From The Pilot:
Prompted by new data regarding Catholics’ understanding of Church teaching on the Real Presence, the archdiocese is planning a yearlong spiritual initiative, the Year of the Eucharist, to be held from 2020 to 2021, Cardinal Seán P. O’Malley announced in a Dec. 10 letter.
In July of this year, the Pew Research Center released the results of a study on “What Americans Know About Religion.” According to Pew, only 31 percent of the self-identifying Catholics who participated in the survey said they believe that Christ is truly present in the bread and wine consecrated at Mass, and half thought the Church teaches that the bread and wine are only symbols. In fact, as explained in the Catechism of the Catholic Church #1376, the Church teaches that, “it has always been the conviction of the Church of God … that by the consecration of the bread and wine there takes place a change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood.”