Much as I applaud Timothy Macnaught’s aspiration for a rethinking of the doctrine on the Eucharist (Letters, 3 July), I feel that a more realistic goal would be that the Church abandon its insistence that adherence to the theory of transubstantiation necessitates the exclusion of those who do not subscribe to it.

In “One Bread One Body” (1998), our bishops tried to justify the ban on eucharistic sharing on the grounds that “there can be … no full unity in the Eucharist without a shared understanding of all that the Eucharist contains and signifies”. But why? There is no indication that those present at the Last Supper had a shared understanding, or any understanding at all, of what Christ was doing. And considering the number of occasions recorded in the Gospels when Christ’s followers missed the point, and had to have things spelled out to them, the likelihood is that there was no shared understanding at the Last Supper.