Real presence

I was privileged to be able to assist at Communion yesterday (Pentecost).  One thought led to another, so later in the day I dug up a 10-year-old lecture by Avery Dulles on the real presence.  (If memory serves, Dulles authored, or maybe co-authored, the metaphysics text we used at St. Joe's half a century ago.)

Much of the lecture seems to me to be gobbledygook.  The part I was trying to remember, however, has less gibberish than the rest:

According to Paul VI and the Second Vatican Council, [the authors at the Council of Trent] remind us, Christ is present in the liturgy in no less than five ways:  in the congregation, when it gathers for prayer; in the word of God when it is proclaimed; in the priests, when they preside at the liturgy; in the sacraments, when they are administered, and finally; in the Host and Chalice offered at Mass.

The presence in the consecrated elements, these authors maintain, is only one of the five, and should not be taken as though it alone were real. In fact, they say, it should be seen as subordinate to the presence in the Church, of which it is a sacramental sign. Did not Augustine and Thomas Aquinas teach that the purpose of the sacrament is to bring about the unity of the Church as Christ's mystical body? Some theologians therefore began to say that Christ's primary presence is in the gathered assembly.

According to the teaching of the Church, the multiple presences of Christ are real and important, but the presence in the Eucharist surpasses all the others. Some fifteen years before Vatican II, Pope Pius XII called attention to four of the ways in which Christ is present in the liturgy. But he was careful to point out that these presences are not all on the same level. The divine Founder of the Church, he wrote, "is present ... above all under the eucharistic species".

Paul VI in his encyclical of 1965 gave a similar listing, adding to Pius XII's list a fifth: Christ's presence in the proclamation of the word. But he left no doubt about which presence is primary. After noting the manifold presences of Christ, he declared: "There is another way, and indeed most remarkable, in which Christ is present in His Church in the sacrament of the Eucharist, which is therefore among the rest of the sacraments 'the more pleasing in respect to devotion, the more noble in respect to understanding, and the holier in regard to what it contains', for it contains Christ Himself and is 'as it were the perfection of the spiritual life and the goal of all the sacraments'". This presence, he said, is called real not because the others are unreal but because it is real par excellence. [emphasis added]

A puzzle.  I'm absolutely positive I first learned of Cardinal Dulles's lecture in one of Paul Cioffi's  classic homilies at Copley Crypt.  But Paul died in 2004, and the lecture wasn't published until 2005.