Eucharist in the Catholic Church Eucharist in the Catholic Church The Eucharist in the Catholic Church is celebrated as "the source and summit" of the Christian life. The Eucharist is consecrated daily (except on Good Friday, when consecration takes place on Maundy Thursday, but is distributed during the Mass of the Presanctified) during the celebration of Mass, the eucharistic liturgy. The term "Eucharist" is also used for the bread and wine when transubstantiated (their substance having been changed), according to Catholic teaching, into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. "At the Last Supper, on the night he was betrayed, our Saviour instituted the Eucharistic
Eucharist in the Catholic Church highly lauded, purpose of adoring Christ present in the Eucharist. In the judgment of the Catholic Church, the concept of transubstantiation, with its accompanying unambiguous distinction between "substance" or underlying reality, and "accidents" or humanly perceptible appearances, safeguards against what it sees as the mutually opposed errors of, on the one hand, a merely figurative understanding of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist (the change of the substance is real), and, on the other hand, an interpretation that would amount to cannibalistic (a charge which pagans leveled at early Catholic Christians who did not understand the rites of