Posted on 08/12/2004 10:41:10 AM PDT by sidewalk
BRIELLE, N.J. -- An 8-year-old girl who suffers from a rare digestive disorder and cannot consume wheat has had her first Holy Communion declared invalid because the wafer contained none, violating Catholic doctrine. Now, Haley Waldman's mother is pushing the Diocese of Trenton and the Vatican to make an exception, saying the girl's condition _ celiac sprue disease _ should not exclude her from participating in the sacrament, in which Roman Catholics eat consecrated wheat-based wafers to commemorate the last supper of Jesus Christ before his crucifixion.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsday.com ...
"Good day, and God bless." Where was the God Bless when you were attacking the Church?
This sentence doesn't make any sense. I have no idea what you mean.
2) Since the church says only one element is needed, then the church seems to be showing its own 'handicap' in making this child's dietary uniqueness have to be visible in a 'ceremonial' first communion (which is what is bothering the mother most likely) rather than just use a rice wafer for the second element for this child alone.
You don't seem to grasp the basic idea that the Church can not "just use a rice wafer." It is invalid matter, it does not work. It is incapable of being transformed into the Body and Blood of Christ. You don't have to accept our beliefs, just acknowledge them.
Since the rice wafer is invalid matter, pretending, just for this one child that it is makes a mockery of the True Body and Blood of Christ.
Simply put, if the child is prevented from eating wheat items, then she is prevented from eating the Communion Bread. Period. End of discussion.
Now, we also believe that either the bread or wine, by themselves are completely complete. So the child loses nothing in terms of Sacramental grace or entering into Communion with Christ and the Church by taking either just the wine or just the bread.
So this child needs to have her first communion, and every communion in her life, by drinking from the Chalice. If she needs to make the priest aware of her condition whenever she goes to a Mass, then that's what she needs to do. End of story. She has a handicap, and this is the way she has to live with it.
If someone gets dizzy from low blood sugar, we don't give them diet pop to drink. They need sugar. In the same way, if this girl needs the grace of communion (which is the point), then she gets it from the wine. We don't pretend to give her grace by giving her a false substitute.
I mean I can see the argument that "if you want communion in a catholic church, this is how we do it and this is the only way we do it. Hence if you can't do it that way, this is how we would accomodate you." I understand your point. But it seems like such a 'silly' restriction that the church is making, causing undue strife between a parishioner and the church.
If you can see the argument, then you should also see that we don't consider the matter used for Communion to be a trivial thing. In other words, it's not "silly" to us.
I think someone else already made the point of how hypocritical this is for the church who allows avowed pro-abortionist to accept Christ but will turn away an innocent on their first communion on a extra-biblical definition.
Again, I don't know if you saw my subsequent post, but I and others have made it very clear that no one is being "turned away. The Church has a perfectly reasonable method for dealing with this. That the local priests decided to do something different is either ignorance or incompetence. In any event, the diocese has cleared up the situation. Priests should adminster sacraments, not make up fake substitutes.
SD
Your method is born of the protestant revolution and it depends upon your own personal interpretation of an amputated Canon of Scripture. None of the ancient churches separated from Rome recognize your Protestant Bible as the complete canon of Scripture. It is simply your surgically altered version of God's Word written.
Without the Holy Bible in its fullness, you use a method of interpretation that none of the churches, which have existed from the beginning, will accept or validate. Not one of the ancient living Christian churches base anything on Scripture alone, because all of the ancient churches have memories and lives longer than the Canon of Scripture or the New Testament itself.
Prayers for those who have died is not based upon a verse of Scripture alone -- what a bizarre Protestant idea that anything is based on the Scripture alone instead of the living relationship between Jesus Christ and His Church through the power of the Holy Spirit. Like the entirety of the faith shared by all of the Apostolic churches from the beginning -- whether they are now Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or non-Chalcedonian Apostolic Churches-- the Faith is bigger and broader and grander than the Holy Bible alone. And that living witness will not brook some recently invented sola scriptura crowd from overthrowing the Faith anymore than they would allow Arianism to triumph. "Truth ripens. Error rots" as Cardinal Newman so wisely observed. And even at the worst moments in the history of the Faith, the Holy Spirit has carried the Church forward from the day of Pentecost on in unbroken continuity.
I am sure you can come up with some Protestant claims not found in Scripture to back up your positions in protest to this post. But in the end it is all just a close cousin of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young.
St. Vincent of Lerins, pray for us.
Post historical evidence from the early Christians (Church Fathers, etc) that supports your interpretation of Scripture and denies Catholic Tradition.
The claim that there is perfect harmony between Scripture and Tradition is disingenous--if there was, Catholics wouldn't be so threatened by sola scriptura, since they would be able to prove all their beliefs by the Scriptures apart from Tradition.
The only thing Catholics are threatened by is the possibility of embracing your errors and losing their soul.
