Transubstantiating Sexual Abuse

A Monopoly on Jesus

Preface: I am Catholic. Don’t get mad at me or yell at me for being a Protestant who “doesn’t understand the Catholic Church.” I understand the Catholic Church.

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The fundamental claim of the Catholic Church is that The Eucharist, the bread and wine used in the Communion ritual, actually becomes the Body and Blood of Jesus.

Literally.

Physically.

All claims of the bread and wine being merely “symbolic” of Christ’s body or “allegorical” to it are flatly rejected and, instead, The Church insists that after they have been consecrated upon the alter by a priest, they become, fully and completely, the actual flesh and blood of the God-Man Jesus.

Even if it doesn’t look like that’s what happened.

Even if the bread and wine undergo no measurable, observable change.

This process is called Transubstantiation which, without getting too far off in the philosophical weeds, is a belief based in Aristotelian metaphysics which says that the substance or essence of the bread and wine change, even if none of their observable, physical attributes change. Admittedly, this is highly questionable. While I personally do believe in The Real Presence (that Jesus is actually in the Eucharist), I find this particular philosophical explanation for it severely lacking. As I’ve mentioned before, it strikes me as intellectually dishonest to use a modern metaphysics that jives with contemporary science for 99.9 percent of everything but then leap to an explanation based on the worldview of a guy from 2300 years ago to explain your miracles. All that aside though, the point of all this is to impress upon you how Catholics feel about The Eucharist. How seriously they take it. It’s not a metaphor for them. It is real and literal. For Catholics, The Eucharistic meal is legit, actual cannibalism.

Which is great. I love it. Very metal.

METAL!!!!!

Of course, admitting that they practice cannibalism gets a lot of Catholics very embarrassed and so, when confronted with this fact, it is typical for them to engage in all sorts of philosophical circumlocutions to try and argue that they don’t. They do though. I encourage all of them to embrace it. Cannibalism is the act of eating another human’s flesh, Jesus was a human, you claim to eat his flesh, therefore, ergo, ipso facto, quod erat demonstrandum, and other Latin phrases as well… Communion is an act of cannibalism.

Just go with it.

It’s fun.

We can get into why the central act of Christian worship is ritualistic cannibalism some other time (and also why it is that people are so shy about it). Today though, I want to leave that aside. Today, I want instead to focus on how belief in Transubstantiation enables Clerical Abuse.

See, it’s not enough for The Church to claim that the bread and wine actually become Jesus. No. In fact, they go a step further. The Catholic Church says, more or less, that they have a monopoly on the power to do this, to make the bread and wine into Christ. Their claim is that The Eucharist of most other Christian denominations and sects is illegitimate. It doesn’t change into Jesus. They say that Communion at a Protestant church remains simple bread and wine and possesses no salvific merit or supernatural Grace. Only they, the Catholics, can give you the Real Stuff.

Okay.

That’s not quite true.

In recent decades I admit this position has somewhat softened, at least in regard to the Eastern Orthodox Church, if not in regard to Protestants. As recently as a hundred years ago it was not uncommon for Catholics and Orthodox Christians to doubt the validity of the other’s sacraments. The Eastern Orthodox Church, still, today, is at best dubious of the Catholic Eucharist, but Catholics have come around to accepting The Orthodox Eucharist as “legitimate”. To my estimation this has always been, on both sides, a political argument disguised as a theological one, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see Rome reverse its stance on the validity of Eastern sacraments if it continues to lose members to the Orthodox Church. That one exception admitted however, the claim of The Church is that the bread and wine you get anywhere else is fake. It’s not real. The Protestant (or other) minister might hold it in the same way and say the same words and put it in your hand while going “The Body of Christ”, sure.

But they simply won’t have the juice.

They won’t have the power.

From the Catholic Perspective these other churches don’t have valid priestly orders and so they lack the magic touch, The Hocus Pocus, to actually change the bread and wine into the Real Thing.

The phrase “Hocus Pocus” likely comes from “Hoc est corpus meum.” “This is my body”, in Latin.

You can see the problem.

If it is true that partaking of Christ’s body and blood is necessary to receive Grace and go to Heaven (which is, in broad brush strokes, what Catholics believe), then the caste of people who possess the magical ability to create that body and blood… become kind of beyond reproach.

Right?

And please, note, I’m not using the phrase “magical ability” here in an attempt to be derogatory. It’s simply what the claim is. The Catholic Church believes that it is only validly ordained priests who can trace their line of succession back to the apostles who possess the magical ability to transmute ordinary food into extraordinary specimens of God’s physical body. That’s the claim. I suppose calling it “miraculous” instead of “magical” might sound more refined, but the two words mean basically the same thing. At root therefore, Catholicism, as an Institution, is based on a magical caste system. The priests can do the magic. Everybody else can’t.

Note:

This doesn’t mean they’re wrong!

It also doesn’t mean they’re right.

I’m not trying to make claims here about the truth or falsehood of Catholic dogma or belief. I’m simply pointing out that the dogma, as stated, suggests that only a vanishingly small subset of people in this world can provide you with the material necessary for saving your soul.

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And if those people are pedophile rapists???