The great miracle of transubstantiation, the call to put on Christ, and why Holy Mass can never become merely a habit
By Fr Michael Payyapilly VC
During this retreat I have been speaking about the Jubilee as a great reset. A pilgrim is not a tourist; a pilgrim has a destination. If the destination of our Christian journey is eternal life, then the Lord does not leave us to find our own way there. He gives us what we need for the journey. I spoke earlier about the first great gift, the Holy Spirit, who continually speaks, reminds, corrects and leads us so that we may be prepared for eternal life. The second gift is just as deeply connected to Jesus Himself: the gift of the Holy Eucharist.
Most of us who are practising Catholics have been coming for Mass for years. That familiarity can become a blessing, but it can also become a danger because we begin doing something extraordinary by force of habit. If I do not go for Mass, I may feel that something is missing, but that does not necessarily mean I understand what is happening when I am there. We received our first catechesis about Holy Communion when we were children. Think about what you really understood at seven or eight years of age about something as deep as the Eucharist. Then the years pass, and unless we deliberately return to that teaching as adults, we can continue coming simply because our parents did it and because this is what Catholics do.
The COVID lockdowns exposed that problem for me very clearly. When we went into lockdown in Doveton, we were blessed to have people and equipment ready, and Holy Family began livestreaming Mass very quickly. Many people joined us online. Even after the lockdowns eased, we continued the livestream while people were able to return physically to church. One day a Vincentian priest working in Sydney rang me and said, almost accusingly, “People in my parish are not coming to church. When I ask them why, they tell me they are watching your Mass.” I felt terrible. I wondered whether our livestream was actually keeping people away from the Eucharist.
I prayed about it, and what became clear to me was that the deeper problem was not the existence of an online Mass. The deeper problem was Eucharistic catechesis. During lockdown the Church had said, in an emergency, that people could prayerfully participate from home because they could not be physically present. Many of us heard the words “it is okay” and forgot the words “for now”. Once sitting at home had become comfortable, the distinction between watching Mass and sacramentally receiving Jesus could disappear very easily if I had never really understood the Eucharist in the first place. If Mass is only one prayer among many prayers, then watching it on a screen can seem equivalent to being there.
But for us the Eucharist is not one prayer among many. It is the prayer above every other prayer, because something is happening there that does not happen anywhere else.
Something Is Happening in the Eucharist
Some of the most powerful experiences I have had in ministry have taken place within the celebration of Mass. Years ago, when I was serving at a retreat centre in India, a desperate mother rang me about her very young baby. The child had been diagnosed with a hole in the heart, and the doctors had told her the situation was serious. The following day we were celebrating the final Mass of the retreat. I told the people about the baby and asked everyone to pray. We spent time praying together during the Eucharist. About two weeks later the mother rang again. They had taken the child for further tests, and she told me the doctors could no longer find the hole in the heart.
Our natural response to a testimony like that is immediate. We are excited. We clap. We say, “Praise God.” I understand that reaction because I have it too. But I want us to notice something about ourselves: we can become much more excited about a healing that happens during Mass than about what happens at every Mass.
I remember another period when I was at the retreat centre in Somersby, near Sydney. In the first couple of years I was often alone on that large property except when volunteers came for retreats. Because there was no one waiting for me, I could take my own sweet time with Mass. Sometimes I would spend two and a half hours celebrating, with long periods of praise and prayer. During one Mass I saw, in prayer, the image of a woman on something like a raft, drifting in the sea. I did not understand it. Later that morning an Australian woman drove into the retreat centre and asked to speak with me. We sat before the Blessed Sacrament and prayed. Again I saw the same image. When I told her about the woman drifting on the raft, she began to cry. She said that was why she had come: she felt she was drifting away from the Lord.
At a girls’ university in Ajmer, where nearly all the students were non-Christian, two young women from Hindu Brahmin families told me about something they themselves could not explain. They lived in the hostel and noticed that a few Catholic students went early in the morning to another room. They followed them. They did not understand what the Mass was; they simply described it to me as “the prayers”. Yet from the moment they entered, both of them began to weep. They returned day after day, and the tears continued. By the time I met them they had been doing this for years. Their explanation was very simple: “Something is happening.”
That phrase matters. Something is happening in the Eucharist. There can be healings, consolations, messages and experiences that touch individual people very powerfully. But those things are sporadic. They do not happen to everyone at every Mass. The greatest miracle of the Eucharist does.
