In July, a group called the Real Presence Coalition undertook a national survey of lay Catholics in the United States to try to understand why there has been such a loss of faith in the presence of Christ in the Eucharist – a Pew Forum study found a decade ago that 70 per cent of Catholics do not believe in this fundamental dogma.
It was the single largest survey of lay Catholics ever conducted in the US, and involved 16,000 participants reasonably representative of American Catholics in terms of age, sex and diocese, though inevitably weighted towards those congregations that included members of the Coalition.
Given that one in five attends a Tridentine Mass, it may well over-represent liturgical conservatives. It posed the question not whether the participants themselves believe in the doctrine, but: “Why do lay Catholics believe there has been a loss of faith in the Real Presence?”
The answers are thought-provoking. One is critical: “lack of humility and reverence in the presence of the Eucharist” and, closely related to this, “a casual attitude to the Eucharist on the part of some clergy” and “lack of catechism about Eucharistic doctrine”. And connected to all these things, “a loss of the sense of a sense of transcendence at Mass”.