside of Mass is a fruit of the Mass, an extension of the Mass, a kind of spiritual accelerant, intensifying participation in the Mass. Like Peter, James and John at the Transfiguration, or Mary Magdalene in the Garden of the Resurrection, or the two disciples at Emmaus, we tend to cling to Christ, begging Him not to leave us; we want the Mass to last, the real presence to linger in our souls long after the elements have been digested. Benedict thought it appropriate “especially in densely populated areas, to set aside specific churches or oratories for perpetual adoration,” allowing people greater access to this gift.[18]
Pope Francis echoed his predecessors in this. In a meeting with the Organising Committee of the U.S. National Eucharistic Congress, he summarised his thoughts by saying: “We must rediscover the sense of adoration in silence. It is a form of prayer that we have lost. Too few people know what it is. It is up to the bishops to catechise the faithful about praying through adoration. The Eucharist requires it of us.”[19]
But this rediscovery has its challenges in an age of distractions, of hyper-fixation on productivity and of hustle culture. A few years ago, psychologists at the University of Virginia studied what happens to the human brain when it has nothing to do.[20] Hundreds of people were recruited, put in a bare room with no devices, and asked to sit still for fifteen minutes and think. Most did not enjoy the experience and reported feeling bored. The researchers then took the experiment further, putting participants in the empty room with the option of giving themselves an electric shock. Astonishingly, two thirds of the men and a quarter of the women chose to be shocked over sitting quietly in their own thoughts. They preferred suffering to silence!
Perhaps it’s something about our brains: while problem-solving and daydreaming are spontaneous, even enjoyable, thinking on command is more arduous. Or perhaps it’s something about our culture of non-stop pings and notifications, sensory inputs, and shared attention across multiple screens or activities. Being still with nothing to do is now so unusual we can’t bear it for too long. Amidst all the expectations and distractions, people of faith may struggle to find both the time and desire to sit quietly with God. But we must!
Where the Church has helped people to do exactly that in recent decades, it has flourished. Two decades ago, I visited the U.S. to learn what was working in vocations ministry. Some dioceses and religious congregations were doing better than others, some better than any in Australia. There were some common factors among these: members faithful to their calling and visibly happy in it; outward signs of vocation and inward commitment to holiness; intentionality about drawing new priests and religious into service; loyalty to the hierarchy and tradition; enthusiasm about then-newish things like World Youth Day and Theology of the Body. But a big common factor was Eucharistic Adoration.
4. What Adoration says about God and us
Adoration is the appropriate response to the reality of the Blessed Sacrament and our faith in it. But, more than this, Adoration is a school in sacred truth, teaching us first who God is. It highlights that ours is a God who comes and stays. The God who created the cosmos for us, shared His intelligence, freedom and love with us and offered us a plan for our flourishing, only to find we abused those gifts, ignored His commandments, refused to render Him His due. He might reasonably have checked out at that point, as the Deists thought He had done. But, no, God stayed, sustaining us in being and calling us back to Himself in myriad ways. He “emptied Himself” to enter time and space in our flesh. He lived the stages and challenges of a human life. He died as a slave on a cross. At that point we’d have understood if He had at last cast off His bodily nature…
But this God does not “do a runner”. “The One who was coming into the world,”[21] remains with us in the world, even as He ascends to glory. He remains with us in His Church, in His inspired Word, in His sacraments, priests and assembly, but especially in His Eucharist. He is there at every Mass and every place that the Sacrament is reserved. There in the wee hours when we cannot sleep and the late hours when we struggle not to. There when we experience consoling graces and when we feel our world collapsing. There when we call upon Him, and even when we don’t. Eucharistic Adoration proclaims that God is a stayer. Not distant. Not just an Unmoved Mover. Not just a logical principle of existence. He is עִמָּנוּאֵל (Emmanuel), God-with-us.
And in teaching us who God is, Adoration teaches us who we are. To know God better is to know ourselves better. It reminds us that, for all our freedom, intellect and other gifts, we are creatures, reliant for our existence upon the Creator; that we are not the centre of the universe; that we owe humility and gratitude to the One who is.
In my Corpus Christi pastoral letter, I suggested that kneeling is the posture that “most clearly reveals what we believe about God and our relationship to Him.”[22] Still today, kneeling before the Sacrament speaks of reverence and worship, of penitence and friendship, of supplication and thanksgiving. In an age of idolatry, egotism, and indifference, it declares there is One and only One worthy of all our adoration.
And dare I say, the young are particularly open to this practice if they are introduced to it. Their knees are made for it! Put them before the Eucharistic Lord at a World Youth Day or an Australian Catholic Youth Festival and, even in their thousands or millions, they are silent and reverent. In a culture of distraction and noise, they are focused and tranquil. In a culture of self-curation and self-promotion, they are humble before their Creator and Redeemer. In a culture that leaves many of them self-hating, the One looking back at them from the monstrance declares that they are loved, not for their looks or results or followers, but simply as friends of a God who wants them near.