We advertise some celebrations as “healing Masses”, and I understand why: people are immediately attracted by the word healing. Yet every Mass is a healing Mass in the deeper sense. When I tell you that a child was healed, the room reacts. If I tell you that at every Eucharist a priest takes bread and wine, speaks the words of consecration, and by the power of God they become the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, our reaction can be strangely quiet. That tells us something about how little we have sometimes understood the miracle before us.
The Greatest Miracle of the Eucharist
The Church uses the word transubstantiation. The appearances remain those of bread and wine: they look the same, they taste the same, they feel the same. But the substance has changed. What was bread and wine is now, truly and sacramentally, the Body and Blood of Jesus. This is not an extraordinary event reserved for one famous shrine or one unusual Mass. This great miracle takes place at every Eucharist.
Then we have to ask the question Fr Michael the preacher in me always wants to ask: why? Jesus does not do something without purpose. Why does He give us His Body and Blood? Why does He make Himself present in this way and then tell us to receive Him?
John 6 gives the answer with extraordinary directness. Jesus says, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life” (John 6:54). Earlier He says, “Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life” (John 6:47), and then, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh” (John 6:51). Later He says, “Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me” (John 6:57).
The purpose is eternal life, and John 6 makes that purpose increasingly clear as the teaching unfolds. The chapter begins with the multiplication of the five loaves and two fish. The people eat and are satisfied. The next day they go looking for Jesus again, and He tells them plainly that they are searching for Him because they ate the loaves and had their fill. They want bread that will keep them from hunger. Jesus takes them deeper. He is not simply going to provide another meal. He speaks about the bread that gives eternal life, and finally He identifies that bread with His own flesh.
So the Eucharist is not merely a religious fellowship meal. Christian fellowship is beautiful, but that is not what makes the Catholic Eucharist what it is. I come to receive Christ Himself. I eat His flesh and drink His blood because He has promised that the one who receives Him has eternal life.
When I receive Him, something also begins to happen in me. Strictly speaking, the word transubstantiation names what happens to the bread and wine. But in the sermon I deliberately used the same image pastorally for what the Eucharist is doing within us. The substance of the bread and wine is changed so that Christ gives Himself to me; and as I receive Him, I am also being changed. On the outside I may still look exactly the same. Emotionally I may feel exactly the same. My family may even look at me after Mass and think, “She is exactly the same. How many Masses does she attend? No difference!” Perhaps I myself cannot see the change. Yet Christ is within me, and little by little He is preparing me for what I am meant to become.
Putting On Christ
Saint Paul says in Colossians that we have “clothed yourselves with the new self” (Colossians 3:10). Where does this newness come from? Ultimately, it is Christ. Galatians gives the same mystery in another way: “It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). When I partake of the Body and Blood of Jesus, I am putting on Christ.
I remember being at university and going through a phase when I was very serious about the gym. I would wake up at four in the morning, cycle several kilometres and work out every day. I would never have woken up at four to pray. I would never have woken up at four to study. But for the gym, I could do it. I wanted a very chiselled body, and afterwards I would wear extremely tight-fitting T-shirts for one very obvious reason: I wanted everyone else to see it.
That is a slightly embarrassing example, but it helps me explain what I mean by putting on. You put something on so that what is underneath is expressed through it. In Christian life I am putting on Christ to such an extent that He should become visible and the old self should become less visible. The Eucharist is not given merely so that I can have a better earthly life. Jesus is preparing me for something far greater. He is conforming me to Himself for eternal life.
A child once gave me one of the best Eucharistic questions I have heard. At Doveton, a mother came forward for Holy Communion carrying her little child. I said, “The Body of Christ.” She said, “Amen,” received the Host and began walking away. The child watched her and asked, loudly enough for me to hear, “Why are you eating that thing? Why are you eating that thing?”
I smiled, but afterwards I thought: that is a profound question. Why are you eating that thing? Why are you drinking that thing? If there is no purpose, why are we doing it? Why are we coming to church week after week?
The answer Fr Michael keeps returning to in this retreat is the same: eternal life. I come to the Eucharist because the Lord is preparing me for eternal life. I receive His Body and Blood because He is changing me, little by little, so that I become more like Him. Perhaps the change is not dramatic enough for me to notice from one Sunday to the next, but His presence is not doing nothing. He is preparing me to fit the kingdom.
