I beg the indulgence of my prolife readers as I navigate some twists of Christian theology to make a point about our shared affirmation of the personhood of the child in the womb.

All Christians observe some form of celebration of “the Lord’s Supper,” what looks like a sharing of bread and wine. Roman Catholics commemorate their teachings about the Lord’s Supper within the two weeks following Pentecost in a feast called the “Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ,” or Corpus Christi for short. Thus many readers here recently observed Corpus Christi.

Catholic teaching on the Lord’s Supper affirms the “Real Presence” of Jesus in what appears to be the bread and wine of the ritual, referred to as the Sacrament of the Eucharist. The teaching has been elaborated through history. The elaboration begins with biblical writers such as John and Paul, and flowers among the ancient “Fathers” of the Church. (A Wikipedia page on the subject yields a sampling of the ancient testimony.) Medieval Catholic theologians applied Aristotelian philosophy to come to a consensus on transubstantiation as a way to understand how Jesus can be present in the Sacrament: The Sacrament is the being (“substance”) of Jesus but the appearance and attributes (“form”) of bread and wine.

Protestants often share some variation on the Catholic teachings, but those that do tend to celebrate the teaching exclusively on the Thursday before Easter. Neither do the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and Eastern Catholics observe Corpus Christi, but they share a similar belief in the liveliness of Jesus’ presence in the appearance of bread and wine.

The Eastern Orthodox often criticize the Roman Catholics for relying too much on philosophy for an analysis of a divine “Mystery,” that is, a Sacrament. They make a good point about the dangers of philosophical analysis. Today’s Catholics, who rarely know anything about Aristotle or medieval philosophy, will often apply the philosophical framework of contemporary science to the Catholic teaching. Some are tempted to lose faith when they discover that, under a microscope, the Sacrament still looks like bread and not the flesh of Jesus. Others are tempted to defend their faith by insisting that the Real Presence can be understood in scientific terms, and they rely too much on wondrous stories about Eucharistic miracles, or fret too much about “invisible particles,” which are not possible in transubstantiation.

Still, I am a Roman Catholic, so I ultimately trust the teaching of the Catholic Church, including its heavily philosophical understanding of the Real Presence. I also observe that the philosophical approach has some value for the prolife movement, as I promised in the opening paragraph of this reflection.

The problem is that science, at least as we have known it in recent centuries, deals with bodies but not souls. The modern scientific method relies mainly on observations made by the human senses regardless of the person doing the observation. One can apply the scientific method to a human body and get many wonderful results in biology and medicine, from which we’ve all benefited, and often times even the hazier field of psychology yields good fruit.

Not so with souls, which are directly experienced only subjectively, and not by multiple observers nor by the senses. So the scientific frame of mind, over time, can habituate us to setting aside questions of the soul, except insofar as a person under consideration may be able to speak for himself or herself.

From there, it’s a short step to concluding that the baby in the womb is “merely a clump of cells.” The operative word there is “merely,” for the truth is that we are all a clump of cells, whether before or after birth. The question isn’t whether we are bodies, for we are all bodies, but rather whether or how those bodies are also persons.

Some pregnancies, such as miscarriages or perhaps molar pregnancies, do in fact degrade into clumps of cells. Effectively any person who may have been conceived has died, if only by the dissolution of the body into component parts. But the argument doesn’t work in reverse: Just because the person is not yet able to affirm his or her own personhood, does not mean the person is merely a clump of cells.

Instead, those of us who care about souls as well as bodies need to go beyond science into philosophy. The body is not something apart from or independent of a soul. Rather, the body is the ordinary mode of being for the human soul. Sometimes that body, by listening, speech, facial expressions, and otherwise, will display signs that the person exercises the faculties we attribute to the soul: intelligence, moral sensibility, an appetite for love and life. And sometimes not. But even when not, that body remains the “substance,” that is, the means by which the soul is in the world, so that the person is body and soul together.

That’s ancient philosophy, and it’s easy to take for granted, or even to scoff at from the perspective of those who prefer science and only science. But philosophy has its applications, one of which is the affirmation of the body as the body of a person.

Christians who believe in the Real Presence should by that fact be able to draw the correct conclusion about children in the womb. We affirm that the Sacrament is the Body and Blood and therefore also the Soul and Divinity of the crucified and resurrected Lord Jesus. We would be horrified at the sacrilege of scoffing at the Sacrament of the Eucharist as “just a clump of cells.” We should understand any similar dismissal of a living child in the womb as the same error.