Did Christ not often speak in parables and symbols? To resume my earlier flippancy, when Christ said He was the Vine, does that mean He was green and leafy? When He said that He was the door of the sheepfold, does that mean that He is made of wood and has hinges? Clearly, Christ often used metaphors to describe Himself!
So who decides when He is being literal and when He is metaphorical? Martin Luther? Post historical evidence from the early Christians (Church Fathers, etc) that denies the objective presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist.
Likewise, Christ Himself when instituting the Lord's Supper said, "Do this in rememberance of Me"...
DO THIS. What did Christ do? He made the bread His Sacred Body and the wine His Precious blood. The priests of the New Covenant do the same thing acting in persona Christi.
Except for two things. First, Christ used two different words for "rock"--petros and petra--indicating that two different rocks were in view: Peter as the "piece of rock," and Himself as the great rock on which the Church was founded. Peter, as Paul later pointed out (Galatians, I think), did not die for us to make us his Church; Christ did.
Christ spoke Aramaic. St. Matthew's Gospel was written in either Aramaic or Hebrew, not Greek, as we know from Eusebius of Caesarea. This was then translated into Greek and the word for Peter was rendered into the masculine form "petros". Peter remains the rock.
Secondly, get an exhaustive concordance and go through the whole of the Scripture. Who is repeatedly throughout the whole referred to as the Rock of our salvation? It isn't Peter.
How many times does Christ have to say something to make it true?
Perhaps Christ said "little Cephas" and "big Cephas" respectively, and Matthew rendered those into "petros" and "petra" in the Greek. Perhaps He used the same word but pointed to Himself when He said, "On this Rock I will establish My Church." Heck, Greek was in such common use in those days, the Lord could have easily interjected the Greek words into His Aramaic presentation the same way we might pepper our sentences with Latin!
Conjecture, speculation, musings...all false.
As I pointed out earlier, not all of them did. Origen for one rejected Peter's supremacy.
Ever stop to wonder why the Church does not deem him "St." Origen?
Yes, she was refused a valid first communion because of either ignorance or incompetence of the local priests. She was given a false substitue, a travesty, a sham and a mockery.
I can't explain why. I can only supposed that the mother didn't want her child to feel that she was different by only taking from the cup and not eating the bread. This betrays the mother's lack of understanding. That a priest would go alond with her instead of teaching both mother and child the truth is an embarrassment.
Trying to paper over this child's handicap by pretending it doesn't exist does no one any good. It seems the mother and the priest had in mind making sure the girl didn't feel "different" instead of worrying about whether she got an actual sacrament.
SD
"So how can I be sure that they discarded and kept all the right Scripture?"
Because from the earliest days it was recognized that what was true must be separated from what was false. We know, for example, that the Gospels have come down to modern times in essentially the same textual condition that they had in earliest times. The evidence for this is overwhelming. There are manuscript fragments which prove this. And just from the early Church fathers' sermons alone it would be possible to reconstruct the entire New Testament--merely by stitching together their citations. And none of these would include anything apocryphal.
But more than this, there are manuscripts and fragments which verify that the Church from its earliest days was careful to separate the authentic from the inauthentic. There is a manuscript extant that proves that as early as the second century means were taken to insure that the apocryphal gospels were not confused with the true ones. This was a list of the writings which the ancients of around 165 A.D. considered authentic. This is around the same time that the apocryphals were beginning to appear--so it is clear the Church had already become aware of the need to draw careful distinctions. Other manuscript fragments--from Tertullian, from St. Irenaeus, from Origen especially--affirm the authorship and authenticity of the four Gospels. So the tradition is clear and may even today be reconstructed by examining fragments still extant.
It is also possible to tell the true from the false from the internal evidence as well. One characteristic of the false gospels, for instance, is that the apostles are made to appear as paragons of virtue, whereas in the true Gospels they are often bewildered and sometimes cowardly and often foolish. Another characteristic is the absence of biographical details and knowledge of Jewish legal procedures and customs and even prejudices. Another sign of inauthenticity would be a lack of first-hand knowledge of the geography of the Holy Land. Still another would be a lack of political or religious conditions that prevailed in the time of Jesus.
That should read "397." The Council of Hippo was 393. My mistake.
".....Another sign of inauthenticity would be a lack of first-hand knowledge of the geography of the Holy Land. Still another would be a lack of political or religious conditions that prevailed in the time of Jesus."
Thanks for the intelligent response. Personally, I'd love to read the discarded Scriptures, just to see what was determined to be apocryphal, or hazardous to our spiritual health.
Nor did he obey all tradition.
Petty beyond belief.
"Personally, I'd love to read the discarded Scriptures, just to see what was determined to be apocryphal, or hazardous to our spiritual health."
You can at this link if you scroll down to "Apocrypha". There are lots of Gnostic and Ebionitic texts here:
http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/
Just bear in mind that they were discarded!
;)
Absolutely. But he can also cite tradition, so that's no help. More to the point, when Jesus countered the Enemy's attacks, did He fall back on rabbinical traditions? Or did He instead cite Scripture truly?
