In the cemetery of Mallona, in my native town of Bilbao, there is a
tombstone on which this verse is carved:
_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.
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