And this is what messes with my head. If it actually becomes the literal flesh of Christ, when does it do it? Does it do it when it hits the stomach, when it passes into the duodenum? Could you eat a wafer, and barf up Jesus meat? Could I gut someone who just received communion, find and steal the Jesus meat, and clone the son of God?
This is too weird for me to parse people taking it as anything other than symbolic.
But, this is just me loading stones into my slingshot in my house of glass. Raised a Buddhist, and we have TONS of crazy BS that we’re supposed to believe.
It is something that is hard to wrap your head around. But when you read the passages about it, you can see even if you don’t understand it, Christ was talking about something more than symbolism. In fact people were weirded out and started leaving him.
And so, you know, it is something metaphysical. It can be both at once while appearing to be one thing. And really, is that so far fetched? Light is both a wave and a particle. Christ was both God and Man. So it has some poetry, in a way.
If you aren’t a believer, its as bunk as anything else. If you are then its one of those holy mysteries of faith.
If I hadn’t already stopped being Catholic by the time all of that was revealed, that would have done it for me. However, the implications and discriminations that are part of the catechism started the erosion of my faith early on.
Thing is, if you do believe that kind of thing, you will make fantastic infantry.
I’m not sure why people thing CCD is anything other than indoctrination into acceptance and comfort of guilt motivated violence, physical AND emotional AND spiritual, in oneself, and especially in others.
I don’t trust a religion based in apologizing and humbling oneself to some vague concept instead of the person you’ve wronged and humiliated. Seems like a religion baed on approving of and enabling the awful behavior of the egoically challenged.
When the priest blesses it during mass. And calling it “literal” is a mistake. It always remains to every physical sense or lab test the same wheat wafer and wine that it was before. On a spiritual and mystical level, however, it becomes the body and blood of Christ… At least for Catholics and Anglicans it does.
Unless you are a Catholic theologian or a Catholic with celiac disease, pretty much any use of your time is better than armchair-quaterbacking what counts as “bread” for Catholic communion.
It’s so disappointing how Catholics have misconstrued what appear to have originally been nondualist teachings (i.e. the holographic nature of the universe, the whole of the One (Christ) is contained within everything).
I think it’s an interesting discussion. It’s all woo anyway, so the idea that gluten free bread somehow blocks the magical powers of a cosmic all powerful being is a strange argument. Lucifer should don a gluten free armor suit to battle da Jesus.
Surely though keeping a tradition intact is more about keeping the experience intact. Clearly the bread should be a flat and basically tasteless (so I’m told) piece of bread. Hence why you’re not allowed to dip it in honey or nacho cheese. That makes sense. Debating how much gluten the bread requires is maybe being a bit silly, so long as it basically looks and tastes the same. Or, to use your analogy, if you wanted Boba Fett, it probably doesn’t matter which of the many different Boba Fett figures you got, so long as it was Boba Fett in his badass armor, and not Jango Fett. And, because it’s about the experience, you probably wouldn’t have particularly desired an action figure of Boba Fett from Attack of the Clones, even though it would technically be Boba Fett.
In most cases, sure, but certainly the only people who would actually want their communion gluten free would be the people to whom it’s a holy sacrament. So if it does matter to them, they don’t have to eat the thing. If it doesn’t matter to them… well it’s hardly belittling their tradition. If the problem is other Catholics getting upset that someone else is doing it wrong, they should probably try minding their own business, and eating their own “correct” piece of bread. Though I suppose the latter attitude is why I was never cut out for organized religion.
Again, it is defining what the bread is. Any definition could be considered arbitrary or “close enough”. But there needs to be a definition at some point. This is the reason that the traditions of the church have been relatively unchanged for the first 1500 years, and now there are a thousand ways of doing things once everyone split off.
Well it IS belittling, because the “what difference does it make” doesn’t hold water for the various reasons posted. It evidently DOES make a difference. Just like the wine needs to be wine - not grape juice.
