The Moment of Consecration, and a Rite That Has None

The Latin schools of the Middle Ages asked when exactly the bread becomes the body, and answered that it happens as the priest speaks the words of Christ, which are the form of the sacrament. The practice of elevating the host immediately afterwards, so that the people could see and adore, dates from the same period and follows from the same answer. The Council of Florence stated the position in its fifteenth century decree for the Armenians, and Trent assumed it.

The Byzantine churches ask the question differently and answer it differently. The narrative is recited, and then the priest asks God to send the Holy Spirit upon the gifts, and it is at that invocation that the church understands its prayer to be granted. Greek theologians from the fourteenth century onwards made the point polemically against the Latins, and Latin theologians replied in kind, so a difference of emphasis in the liturgies hardened into a controversy between the churches. Modern liturgical scholarship on both sides tends to treat the whole prayer as consecratory and the search for a single instant as a scholastic question the early texts do not answer.

Then there is a rite that settles the matter by having no narrative at all. The Anaphora of Addai and Mari, the ancient East Syriac prayer still used by the Assyrian Church of the East, contains no institution account in its received text. In 2001 the Holy See issued guidelines accepting eucharists celebrated with it as valid, on the ground that the words are present in the prayer in a dispersed form. That judgement is pastorally narrow and theologically large, and it is still being argued over.