In the hall of the Vatican where the synod on the Eucharist is being held from October 2-23, above the presider’s table is a large screen. It displays a famous fresco by Raphael, which illustrates for the synod fathers the theme of their meeting: the "Disputation on the Sacrament." At the center of the depiction, on an altar surrounded by other fathers who are reasoning and discussing – while they adore – is the consecrated host exposed in a magnificent monstrance.
He continues by reprinting a 10/12 article by Timothy Verdun, an art expert who also was invited by the Pope to be an auditor at the Synod:
For the visitor of the early 1500’s – as also for Catholic believers today – that small round of white that Raphael isolates at the center of the altar was, therefore, the key to all the mysteries of the faith.
In the bread of God, the humanist Christian did not see the static object of devotion that the Eucharist had become in late medieval pietism, but a dynamic reality of the life of that union of many members which is the Church. Donato Acciaiuoli, in a sermon on the Eucharist he delivered in 1468, lists ecclesial communion as the first benefit of the sacrament. But he also insists upon the intellectual fascination that this mystery has always exerted, and continues to exert, upon men. In Raphael’s "Disputation, " in fact, we see not only Eucharistic adoration – a purely religious act – but a dynamic "school" of thinkers gathered around the altar, who are intent upon penetrating the meaning of the mystery. These Christian doctors are just as animated in the search for truth as their pagan predecessors, in the "School of Athens " facing them, were.
For Giorgio Vasari, the first commentator on the "Disputation" during the 1500’s, this intense intellectual activity painted by Raphael represents a process: they are "writing the Mass," he says, and "discussing the host upon the altar." The Mass, which makes present again, in an unbloody manner, the sacrifice of Christ on the cross, is the liturgical action in which, through the work of the Holy Spirit, the ecclesial community lives fully its conformity to Christ. "Writing" the Mass implies the tireless and age-old effort to understand, explore, and better live the mystery of communion, entrusted to the Church, between heaven and earth, between God and man
Even outside of the liturgical action, the Eucharistic host revealed the body of Christ to the humanists: and this not only as a relic of his passion, but also and above all as communion, friendship, Church. In Raphael’s fresco and in the commentary on it made by Vasari, we witness the world of the Renaissance recovering the ancient view of the Eucharist: the view of the “Didache” and of writers such as Gaudentius of Brescia, for whom the bread "comes from many grains of wheat, as also the mystical body of Christ is one, but is formed of the whole multitude of the human race, which is brought to perfection by the fire of the Spirit." And so it is for the blood: many grapes become a single chalice. Finally, this ancient writer explains how the unity of the Eucharist and the Church is accomplished: "Then comes the pressing upon the wine-press of the cross. Then there is the fermentation that takes place of its own accord within the ample spaces of hearts full of faith, hearts that take up the cross."
Looking over the "Disputation " from bottom to top – from the Eucharist to Christ and the Father – it appears clearly that the unity of the Church on earth with its Head in heaven, of whom the Eucharist is the symbol, is derived precisely from the "press" of the great concealed cross that organizes the entire composition, and along the vertical axis of which we contemplate the Trinity, while the horizontal one shows us our future in heaven with Mary and all the saints.
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