LOL! Our side doesn't claim the superiority of men over other men (and even God!). Only your side does that.
FK-”” I DO understand that you believe the Eucharist is a never ending sacrifice, that is my criticism! :) The Bible says that Christ died ONCE!””
The Bible DOES NOT limit Christ to time,FK. You do!
But the Bible DOES limit US to time as finite creatures of God on earth. Did Divine Christ DIE on the cross? No, "Christ Man" did, and He died ONCE AND FOR ALL, and then was resurrected. Do you acknowledge that He was resurrected? If you do then why do you have Him every day still slowly dying on the cross? Why can't you folks get passed that? He died once and He rose once. Somehow that doesn't compute in Catholic theology. Christ isn't still up there, STF, it happened WITHIN time, and now it's done. It is FINISHED!
We, are in time, and to us it would seem that this one sacrifice was consummated 2000 years ago. GOD, however is outside of time and space.
Then why do you DRAG God back within time and space every day at your Mass? God never asked for this, but maybe He didn't understand who was in charge down here. :)
Everything is now in GOD’s eyes, and so we are taken back to that one sacrifice as if it were happening now at each and every Mass.
No, we aren't taken anywhere, we remain in time and space. It is YOU ALL who are dragging Christ away from the right hand of God, "as if ...".
The Catholic Church teaches that the sacrifice on the Cross was a complete and perfect sacrifice of the Lamb of GOD, offered once.
That's not what you practice because then there would be no need to re-present it. Remember it, yes. Re-present it, no. That is doing the same sacrifice again. You call the Eucharist a sacrifice. We do not call the Lord's Supper a sacrifice.
St. Paul bears witness that the sacrificial rite which Christ instituted at the Last Supper is to be perpetuated, and that it is not only important for man's sanctification, but is the principal factor in man's final redemption. In 1Cor 11:23-26, St. Paul told how, at the Last Supper, Our Lord said: “For as often as you shall eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the death of the Lord until He comes.”
It is a SHOWING of belief, not accomplishing added salvation by works and ritual. Your side goes way beyond a showing of belief, you are making sacrifices in hopes they will get you salvation. That is not doing something "in memory". Paul was making no reference to a salvific act, he was talking about in memory. Paul talked about salvation being by grace through faith, NOT by the performance of rituals.
Thus at every Mass the faithful have a new opportunity to worship God with this one perfect sacrifice and to absorb more of Christ's saving and sanctifying grace of Calvary. This grace is infinite, and the faithful should continuously grow in it. The Mass is offered again and again, because of our imperfect capacity to receive.
This proves that you believe that God's grace is ineffectual, unless man gives his approval. Man decides how powerful God's grace is, or more importantly a FEW men make that decision. That elevates man above God. Does your Magisterium presume the power to declare and determine how far and straight Tiger Woods can hit a golf ball? No, but it DOES presume to declare and determine how and when and to what degree God can dispense His saving grace. Interesting, and ALL this without a shred of Biblical support.
The holy sacrifice of the Mass fulfills the Old Testament prophecy... [Mal. 1:11]
Oh, please. With that level of typology anyone could make the Bible support Nazism. :)
It's only “extra scriptural” interpretations of scripture that lead someone to deny that Christ cannot be literally present in the Eucharist.
Oh, He COULD be, it's not a matter of impossibility. It would just mean that the Bible would have say and stand for MUCH different things than it does now. I don't deny Eucharistic theology on my own authority, but on the authority of God's revelation to us.
Not much has changed in over 2000 years later. There are still those who attack the Church that Christ gave us, whether by persecution in places like China or by the ignorant who twist the scriptures to create division.
AMEN to every word, STF. It is very sad.
No matter how hard they try the Catholic Church still stands and through the guidance of the Holy Spirit and the faithful produces such loving people like Mother Teresa,Saint Benedicta the cross(Martyred at Auschwitz)http://www.ewtn.com/faith/edith_stein.htm and a whole host of others throughout history.
I have no doubt of it. I am sure there are many many Catholics who either are now or will be in Heaven. I believe the same of Protestants, even though that belief is NOT echoed by the Magisterium.
I encourage you to read about the life of Edith Stein (Saint Benedicta) I believe it will help you to understand the Catholic Faith better,Dear Brother. Here is a her novena to the Holy Spirit. It is so beautiful!
Substantially, it IS beautiful. Thank you for posting it. :) On what "Divine Holy Spirit" means, we probably essentially agree. I think our differences stem largely from the role man plays in the universe, although those differences necessarily will affect God's role too. However, this particular novena was obviously not written to get into those differences, so I can appreciate it. :)
I think this should answer some of your questions regarding thr Blessed Sacrament
The Eucharist as a Sacrifice, or the Mass
By Fulton Sheen
http://www.ewtn.com/library/DOCTRINE/SACRAMEN.TXT
The Mass has three important parts: the Offertory, the Consecration,
and the Communion. In the order of human love, these correspond to
engagement, the marriage ceremony, and the consummation of the mar-
riage. When a man becomes engaged to a woman, he generally brings her
the gift of a precious ring; it is not of tin or straw, because these
represent no sacrifice. Regardless of how much he might pay for the
ring, he would still tear off the price tag, in order that his beloved
might never establish any correspondence between the price of the gift
and his love. No matter how much he gave her, the gift to him would
seem inadequate. The ring is round in order to express the eternity of
his love which has neither beginning nor end; it is precious, because
it is a symbol of the total readiness to give his whole personality to
the beloved.
