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Although Wycliffe questioned many practices of the church of his day, his most controversial position was on transubstantiation. This was the belief that, upon the words of the priestly consecration in the Mass, the eucharistic elements of the bread and wine became the substance of the body and blood of Jesus Christ while keeping the appearance of bread and wine. Typical of Wycliffe’s comments on the Eucharist were the following:

“The nature of the bread is not destroyed by what is done by the priest, it is only elevated so as to become a substance more honored. The bread while becoming by virtue of Christ’s words the body of Christ does not cease to be bread. When it has become sacramentally the body of Christ, it remains bread substantially.”

“Nobody on earth is able to see Christ in the consecrated Host with the bodily eye, but by faith.”

“This same opinion is confirmed by blessed Augustine’s statement (in Decretum): ‘What is seen is the bread and the cup which the eyes renounce; but what faith demands is that the bread is the body of Christ and the cup is his blood. These are called sacramental elements for this reason that in them one thing is seen and another is understood. What is seen has bodily appearance, what is understood has a spiritual fruit.’”

“The consecrated Host we priests make and bless is not the body of the Lord but an effectual sign of it. It is not to be understood that the body of Christ comes down from heaven to the Host consecrated in every church.”

“Some expressions in Scripture must be understood plainly and without figure, but there are others that must be understood in a figurative sense. Just as Christ calls John the Baptist Elias, and St. Paul says that Christ was a rock, and Moses in Genesis 41 that the seven good kine are seven years, and the seven good ears are seven years. You will meet with such modes of expression constantly in Scripture and in these expressions, without a doubt, the production is made figuratively.”

“Therefore, let every man wisely, with much prayer and great study, and also with charity read the words of God in the Holy Scriptures … Christ saith, ‘I am the true vine.’ Wherefore do you not worship the vine for God, as you do the bread? Wherein was Christ a true vine? Or, wherein was the bread Christ’s body? It was in figurative speech, which is hidden to the understanding of the sinners. And thus, as Christ became not a material nor an earthly vine, nor a material vine the body of Christ, so neither is material bread changed from its substance to the flesh and blood of Christ.”

“If bread consecrated and unconsecrated be mixed together, the heretic cannot tell the difference between the natural bread and his supposed quality without a substance, any more than any of us can distinguish in such case between the bread that has been consecrated and that which has not. Mice, however, have an innate knowledge of the fact. They know that the substance of the bread is retained as at first. But our unbelievers have not even such knowledge. They never know what bread or what wine has been consecrated, except as they see it consecrated. But what, I ask, can be supposed to have moved the Lord Jesus Christ thus to confound and destroy all natural discernment in the senses and minds of the worshipers?”

“In the Mass creed, it is said, ‘I believe in one God only, Jesus Christ, by whom all things be made’ … And you then, who are an earthly man, by what reason may you say that you make your Maker? You say every day that you make of bread the body of the Lord, flesh and blood of Jesus Christ, God and man; … If you make the body of the Lord in these words, ‘Hoc est corpus meum,’ you yourself must be the person of Christ or else there is a false God … If you cannot make the work that God made in Genesis, how shall you make Him that made the works? And you have no words of authority.”

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