BLESSED SACRILEGE OF THE ALTAR
Roman Catholicism says the Blessed Eucharist or the Mass is an act of worship
wherein the bread and wine are turned by the priest, who uses the power of God,
into the body and blood of Jesus Christ who is true God and true man.
The altar of modern Catholicism is a place of sacrilege and hence sacrilege that
is blessed for the Church has no repentance and makes virtue out of its
practice.
WAFER-WATCHING
The Catholic Church likes to expose the communion wafer and put it on display so
that the people can come and look at it, adore it and pray to it as if it were
God. It is kept in tabernacles for the worship of the people. Also, the priest
may take a large host or wafer and put it in a monstrance which it can be
displayed in for the adoration of the people. The priest may perform an act of
worship called Benediction in which the wafer is adored and used to bless the
people.
The Church says Jesus is bodily in Heaven and that the host is this same body.
Each host then is the one entity, Jesus. The Church denies that the more wafers
that are changed into Jesus the more Jesuses there are. Jesus' body doesn't get
bigger the more wafers there are. Jesus's body in Heaven is supposed to be a
body as we understand it. The Church teaches that its height and appearance and
weight etc do not make it a body - do not make it Jesus. A body is something
ghostly. So it follows that a marble can be a human person. The breeze can be a
human person. Having eyes and ears and flesh is optional to having a body, to
being a person. None of this makes any sense. What the Church is doing is hiding
the fact that it is pretending that the wafer is Jesus. If you say the wafer is
physically transformed into Jesus and yet the wafer is physically unchanged then
that is what you are doing. The worship of the eucharist is far worse than any
idolatry engaged in by the pagans.
The wafer may be displayed on an altar. This is called exposition. Many Churches
hold Eucharistic Adoration in which the exposition may carry on for a length of
time. Eucharistic Adoration is surprisingly popular in the Church especially
among women. Its appeal lies in how it offers a condensed God. He is there in
the form of a helpless wafer. The worshipper feels bigger than God. The idolater
might believe in a great and powerful god but he likes to feel better than the
god by treating an image or object as if it were the god or the abode of the
god. It is placebo for the fear of the supernatural.
If people were invited to worship key rings or remote controls or the
mother-in-law's hairdo as God incarnate like they are asked to worship the wafer
in Catholicism, they would recoil and see how odd and wacky it is. The Catholic
Church hit upon the idea of using unleavened bread which is bleached white and
looks mysterious. This was because people would feel that worshipping a loaf or
a bun would be too idolatrous and strange. It needs to look sacred to make
people adore it. The same psychology is behind the fact that Catholics can
venerate traditional images of the Virgin Mary but cannot venerate one that
looks more like Lady Gaga than the Virgin Mary. The Church seeks to trigger the
feeling that the wafer is Jesus. This is idolatry for you must adore the wafer
because it is Jesus not just because you feel it is. Feelings led pagans into
idol worship.
If you give somebody tap water and say it is actually pure arsenic you are
telling the person to kid themselves that it is not water but arsenic. If you
say the tap water is physically unchanged but still somehow not water you are
trying to hide the pretending. Admit it. The worship of the wafer in Catholicism
is pretending that it is Jesus Christ. Even if it is Jesus, you don't know that
and could still be pretending that it is Jesus. The pagans thought that the
spirits of their gods went into the statues they worshipped. That made them
idolaters. Catholics are worse - they adore bread as God and it is deliberate
for they are only pretending it is not bread but God.
Jesus did not say at the Last Supper that we are to eat and adore or just adore
the bread but that we are to eat it. To this it might be objected that if it is
Jesus it should be adored. Yes but that does not imply it would be treated with
the extra devotion and ceremony that Catholics make.
The priest can change the bread into his god when he visits the sick. Providing
the Eucharist for the sick is an excuse for keeping it in tabernacles.
When all we see is bread it is easy to forget about Jesus and adore what looks
like bread. When you are looking at the bread you are often forgetting to be
aware of God. You can love a person’s looks and forget even that it is a person
you are looking at. Prayer is awareness of God and nothing else. That is why the
only true form of prayer is just being aware of the presence of God and
intending to be one with him. Words remove that awareness because you cannot
concentrate on saying, “Jesus be praised,” and on the divine presence at the
same time. In between the words yes but not when you are voicing the words.
Vocal prayer is actually sinful. It is idolatry to pray with a picture of God or
Jesus or Mary in your mind. It is as much adoring an image as would adoring a
statue be.
Praying to the blessed sacrament betrays ignorance of spirituality. It is no use
saying that Jesus accepted worship when he was on earth because that was not
real worship even though he might have accepted it as a start on the way to
higher things. Bowing or praying to Jesus is not worship because only being
aware that he is with you is. You could say it was worship but not literal
worship. It was just emotional stuff like being grateful or emotionally loving.