That is why I do not want us to come to Mass merely from obligation. I know the Church speaks about obligation, and I am not telling anyone to disregard the Church. My point is about the poverty of a relationship in which fear is the only reason I come. If my whole motivation is, “I had better go or Jesus will punish me,” what a sad way to approach the Eucharist. Nor should Mass become one more box in a checklist: Mass, rosary, prayers, retreat - tick, tick, tick, and at the end I can tell Jesus that I am doing very well. I want us to come because He is preparing us for eternal life, not simply because we are afraid of failing an obligation or because Mass is another item on a religious checklist.
The Eucharist Has a Purpose
When we studied theology, one of our professors was very well known for his knowledge of the liturgy. He would ask us a question that left a room full of theology students staring blankly: when everything is fulfilled, will the Eucharist be celebrated in heaven?
Our instinct was to say yes. The Eucharist is holy, so surely there must be Eucharist in heaven. He kept pushing us until the answer became clear: no Eucharist in heaven, because the sacramental Eucharist has a purpose, and that purpose has already been achieved. Here the Eucharist prepares me for complete union with Christ. If I am in the kingdom, I am no longer being prepared for that union; I am already living in it.
That helped me understand again why the Eucharist matters now. The Holy Spirit is leading me towards eternal life, and the Eucharist is preparing me for eternal life. These are the two great gifts I have been speaking about within the great reset. They are not disconnected devotions. Both are Christ’s gifts for a pilgrim who has a destination.
Once I know that, the way I enter a church must change. A Catholic church is not simply a hall in which a religious meeting happens. The Lord is present in the tabernacle. We should enter knowing that the space is sacred. This is not about becoming rigid or making parents anxious about every sound a child makes. I am not talking about a mother who must nurse a baby or a family dealing with genuine needs. I am talking about the casual attitude that says nothing special is happening here. If every time a child becomes restless we immediately give food or put a mobile phone in front of the child, we can unintentionally teach that this place has no sacred difference from any other place.
From the moment I prepare at home, something special is about to happen. I dress, I travel, I arrive, I recollect myself because I am going to receive Jesus. If I know that I am conscious of mortal sin, I prepare through Confession because I know whom I am about to receive. The preparation is not there to make me worthy by my own effort. It is there because the One I am approaching is holy and because He is about to do something precious in me.
I remember walking in procession for a Saturday evening Mass at Berowra in Sydney. A mother came in with two children just as the entrance hymn had begun. One child was fascinated by the holy-water font, which was a little high, and reached up into it. Water went everywhere. I nearly laughed, and then I thought: perfect. A total cleansing before Mass. Cleanse your tongues as well! There was humour in the moment, but the image stayed with me because the whole Christian life is a preparation to receive and be changed by Christ.
There are people who genuinely cannot be physically present at Mass at a particular time. Work, illness, distance and other circumstances can make attendance impossible, and in those situations an online Mass can be a real spiritual help. My concern is the person who can come but chooses not to because watching at home is easier. “I am tired today.” “My little toe is hurting.” “I will just watch online.” If I really understand what is happening in the Eucharist, desire changes the decision. I want to be there because I want to receive Him.
Ephesians says, “Clothe yourselves with the new self” (Ephesians 4:24). That is what I want us to remember as we come to the Eucharist. Jesus is not simply giving me a holy object. He is giving me Himself. He is preparing me for eternal life. He is making me more and more like Himself.
At the end of the sermon I asked everyone to close their eyes and pray with that understanding. A little piece of bread and a little wine are going to become the precious Body and Blood of Jesus. So often I have stood before this mystery by force of habit or obligation. But now I want to understand it as part of the great reset. The Holy Spirit is constantly preparing me for eternal life, and the Eucharist is preparing me for eternal life.
Lord, give me intensity and passion for what is happening here. Let me recognise the greatest of all miracles: the transubstantiation by which bread and wine become Your Body and Blood. And as I receive You, work the greater transformation You desire in me. Put Christ on me until it is no longer merely I who live, but Christ who lives in me. Change me by Your presence. Make me like You, and prepare me for eternal life.
Adapted and edited from a talk delivered by Fr Michael Payyapilly VC during Divine Australia’s “Powered by the Holy Spirit” Live-In Retreat, held at Belgrave Heights Convention Centre, Belgrave Heights, Victoria, on 19 July 2025.