Often, random thoughts occur to me in the shower.
This morning, I was thinking – “do any Roman Catholics actually believe in transubstantiation?”
If they do, it’s a pretty simple test scientifically – test the wafer before and after it enters the body.
You have to take a DNA sample from the ingester to eliminate contamination, but should be an easy test to see if the starch transforms into human DNA, specifically that of Christ. Ditto for the wine.
If it doesn’t stand up to a simple test, what possible rebuttal is there?
If most Roman Catholics don’t actually believe it (and probably many don’t even know what the word “transubstantiation” means), then what does that mean about their beliefs as a whole? Isn’t communion a cornerstone?
Of course, the overall problem with that is I’m applying logic to religion. 😉
I had some good conversations on this sort of topic with my religion teacher last semester, who was a Catholic nun. She spoke of the communion and of “christ made flesh” as more of…the act of christ becoming us. When we meditate and seek out the person of Christ, we become him. We are his agents on Earth, and in taking communion, we are Christ made flesh. So, the wafer doesn’t “become christ”. It’s our act of wanting to make Christ alive within us that is important. I loved this interpretation of the communion. Make much more sense than just “make this bread into me”.
That certainly makes sense, but the position of the Roman Catholic church is that there is an *actual change*.
From the Vatican website:
The Council of Trent summarizes the Catholic faith by declaring: “Because Christ our Redeemer said that it was truly his body that he was offering under the species of bread, it has always been the conviction of the Church of God, and this holy Council now declares again, that by the consecration of the bread and wine there takes place a change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood. This change the holy Catholic Church has fittingly and properly called transubstantiation.”
Ah, I guess later on, the Vatican went back on what they declared at the Council of Trent, in “EUCHARISTIC DOCTRINE – ELUCIDATION” in 1980.
There, they say:
Becoming does not here imply material change. Nor does the liturgical use of the word imply that the bread and wine become Christ’s body and blood in such a way that in the eucharistic celebration his presence is limited to the consecrated elements. It does not imply that Christ becomes present in the eucharist in the same manner that he was present in his earthly life. It does not imply that this becoming follows the physical laws of this world.