Do you live forever?
Do Catholics who eat ever die?
If the eating is literal and the life is literal, then the living forever is literal.
To pick and choose which parts of His discourse are to be taken literally and which part is to be taken figuratively, is disingenuous.
Literal eating of the flesh and blood also violates God’s holy commands.
Understanding ti figuratively, as Jesus said it was, remains true to the rest of the body of Scripture.
If you’re going to be literalist about everything Jesus says, then we should live forever, we should have water flowing out of our bodies, we should not be calling religious leaders *Father* and the Flood really happened.
All we Catholics assert is that this was the interpretation the early disciples, taught by the Apostles, understood an practiced under the command of Christ to go forth and teach...
We cannot attribute interpretations offered by every Biblical reader on scripture where a single truth collapses into a thousand interpretations. We have the sacred oral tradition before scripture was written and indeed was tradition was used as a cross reference to confirm what texts were legitimate and what were not.
But the flood really happened....