Jesus does not want to be adored with incense and candles any more. He permitted
the woman to anoint his feet with expensive oil though selling the oil for the
poor would have been a better idea. Judas pointed out that the oil should have
been sold for the poor. But Jesus said that it was preparation for burial and he
was allowing this extravagance just once for the poor would still need help
after he was gone meaning that after that we can sell oil for the benefit of the
poor. He does not want incense any more or candles when he said that about the
oil.
God would not let Moses see his face because he hated idolatry – which proves
that God would never become man. Read Exodus 33. Moses was unlikely to commit
that sin unlike everybody that has been born since but God still would not take
a chance. This episode proves that the Catholic rites of adoration for the
Eucharist are pagan. It also proves that Jesus Christ would not have turned
bread and wine into his own body and blood for it would be adoring an image not
God even though God is in that image. We don't see him. As far as we are
concerned we see bread. You don’t need helps to prayer in the form of exposed
communion wafers or images for if prayer is hard for you and you try it is as
good a prayer as any for God rewards effort not success. The helps actually
reduce or ruin merit and God would not set up anything that would lead to that.
Tabernacles can be robbed and wafers can decay over being kept or displayed too
long. Jesus would not suffer such indignities if he was eaten at Mass and
nothing left over. It is wrong to have them and have these things occurring when
they are not needed.
The doctrine that the bread is really a human being is very hard for people to
believe and very hard to defend. It would be simpler to take the bread as a
symbol of Jesus that you take to get grace from God that makes you closer to
Jesus. If somebody is not sure if the bread is the body then in so far as they
are not sure they are committing idolatry EVEN IF THE BREAD IS THE BODY OF
JESUS. If they are not sure or not very sure, then they are guilty of intending
to worship bread. Even pagan idolaters didn't go that far. They didn't adore
images but the god they thought lived in the image or who had turned into the
image.
BOOKS CONSULTED
Apologetics and Catholic Doctrine, Book 2, Most Rev M Sheehan DD, MH Gill & Son,
Dublin, 1954
Apologetics for the Pulpit, Aloysius Roche, Burns Oates & Washbourne Ltd,
London, 1950
Born-Again Catholics and the Mass, William C Standridge Independent Faith
Mission, North Carolina, 1980
Catholicism and Fundamentalism, Karl Keating, Ignatius Press, San Francisco,
1988
Confession of a Roman Catholic, Paul Whitcomb, TAN, Illinois, 1985
Critiques of God, Edited by Peter A Angeles (Religion and Reason Section),
Prometheus Books, New York, 1995
Documents of the Christian Church, edited by Henry Bettenson, Oxford University
Press, Oxford, 1979
Eucharist, Centre of Christian Life, Rod Kissinger SJ, Liguori Publications,
Missouri, 1970
Fifty Years in the Church of Rome, Fr Charles Chiniquy, Chick Publications,
Chino, 1985
Is Jesus Really Present in the Eucharist? Michael Evans, Catholic Truth Society,
London, 1986
Handbook to the Controversy with Rome, Vol 2, Karl Von Hase MD, The Religious
Tract Society, London, 1906
Living in Christ, A Dreze SJ, Geoffrey Chapman, London-Melbourne, 1969
Martin Luther, Richard Marius, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1999
Radio Replies, Vol 2, Frs Rumble and Carty, Radio Replies Press, St Paul,
Minnesota, 1940
Roman Catholic Claims, Charles Gore, MA, Longmans, Green & Co, London, 1894
Salvation, The Bible and Roman Catholicism, William Webster, Banner of Truth,
Edinburgh, 1990
Secrets of Romanism, Joseph Zaccello, Loizeaux Brothers, New Jersey, 1984
The Catechism of the Catholic Church, Veritas, Dublin, 1995
The Early Church, Henry Chadwick, Pelican, Middlesex, 1987
The Mass, Sacrifice and Sacrament, William F Dunphy, CSSR, Liguori Publications,
Missouri, 1986
The Primitive Faith and Roman Catholic Developments, Rev John A Gregg, APCK,
Dublin, 1928
The Student’s Catholic Doctrine, Rev Charles Hart BA, Burns & Oates, London,
1961
This is My Body, This is My Blood, Bob and Penny Lord, Journeys of Faith,
California, 1986
Why Does God…? Domenico Grasso SJ, St Pauls, Bucks, 1970
The Web
Transubstantiation, Is it a True Doctrine?
http://www.geocities.com/christian_apologist2001/
BIBLE QUOTATIONS FROM:
The Amplified Bible