Aunque estamos en polvo convertidos, en Ti, Senor, nuestra esperanza fia, que tornaremos a vivir vestidos con la carne y la piel que nos cubria.[16]

“With the same bodies and souls that they had,” as the Catechism says.  So much so, that it is orthodox Catholic doctrine that the happiness of the blessed is not perfectly complete until they recover their bodies.  They lament in heaven, says our Brother Pedro Malon de Chaide of the Order of St. Augustine, a Spaniard and a Basque,[17] and “this lament springs from their not being perfectly whole in heaven, for only the soul is there; and although they cannot suffer, because they see God, in whom they unspeakably delight, yet with all this it appears that they are not wholly content.  They will be so when they are clothed with their own bodies.”

And to this central dogma of the resurrection in Christ and by Christ corresponds likewise a central sacrament, the axis of popular Catholic piety—­the Sacrament of the Eucharist.  In it is administered the body of Christ, which is the bread of immortality.

This sacrament is genuinely realist—­dinglich, as the Germans would say—­which may without great violence be translated “material.”  It is the sacrament most genuinely ex opere operato, for which is substituted among Protestants the idealistic sacrament of the word.  Fundamentally it is concerned with—­and I say it with all possible respect, but without wishing to sacrifice the expressiveness of the phrase—­the eating and drinking of God, the Eternalizer, the feeding upon Him.  Little wonder then if St. Teresa tells us that when she was communicating in the monastery of the Incarnation and in the second year of her being Prioress there, on the octave of St. Martin, and the Father, Fr. Juan de la Cruz, divided the Host between her and another sister, she thought that it was done not because there was any want of Hosts, but because he wished to mortify her, “for I had told him how much I delighted in Hosts of a large size.  Yet I was not ignorant that the size of the Host is of no moment, for I knew that our Lord is whole and entire in the smallest particle.”  Here reason pulls one way, feeling another.  And what importance for this feeling have the thousand and one difficulties that arise from reflecting rationally upon the mystery of this sacrament?  What is a divine body?  And the body, in so far as it is the body of Christ, is it divine?  What is an immortal and immortalizing body?  What is substance separated from the accidents?  Nowadays we have greatly refined our notion of materiality and substantiality; but there were even some among the Fathers of the Church to whom the immateriality of God Himself was not a thing so clear and definite as it is for us.  And this sacrament of the Eucharist is the immortalizing sacrament par excellence, and therefore the axis of popular Catholic piety, and if it may be so said, the most specifically religious of sacraments.