I don’t think anyone is “upset” per se, but the question arose and an answer needed. The fact is that “the bread needs SOME wheat gluten” and “the bread can lack gluten” are both reasonable, logical answers. There needs a clarification what constitutes bread, and that was given. It was decided that when discerning what ingredients were needed, that was included. Which is fine. It makes as much sense to say “This is the form the bread has always been in, let’s keep the same definition.” as “It IS close enough, let’s go with it.” It’s a judgement call and that is the purpose of church leaders to research, think about, pray on, and decide.
Let’s be frank. The majority of people not eating gluten are not doing it from a medical necessity. Those that are have varying tolerance. I couldn’t find how much gluten was in an average wafer, but I did read that many foods marked “gluten free” have SOME gluten in them. I can’t conceive the number of people being adversely affected by one wafer a week being very high. And those that are will just have to adapt just like the many more recovering alcoholics who refuse the wine. The alcoholic thing affects WAAAY more people, yet they are firm on this.
Okay, so it doesn’t actually become flesh? (excuse my ignorance, again, raised Buddhist…)
That makes a LOT more sense to me. I can grasp the concept if you aren’t arguing that transubstantiation involves turning into a literal chunk of flesh, but becomes spiritually and mystically so.
And again, please excuse the ignorance, but then what is the difference between that being a “symbolic” change vs anything else. Maybe that’s the wrong way to put it. I guess what the non-initiated see as “symbolic” is very real to the initiated.
If I understand, the argument is that it was before a wafer, in measurable reality (lab tests etc…), and also spiritually and mystically nothing more than a wafer. Afterwards, it’s still a wafer (to science), but in the spiritual and mystical realms it’s a bit of the body of Christ?
Are there other things (other than communion wine) which also do this in Christianity? I mean things that to all appearances and tests would seem to be one thing, but are spiritually and mystically actually other things. It’s a fascinating concept.
Yes, it is believed to change in a spiritual way that changes how you can treat it. Once it changes, to be in it’s presence is to literally be in the presence of Christ. This is why you get the practice of Adoration where you just come in and sit in it’s presence, and the rules for disposing of it are strict. If a blessed wafer gets dirty for instance, it must be dissolved in blessed wine and poured down a special sink, sacrarium, that empties directly into the ground.
Holy water and other blessed items also have rules about respectful treatment. As far as I know though, the Eucharist is the only thing that actually becomes God.
My knowledge comes more from current catechism, I was raised with it though I’m no longer practicing. I’ve only studied older church beliefs for fun in a more patchy manner.
If you honestly believed that God was transforming the cracker into the body of Yeshua bin Yosif of Nazareth, 1st century CE, why would you believe that God wouldn’t do so for a pop tart, if the prayers of the priest were as sincere as those of the one praying for the transformation of the cracker? I can think of several scenarios where normal crackers would be unavailable and a priest trying to hold Mass would have to use whatever bread-type substances are available.
I am married to a woman for whom one pasta noodle is enough to trigger a very nasty, though not life-threatening, autoimmune reaction where antibodies sensitive to gliadin (a subunit of gluten) also happen to bind to her neurons, causing ataxia (difficulty in moving and thinking). Now, we’re not Catholic, or even religious for that matter. But if we were, I can’t imagine her accepting the church saying, “Sorry, in order to take part in our most holy ritual, you have to poison yourself.”
Food that is certified gluten free has been monitored through the entire manufacturing process and should contain no gluten at all, even trace amounts. If it does, that’s grounds for a suit against the manufacturer.
It isn’t a matter of could, but would. Maybe He does. Who knows when it goes outside the prescribed tradition.
I’m sorry she is so allergic, but it isn’t REQUIRED to partake in the bread. As I have said elsewhere, many more don’t partake in the wine. As someone with a disability, I have to miss out on some stuff to. It sucks, but that’s what we have to do.
I confess I am not up on all of it, but in doing some searching I saw people warning that gluten can appear where it isn’t supposed to.
