As the Church enters in many places a strange sort of Holy Saturday (though at least the chants of Tenebrae are heard on Holy Saturday), here is a passage from St Robert Bellarmine which I came across recently, about the phrase ‘the Breaking of the Bread’ as a name for the Mass. Some of the Tablety sort of people seem to like this phrase because they think (if truth be told) that it is a bit Protestant. Bellarmine discusses it while speaking of the Scriptural passages that teach the real presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist:
The second argument is drawn from the words ‘The bread which we break’ (1 Cor. 10). For in the mystery of the Eucharist, breaking is the same as immolating or offering. This is clear from the words of Paul in 1 Cor. 11: ‘This is my body which is broken for you.’ For Calvin too, and Martyr [the Protestant controversialist Peter Martyr Vermigli] and many Catholics understand this of the passion, and Calvin says expressly, ‘To be broken here means the same as to be immolated’. Therefore in this place too, breaking will be immolation: for it is the same word, of the same author, in the same epistle, and treating of the same subject.
This is confirmed by the fact that Paul speaks about the chalice with words that have to do with its consecration, not its distribution; for he doesn’t say, ‘the chalice which we drink’, but ‘the chalice which we bless’. Therefore in speaking of the bread, he must also have used words having to do with its consecration, not with its distribution (‘Controversies on the Sacrament of the Eucharist’, Bk. 1, chapter 12).
Laodicea 
April 13, 2020 at 10:11 am
Actually, there is an interesting textual variation here. The Vulgate has ‘traditur’ (‘given’), not ‘frangitur’ (‘broken’) in 1 Cor. 11:24. Yet Bellarmine (contemporary with the Clementine Vulgate) and Calvin (earlier than it) both read ‘frangitur’. The accepted Greek text in the modern versions of the NT has no verb at all, literally reading, ‘This is my body, the [body] for you’. ‘Ambrosiaster’ in the 4th century has ‘frangitur’. But it is not just a Latin reading, seemingly, as the Coptic liturgy of St Mark has in the consecration, ‘This is my body which is broken for you’.