That's why it's important for every disciple of Christ to not merely accept another's word, but to study the Word for him or herself. When one has a grasp of the whole of the Bible, one sees just how feeble the Devil's out-of-context quotes really are. I'm not here to say, "Follow me!" but to say, "Study the Word for yourself and follow Him!"
When you speak of two or more gathering in Jesus' name, it is indeed true that he is present among them, but virtually--as he is present in the Word.
Why do you take Christ's promise to be there among them to be "virtual" and His command to eat of His flesh literally? That seems inconsistant.
But the Liturgy has always been deemed a sacrifice--the ancients always used this term. This is why there must be a priest, a person who sacrifices.
But that's just a return to a mock-Levitical system! Christ Himself is our High Priest now (per the whole book of Hebrews) who offered Himself up for our remission of sins. Having done so once, His perfect blood, in contrast to the blood of animals, is effectual over our sins forever.
The mediation of the priest is of an altogether different order--as one who effects the sacrifice.
For a priest to mediate in any way between Man and Christ also puts him as a mediator in between Man and God, which violates the clear message of Hebrews and 1 Tim. 2:5. Furthermore, Peter and Revelation both refer to the universal priesthood of believers (I can provide quotes later if you'd like). Thus, I reject modern Nicolaitanism in all its forms (and it does still appear in many Protestant demominations too, so don't think I'm just picking on the Catholics here).
This is because she alone has kept the tradition alive from the ancient apostolic past to today.
I disagree. I think the RCC has done the work of God in maintaining the continuence of the Scriptures (for which I thank your scribes), but when it takes 1800 years to formally proclaim the Immaculate Conception or the Assumption of Mary (to name just two), we see a clear evolution of theology, not a consistant, unchanging one.
The idea that the "spirit" of the Eucharist is what matters in this case is not true--any more than it would be to use sand instead of water for baptism merely because it's the "spirit" that counts.
*chuckle* Nice analogy. But I'm not arguing for the caprecious changing of the tradition of wheat wafers just for the heck of it. I'm arguing that in a case such as this, where health issues are the problem, that the issue of what kind of bread to use is secondary to allowing the child to partake of the Lord's table. I understand it's your church, but I'm explaining why this smacks of legalism over love to me, like the Pharisees who condemned Jesus for healing on the Sabbath instead of during the work week.
But we mortals for the most part are spiritually weak and need the physical reassurance that Jesus provided through his concrete sacrament.
That's why God gave us rituals; not because they are "magically" necessary for His grace, but because they teach us, comfort us, and make His will a part of us through the act. Rituals turn dead orthodoxy into a living culture. That's why denying this girl a very important part of her ritual culture, begrudgingly offering a sip of wine instead, saddens me and strikes me as unloving legalism.
"It is the Catholic church which, while being so firm standing against a little girl, is waffling over whether to deny the Sacrements to pro-abort Catholic politicians."
How much more tragic if, due to the tepidity of vacillating prelates, a slime-ball like Kerry should receive the real Sacrament, and they allowed this unfortunate little girl to be fobbed off with a fake!
"Then Jesus said to them: Amen, amen I say unto you: Except you eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, you shall not have life in you" (St. John vi.54)
By this, the Church teaches that sanctifying grace ("life") is giving through consuming the Holy Eucharist (Christ's "flesh" and "blood"). By what means does a Protestant such as yourself interpret this passage? In a clear manner WITHOUT IMPUTING METAPHORICAL LANGUAGE ON CHRIST'S PART?" (emphasis mine)
Since when is metaphor forbidden? It's one of Jesus' favorite tools! Or I suppose when Jesus told Nicodemus that he must be "born again", he literally meant it. Nic didn't get it either- so Jesus had to explain that it was a metaphor for a total spiritual renewal. Or how about when Jesus said that if our eye makes us sin, we should "pluck it out". Was he advocating self-mutilation? Hardly! Once again, a metaphor for an INNER, SPIRITUAL change. Likewise, the command to eat His body and drink His blood was a metaphor for a deep, spiritual belief in Him (see John 6:35 "I am the bread of life. He who comes to Me shall never hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst") So, it's not the physical acts of eating and drinking that are important, but the spiritual act of belief that is important. The words of institution at the Last Supper were a beautiful tie-in to this metaphor. Yes, we are commanded to do the physical acts of eating and drinking, but as a REMEMBRANCE of Him, and an outward symbol of our inner, saving belief.
I get a chuckle out of the way Irenaeus puts it, that just as there are four corners of the earth and four seasons, so there are also four Gospel accounts. It apparently wasn't even much in debate that early in the Church's history; the Gnostic gospels didn't really start to sprout in earnest all over the place until the third century or so.
Actually, I think the venial sins are cleansed, but mortal sin are compounded through recieving the Eucharist. Of course, venial sins are also cleansed by the "Lord I am not worthy.." prayer we say prior to communion.
LOL :-D
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