It is not for nothing that today's feast is called the Feast of the Blessed Sacrament, the day of the holy sign and the holy action, the feast of the sacramental presence of the heavenly Messiah Jesus. They are used precisely to put words to realities and to effectively evoke them. They express realities which are too rich, too close to the marrow of the real to be approach is barren and pitiful shards of human concepts. Sacraments, even the eucharistic presence est in genere signi,' that is, that presence can only be conceived within the category of the symbolic, and not within categories of physics or metaphysics. We need not look for physical changes in what is presented there as signs in regard to Jesus' real presence.
Bread is, and remains, physically bread, and wine is, and remains, physically wine.
Also Anglicans, Lutherans, and most Calvinists, who in line with the medieval view of faith emphasize the symbolic character of sacramentality, intend basically the same thing, and react only against physical processes of change in the bread and wine through the Consecration. One perhaps say only of the followers of Zwingli that they declared the reality of the sacramental symbolism in too threadbare and unreal way. We proclaim the death of the Lord, that is, not his physical death, but that death of being assumed into the Christian, sacramental world of the Risen One who now lives among us as the head of his body, the Church. The feast of Corpus Christi has something substantially to do with the hunger of two-thirds of the world's population, but it is not an assembly where we seek technical solutions to the problem. It is the sacramental place where the confession of faith is celebrated in the Risen Jesus who opens the possibility of a better world that might be called the radiant sunrise of the Reign of God.