The Mass, too, has an engagement which corresponds to the Offertory of
the Mass, in which the faithful bring gifts of bread and wine, or its
equivalent, that which buys bread and wine. As the ring is a symbol of
the lover offering himself to the beloved, so too, the bread and wine
are the symbols of a person offering himself to Christ. This is
apparent in several ways: first, since bread and wine have
traditionally nourished man and given him life, in bringing that which
was the substance of his life, he is equivalently giving himself.
Second, the readiness to sacrifice himself for the beloved is revealed
in the bread and wine; no two substances have to undergo more to become
what they are than do wheat and grapes. One passes through the
Gethsemane of a mill, the other through the Calvary of the winepress
before they can be presented to the Beloved on the altar. In the
Offertory, therefore, under the appearance of bread and wine, the
faithful are offering themselves to Christ.
After the engagement comes the marriage ceremony in which the lover
sacrifices himself for the beloved, and the beloved surrenders
devotedly to the lover. The groom practically says, “My greatest
freedom is to be your slave. I give up my individuality in order to
serve you.” The joining of hands in the marriage ceremony is a symbol
of the transfer of self to another self: “I am yours and you are mine.
I want to die to myself, in order to live in you, my beloved. I cannot
live unto you, unless I give up myself. So I say to you, ‘This is My
Body; this is My Blood’.”
In the Mass, the faithful are already present on the altar under the
appearance of bread and wine. At the moment of the Consecration of the
Mass, when the priest as Christ pronounces the words “This is My Body”
and “This is My Blood,” the substance of the bread becomes the
substance of the body of Christ, and the substance of the wine becomes
the substance of the blood of Christ. At that moment, the faithful are
saying in a secondary sense with the priest: “This is my body; this is
my blood. Take it! I no longer want it for myself. The very substance
of my being, my intellect, and my will—change! Transubstantiate!—so
that my ego is lost in Thee, so that my intellect is one with Thy
Truth, and my will is one with Thy desires! I care not if the species
or appearances of my life remain; that is to say, my duties, my
avocation, my appointments in time and space. But what I am
substantially, I give to Thee.”
In the human order, after the engagement and the marriage is the
consummation of the marriage. All love craves unity. Correspondence by
letter, or by speech, cannot satisfy that instinctive yearning of two
hearts to be lost in one another. There must, therefore, come some
great ecstatic moment in which love becomes too deep for words; this is
the communion of body and blood with body and blood in the oneness
which lasts not long, but is a foretaste of Heaven.
The marital act is nothing but a fragile and shadowy image of Communion
in which, after having offered ourselves under the appearance of bread
and wine and having died to our lower self, we now begin to enjoy that
ecstatic union with Christ in Holy Communion—a oneness which is, in
the language of Thompson, “a passionless passion, a wild tranquility.”
This is the moment when the hungry heart communes with the Bread of
Life; this is the rapture in which is fulfilled that “love we fall just
short of in all love,” and that rapture that leaves all other raptures
pain.
The Sacrifice of the Mass may be presented under another analogy.
Picture a house which had two large windows on opposite sides. One
window looks down into a valley, the other to a towering mountain. The
owner could gaze on both and somehow see that they were related: the
valley is the mountain humbled; the mountain is the valley exalted.
The Sacrifice of the Mass is something like that. Every church, in a
way, looks down on a valley, but the valley of death and humiliation in
which we see a cross. But it also looks up to a mountain, an eternal
mountain, the mountain of heaven where Christ reigns gloriously. As the
valley and the mountain are related as humiliation and exaltation, so
the Sacrifice of the Mass is related to Calvary in the valley, and to
Christ in heaven and the eternal hills.
All three, Calvary, the Mass, and the glorified Christ in heaven are
different levels of the great eternal act of love. The Christ Who
appeared in heaven as the lamb slain from the beginning of the world,
at a certain moment in time, came to this earth and offered His Life in
Redemption for the sins of men. Then He ascended into heaven where that
same eternal act of love continues, as He intercedes for humanity,
showing the scars of His Love to His heavenly Father. True, agony and
crucifixion are passing things, but the obedience and the love which
inspired them are not. In the Father’s eyes, the Son-made-Man loves
always unto death. The patriot who regretted that he had only one life
to give to his country, would have loved to have made his sacrifice
eternal. Being man, he could not do it. But Christ, being God and man,
could.
The Mass, therefore, looks backward and forward. Because we live in
time and can use only earthly symbols, we see successively that which
is but one eternal movement of love. If a motion picture reel were
endowed with consciousness, it would see and understand the story at
once; but we do not grasp it until we see it unfolded upon the screen.