The external postures of Eucharistic Adoration help cultivate the internal quiet and attention, and help recover habits of reverence and contemplation that we need if we are to flourish as spiritual beings. And the practice can empower us to love as the Eucharistic Lord loves, to see Him in the face of the other, especially the poor and downtrodden.
5. What this asks of our schools in their parishes
So, if the Eucharist is what the Church says it is, and if adoration is one particular way in which we allow this gift to teach us more about God and our relationship with Him, what does this mean for the daily life of our Catholic schools in their parishes?
The first Catholics in Australia arrived as convicts and marines in 1788, and for thirty-two years it fell to the lay faithful, without the benefit of clergy and their sacraments, to baptise, catechise, marry and bury each other.[23] They longed for the Eucharist and petitioned repeatedly for a priest. Apart from a brief period when a convict priest was allowed to celebrate Mass, the only way the faithful could receive the Eucharist was to descend upon a passing French or Spanish ship and beg its chaplain for Mass. An underground priest, Fr Jeremiah Flynn, did briefly minister until he was caught, but before he was deported he left behind a single consecrated Host in the safe-keeping of a Catholic family; and that Host, in that family home, became the focus of Catholic life in the colony; there the laity prayed and taught their children catechism. Only in 1820 were priests finally allowed to come to Australia and practice their craft openly, while it was still illegal in the British Isles…
So the Church of Sydney, then, was from the beginning focused on the Blessed Sacrament—the lack of it when the authorities denied it to the faithful, the delight in it when it was at last permitted. A century later this small and once-persecuted community was confident enough to host the 29th International Eucharistic Congress of 1928, the first ever held in the Southern Hemisphere.[24] Newspapers celebrated the extraordinary procession of the Blessed Sacrament, from St Patrick’s Seminary Manly, onto a ferry painted white and gold for the occasion, across Sydney Harbour to Circular Quay.
This love for the “Sacrament of sacraments” has only deepened with the generations. In 2008, a quarter of a million young adults knelt before it at the Vigil of Sydney’s World Youth Day, a turning point in the spiritual lives of many. And as you all know, in just over two years Sydney will host the 54th International Eucharistic Congress, “Eucharist28”, exactly one hundred years after the 1928 Congress, with Pope Leo XIV signalling his intention to join us.[25]
Past, present and future, then, the Church of Sydney is a Eucharistic Church. The young people in our schools and parishes are no bit-players in this story: they will write its next chapter. So, what do we owe them? How might we equip them best for the adventure of faith that awaits them? Let me end with six brief resolutions.
First, let’s continue to teach the fullness of the Catholic faith about the Eucharist with joy and courage, and never be tempted to dumb or water it down. We must have confidence in our young students: their ability to trust in God, to be moved by Scripture and doctrine, and to appreciate the richness that is offered them. Our survey data shows that well taught our young ones will embrace Church teaching on the Eucharist. So we should redouble our efforts to offer it to them.
Secondly, we should recommit ourselves to making the Mass, as “the source and summit of the Christian life” into the source and summit of Catholic school life. When schools work with parishes and chaplains to make celebrating the Eucharist a priority, finding the right times and places and music and ministries for the children, making the Mass as reverent, beautiful and inviting as possible, they reinforce faith in the Real Presence.
Third, to the best of our ability, let’s give students regular access to Eucharistic Adoration. Where a school has a chapel with the Sacrament reserved, let it be open and visited, with regular holy hours, Benediction at school retreats, and Adoration whilever Confession is being offered by a priest. Where there is no chapel, we can walk our children to the parish church to Mass, of course, but also sometimes for some minutes of guided silence before the tabernacle, so our young ones might taste stillness before God and open up to transforming grace.
Fourthly, we should pair the Eucharist with Confession, the best preparation for receiving the Lord. Along with the one-hour fast and prayerful preparation before Mass, the cleansed soul honours the Real Presence and is tilled to receive its graces.
Fifth, let’s teach our students appropriate attitudes and postures of reverence such as I detail in my recent pastoral letter, so they engage not just their minds but their senses and bodies in prayer and worship. Our children need to know how to ‘be’ in church, how to genuflect, bow, kneel, stand, sit quiet—all of which requires practice!
Sixthly, we must cultivate a love for the Eucharist among staff and parents. Young people have great phoney detectors and can sense whether their elders mean what they say about the Eucharist. If they see us oldies genuflect or kneel before the Blessed Sacrament, celebrate Mass reverently or receive Communion devoutly, they are far more likely to follow suit and live out the faith they recently professed in our survey.
