Origin of the Eucharist and the possible intervention of other factors. One key consideration in this is the problem of the Jewish prohibition of drinking blood (see below). Professor Robert J. Daly, S.J., argues that Jesus did indeed institute the Eucharist, though it took generations and centuries of guidance from the Holy Spirit for the Eucharist to reach its current form. "What Jesus did at the Last Supper is obviously at least the generative moment of the institution of the Eucharist." But it was not the Eucharist as we know it. "The Eucharist that Christians now celebrate is what the Church, under the guidance
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