I THE DECLARATION AND THE DECREE

‘ The Spanish Armada, the Battle of Waterloo, and the doctrine of Transubstantiation’: such were the three topics of conversation favoured by Ruskin when, as an awkward and inexperienced youth, he was thrown into the society of an elegant, convent-bred young lady from France. In choosing at least the third theme he was in good company. For over more than two hundred years, every English sovereign had to profess his belief that ‘in the sacrament of the Lord's Supper there is not any transubstantiation of the elements of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ at or after the consecration thereof by any person whatsoever.’ To those who wished to safeguard the Protestant succession to the throne, there seemed to be no more distinctively popish a doctrine for the monarch to repudiate in the presence of his first Parliament. If times be thought to have changed, one sign of the change would be found in the ‘Final Report’ of a commission of Anglican and Roman Catholic theologians published in 1982. In the part of this devoted to eucharistic belief (first produced in 1971), ‘substantial agreement’ is claimed, and the word ‘transubstantiation’ is relegated to a footnote, where we are told that in contemporary (presumably this means ‘recent’) Catholic theology the word is not understood as explaining how the eucharistic change takes place (ARCIC 1982: 16, 14). And yet perhaps times have not changed so much after all. Reservations about the report were expressed in a letter from no less than the Roman Inquisition (its latest change of name is into ‘Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’). One reservation touches some expressions in the report, ‘ especially some of those which attempt to express the realisation of this [real] presence’.