A special liturgy highlighting scientists, science educators and students of science drew about 200 people — from families with young children to teens and older adults — to Holy Family Church Nov. 27.
The homily was delivered by a scientist, Father Patrick Dolan, who concelebrated the Mass with Archbishop Shelton J. Fabre. Father Dolan told the congregation that the Gospel reading detailing the transfiguration “speaks beautifully” to the fact that — like the apostles Peter, James and John — people are always looking for what is real as God reveals it.
Science and faith intersect in the Eucharist when people try to determine what “truly is real,” Father Dolan said.
Throughout the centuries people have questioned whether “there is anything more than just the bread and wine there” at Communion, he noted. Even notable theologians struggled with this question, he said.
Father Dolan listed “four wonderful reasons for us to believe that there is something significantly more than just the bread and wine, that there really is the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ.”
First, he said, are Jesus’ words. His words are “effective” and “powerful”; they could forgive sins and heal the sick, he said.
Second, he pointed to “the effect” of the Eucharist throughout the centuries. “When the Eucharist was present, things flourished spiritually,” he said.
Third are the hundreds of miracles attributed to the Eucharist, said Father Dolan. These miracles were not meant to deceive, he said, but to allow people to see more of Jesus, as the apostles did during the transfiguration.
Fourth, Father Dolan said, is what St. Thomas Aquinas called “our spiritual eye,” which is something within that allows one to sense the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist.
“There’s something real and we have every good reason to believe in the reality of the Body and Blood of Jesus,” he said. “You can’t measure it with a machine … but you can detect it with the human soul made in the image and likeness of God that resonates with that.”
Father Dolan went on to share with the congregation that science is to be taken seriously when it comes to the Eucharist.
In 1949, he said, a question came up about the “reality of physical things and the reality of spiritual things. How do they come together in the most sacred Eucharist?”
The question went something like this, he said: If the church claimed that bread and wine are changed into flesh and blood, where does the change take place — in the protons, neutrons, electrons, or in something smaller?
As this was debated, some theologians claimed such questions should not even be asked, he said. Others claimed “We have every right to look at where and try and figure it out so we can behave appropriately,” Father Dolan said.
That debate went on until the beginning of the Second Vatican Council, he said. Some of the arguments were lost in all the changes brought about by the council, but the conclusions remained, he said: Science should be taken seriously and it could help determine “how to do things correctly in our ceremony.”
For example, science helps the church determine what qualifies as Communion bread.
Speaking to the congregation, he concluded, “May you truly be able to use all the tools of human investigation … and may God’s grace grow in you as you investigate your world around you and like our first reading says, may you quickly find its Lord.”
Following the Mass, Tim Tomes, archivist for the archdiocese, and Record columnist Chris Graney, an astronomer with the Vatican Observatory, discussed the recently restored Bouchet telescope. The 150-year-old telescope belonged to Monsignor Michael Bouchet, an inventor and vicar general for the then-Diocese of Louisville in the 1870s.