Conclusion
Dear pastors and education leaders, my principal collaborators in the mission of the Church to the young, in two years’ time the young people now in your care will be among those celebrating Eucharist28. Let us prepare them by offering the one thing that answers the hunger Pope Leo has named in the young: their search for meaning in a world that has mislaid it. In offering them the Flesh and Blood, Body and Soul, Humanity and Divinity, the whole Christ, we are offering them all that God is—a God who, as the Pope recently preached in Madrid, does not want to be shut up in churches and tabernacles but to be brought out to meet us face to face.[26]
[1] Philippa Martyr, “Middle-aged Catholics have Eucharistic problems,” The Catholic Weekly 9 June 2023.
[2] Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (November 21, 1964), no. 11; see also Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 1324; Second Vatican Council, Sacrosanctum Concilium, Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy (December 4, 1963), no. 10.
[3] Gregory Smith, “Just one-third of U.S. Catholics agree with their church that Eucharist is body, blood of Christ,” Pew Research Center 5 August 2019 https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/08/05/transubstantiation-eucharist-u-s-catholics/
[4] Anthony Fisher OP, Adoring the Eucharistic Lord: “Let Us Kneel Before the God Who Made Us” (Ps 94:6), Pastoral Letter to the Priests, Religious, and People of the Archdiocese of Sydney on the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ (Archdiocese of Sydney, 2026).
[5] G. E. M. Anscombe, “On Transubstantiation,” in Ethics, Religion and Politics, Collected Philosophical Papers 3 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), 107–12; first published as a pamphlet (London: Catholic Truth Society, 1974).
[6] Fourth Lateran Council (1215), const. 1, Firmiter credimus; in Heinrich Denzinger, Compendium of Creeds, Definitions, and Declarations on Matters of Faith and Morals, 43rd ed., ed. Peter Hünermann (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2012), no. 802.
[7] Council of Trent, sess. 13 (October 11, 1551), Decree on the Most Holy Eucharist, chap. 4 and can. 2; in Denzinger, Compendium, nos. 1642 and 1652. The phrase “truly, really and substantially” is from can. 1 (no. 1651).
[8] Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae III, qq. 73–83 (the treatise on the Eucharist), among the last works he completed before his death in 1274. Aquinas is also the author of the liturgy for Corpus Christi, including the hymns Pange lingua (with its concluding Tantum ergo), Panis angelicus, and O salutaris hostia.
[9] Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae III, q. 76, a. 1.
[10] Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae III, q. 75, aa. 1–5.
[11] Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae III, q. 75, a. 4.
[12] John Paul II, Mane Nobiscum Domine, Apostolic Letter for the Year of the Eucharist (October 7, 2004).
[13] Benedict XVI, Sacramentum Caritatis, Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation (February 22, 2007), no. 11.
[14] Leo XIV, Homily for the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, Saint John Lateran Square, Rome, June 22, 2025, https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/homilies/2025/documents/20250622-omelia-corpus-domini.html.
[15] Congregation for Divine Worship, Holy Communion and Worship of the Eucharist outside Mass (1973), no. 5.
[16] Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos 98.9 (PL 37:1264), quoted in Benedict XVI, Sacramentum Caritatis (February 22, 2007), no. 66.
[17] Benedict XVI, Sacramentum Caritatis (February 22, 2007), no. 66.
[18] Benedict XVI, Sacramentum Caritatis (February 22, 2007), no. 67.
[19] Francis, address to the organising committee of the National Eucharistic Congress (United States), as reported in “Pope Francis Urges Us to Rediscover Eucharistic Adoration,” Catholic365, July 9, 2024.
[20] Timothy D. Wilson et al., “Just Think: The Challenges of the Disengaged Mind,” Science 345, no. 6192 (July 4, 2014): 75–77.
[21] John 1:9; cf. John 3:17, 6:14, 11:27, 12:46.
[22] Anthony Fisher, OP, Adoring the Eucharistic Lord: “Let Us Kneel Before the God Who Made Us” (Ps 94:6), Pastoral Letter to the Priests, Religious, and People of the Archdiocese of Sydney on the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ (Sydney: Archdiocese of Sydney, 2026).
[23] Robert Dixon, The Catholics in Australia (Adelaide: Open Book, 2005); Patrick O’Farrell, The Catholic Church in Australia: A Short History, 1788–1967 (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1969); on Fr Jeremiah O’Flynn (1788–1831) and the reserved Host, see Vivienne Parsons, “O’Flynn, Jeremiah Francis (1788–1831),” in Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 2 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1967).
[24] Samantha Frappell, “International Eucharistic Congress 1928,” Dictionary of Sydney (2012), https://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/international_eucharistic_congress_1928; Naomi Turner, Catholics in Australia: A Social History (North Blackburn, Vic.: Collins Dove, 1992).
[25] “Sydney to Host International Eucharistic Congress in 2028,” CathNews, September 16, 2024, https://cathnews.com/2024/09/16/sydney-to-host-international-eucharistic-congress-in-2028/; “Pope Leo to Mark Australia’s 100th International Eucharistic Congress with Sydney Visit,” Catholic Leader, February 17, 2026.
[26] Pope Leo XIV, Homily for the Solemnity of Corpus Christi, Madrid, June 7, 2026.
