First Communion for Catholics is when a child receives Christ physically for the first time. The host is not symbolic. Catholics have faith it is the true physical presence of Jesus Christ. Every mass is a miracle. Every act of communion is a miracle with the rationale that runs seemingly counter to what is possible in the world. Every good Catholic is therefore a believer of miracles. It is this capacity to believe which is pivotal to the very idea of Catholicism.
The little child does not understand this completely well, of course. The little child is dressed in white well-pressed clothes; a dress, if the child is a girl. He or she holds a candle. The procession has been rehearsed many times before the real act at the altar. But even, as he or she holds his or her place in the line, and through the noisy chatter that lines often encourage in the very young, the child seldom ever really thinks in terms of the miracle of the act itself.
The school system, even the Catholic school system, tends to bury the miraculous nature of the act under layers of academic disciplines: the sciences, the arts, literature and philosophy. In time, every child develops incredulity at all things that cannot be fully explained by factors with a clear materialistic measure. And it is excusable if the child begins to think the Eucharist is simply symbolically real. Or that the bread is really only bread like any other. And the real miracle is that we can believe at all.
We all derive, of course, from the premise that there is a difference between what is physically real and what is only symbolically so. What is symbolically real is real by virtue of an interpretation deriving from belief and faith, which do affect behavior. The scientific discipline dictates that if the host has been miraculously transformed, then there must be material manifestations of this “miracle” which can be measured. And science has a whole battery of tests to find out what these are, if they are there at all. The miracle of the Eucharist cannot yield any indications by virtue of scientific tests. If it were left up to science, there is no miracle at all.
And yet Catholics believe anyway. Catholics believe on the basis of a stubborn unscientific faith.
The young child lining up for first communion inside the timespan of a series of grading periods constituting his or her school experience lives ultimately inside an anachronism, a contradiction, that seldom ever is resolved.
The school curriculum requires studies based almost entirely on the scientific disciplines. And the scientific disciplines presume an incredulity, even a denial, for all ideas having no basis in the sense of scientific material evidence and proof. But if the child is growing inside a Catholic school environment, then he or she will have been taught also of the absolute reality of miracles and of things being real even when their reality cannot be materially proven.
This contradiction is seldom ever fully explained to the child. It is hardly even talked about inside the academic environment. Here, there is only mostly a reading of dogma; never much of an argument for or against the nuanced tenets themselves.
Instead, as Catholic school systems often go, this contradiction is almost always left to the parents to explain to their children. This, along with thorny issues like sex, life and death, and the fundamental purpose of life. Except for a few parents, these issues are for the child, swept under the rug.
In the course of growing to maturity, the child, if he or she is intelligent, makes a fundamental personal choice: to believe or not? And this resolution has little to do with the nuanced dogma of the Catholic faith. The decision is a fundamental one: Do I or do I not believe in miracles?
Given all the current developments of the sciences, the fact we live inside an environment of technological “miracles,” the cards seem stacked in favor of the negative. Otherwise, the contemporary Catholic immerses into the postmodern penchant for fragmentation – the ability to live viably with opposing, even contradictory beliefs, as a normal course of life: Otherwise, the child, becomes now a grown man or woman, can just choose not to believe in God; Or not think about religion at all.
A good conversation about the Eucharist in these contemporary times does make sense. But the most meaningful venue of this discussion is really inside the family with parents asking their children a primordial question of faith: Do you believe in miracles?
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