So it is with the love by which Christ prepared for His coming in the
Old Testament, offered Himself on Calvary, and now re-presents it in
Sacrifice in the Mass. The Mass, therefore, is not another immolation
but a new presentation of the eternal Victim and its application to us.
To assist at Mass is the same as to assist at Calvary. But there are
differences.
On the Cross, Our Lord offered Himself for all mankind; in the Mass we
make application of that death to ourselves, and unite our sacrifice
with His. The disadvantage of not having lived at the time of Christ is
nullified by the Mass. On the Cross, He potentially redeemed all
humanity; in the Mass we actualize that Redemption. Calvary happened at
a definite moment in time and on a particular hill in space. The Mass
temporalizes and spatializes that eternal act of love.
The Sacrifice of Calvary was offered up in a bloody manner by the
separation of His blood from His body. In the Mass, this death is
mystically and sacramentally presented in an unbloody manner, by the
separate consecration of bread and wine. The two are not consecrated
together by such words as “This is My Body and My Blood”; rather,
following the words of Our Lord: “This is My Body” is said over the
bread; then, “This is My Blood” is said over the wine. The separate
consecration is a kind of mystical sword dividing body and blood, which
is the way Our Lord died on Calvary.
Suppose there was an eternal broadcasting station that sent out eternal
waves of wisdom and enlightenment. People who lived in different ages
would tune in to that wisdom, assimilate it, and apply it to
themselves. Christ’s eternal act of love is something to which we tune
in, as we appear in successive ages of history through the Mass. The
Mass, therefore, borrows its reality and its efficacy from Calvary and
has no meaning apart from it. He who assists at Mass lifts the Cross of
Christ out of the soil of Calvary and plants it in the center of his
own heart.
This is the only perfect act of love, sacrifice, thanksgiving, and
obedience which we can ever pay to God; namely, that which is offered
by His Divine Son Incarnate. Of and by ourselves, we cannot touch the
ceiling because we are not tall enough. Of and by ourselves, we cannot
touch God. We need a Mediator, someone who is both God and Man, Who is
Christ. No human prayer, no human act of self-denial, no human
sacrifice is sufficient to pierce Heaven. It is only the Sacrifice of
the Cross that can do so, and this is done in the Mass. As we offer it,
we hang, as it were, onto His robes, we tug at His feet at the
Ascension, we cling to His pierced hands in offering Himself to the
Heavenly Father. Being hidden in Him, our prayers and sacrifices have
His value. In the Mass we are once more at Calvary, rubbing shoulders
with Mary Magdalen and John, while mournfully looking over our
shoulders at executioners who still shake dice for the garments of the
Lord.
The priest who offers the Sacrifice merely lends to Christ his voice
and his fingers. It is Christ Who is the Priest; it is Christ Who is
the Victim. In all pagan sacrifices and in the Jewish sacrifices, the
victim was always separate from the priest. It might have been a goat,
a lamb, or a bullock. But when Christ came, He the Priest offered
Himself as the Victim. In the Mass, it is Christ Who still offers
Himself and Who is the Victim to Whom we become united. The altar,
therefore, is not related to the congregation as the stage to an
audience in the theatre. The communion rail is not the same as
footlights, which divide the drama from the onlooker. All the members
of the Church have a kind of priesthood, inasmuch as they offer up with
the Eternal Priest this eternal act of love. The laity participate in
the life and power of Christ, for “Thou hast made us a royal race of
priests to serve God” (Apoc. 5:10).
The expression, sometimes used by Catholics “to hear Mass,” is an
indication of how little is understood of their active participation,
not only with Christ, but also with all of the saints and members of
the Church until the end of time. This corporate action of the Church
is indicated in certain prayers of the Mass. For example, immediately
before the Consecration, God is asked to receive the offering which “we
Thy servants and Thy whole household make unto Thee”; and after the
Consecration the faithful again say, “We Thy servants, as also Thy holy
people, do offer unto Thy most excellent majesty of Thine own gifts
bestowed on us.” All participate, but the closer we are to the mystery,
the more we become one with Christ.
No man can ever come to the real fullness of his personality by
reflection or contemplation; he has to act it out. That is why through
all ages man laid his hand on the best of the herd and destroyed it in
order to indicate the offering and surrender of himself. By laying his
hands on the animal, he identified himself with it. Then he consumed
it, in order to gain some identification with the one to whom it was
offered. In the Mass, all the ancient dim foreshadowings of the supreme
sacrifice are fulfilled. Man immolates himself with Christ, bidding Him
to take his body and his blood. Through this destruction of the ego,
there is a void and an emptiness created, which makes it possible for
Divinity to fill up the vacuum and to make the offerer holy. Man dies
to the past, in order that he may live in the future. He chooses to be
united with his Divine King in some form of death, that he may share in
His Resurrection and glory. Thus dying he lives; chastened he is not
killed; sorrowful he always rejoices; giving up time, he finds
eternity. Nothingness is exchanged for everything. Poverty turns into
riches, and having nothing, he begins to possess all things.
Here is another good one by Father John Hardon
http://www.therealpresence.org/eucharst/link/sacrifice.htm