The Body of Christ

The Catholic Thing ^ | June 2, 2013 | Bevil Bramwell OMI

[NYer]

On this Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ, it’s good to remember the words of Saint Thomas Aquinas:

Almighty and Eternal God, behold I come to the sacrament of Your only-begotten Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. As one sick I come to the Physician of life; unclean, to the Fountain of mercy; blind, to the Light of eternal splendor; poor and needy to the Lord of heaven and earth. Therefore, I beg of You, through Your infinite mercy and generosity, heal my weakness, wash my uncleanness, give light to my blindness, enrich my poverty, and clothe my nakedness. May I thus receive the Bread of Angels, the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, with such reverence and humility, contrition and devotion, purity and faith, purpose and intention, as shall aid my soul’s salvation.

This is the humble attitude with which we should both enter the church building (because the Blessed Sacrament is reserved there) and approach the Blessed Sacrament at Holy Communion.

The reason for our humility is that the glorified and risen Lord is present here in the Bread of Angels. The Eucharist is not a manmade symbol for an absent reality, a mere reminder of times past.

Rather, as Saint Thomas prayed in his Prayer after Communion: “I thank You, Lord, Almighty Father, Everlasting God, for having been pleased, through no merit of mine, but of Your great mercy alone, to feed me, a sinner, and Your unworthy servant, with the precious Body and Blood of Your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.” The Blessed Eucharist is the Body and Blood of the Son of God. It is the only thing worthy of the worship that is given to God alone for that very reason.

How different would the attitude be in our churches if Christ’s Real Presence were taken seriously? Rather than trying to make our churches like movie houses or secular meeting spaces or – worse – copying other religions, perhaps we could make them houses of the Blessed Sacrament, oases of the guaranteed presence of Christ in a secular world.

            Pope Francis holding the monstrance on Corpus Christi (May 30 in Rome)

The celebration of the Eucharist is not a closed, feel-good moment, private to our parish or even to our family. Eucharistic Prayer I says very clearly: “by the hands of your holy angel this offering may be born to your altar in heaven in the sight of your divine majesty so as we receive communion at this altar. . .we may be filled with every grace and blessing.” We join the liturgy of Heaven that showers its grace upon earth.

We need to be personally close to Christ for our spiritual survival, but this is not at all an individualistic concept. As John Paul II exhorted us: “The Church and the world have a great need for Eucharistic worship. Jesus awaits us in this sacrament of love. Let us not refuse the time to go to meet him in adoration, in contemplation full of faith and open to make amends for the serious offenses and crimes of the world.”

So alongside our reaching for an ever deeper appreciation and awe for the Body and Blood of Christ – which is already countercultural in our confused time – we have to learn something about the effects of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection.

One of them is that “our unity is the fruit of Calvary, and results from the Mass’s application to us of the fruits of the Passion, with a view to our final redemption.”(Henri de Lubac) So being Christian depends on our actually being open to the mystery at the heart of our redemption, the life, death and resurrection of Christ.  In fact, our whole approach to the Body and Blood of Christ will be a good indicator of whether we even grasp the central mystery of our faith in love.

Relearning our faith so that it is not individualized (the Protestant position), but rather something that, as Christ’s own Church, joins us more deeply to Christ and each other is predicated on our approaching the Blessed Sacrament as Thomas Aquinas did. The individualism that we have been schooled in for years – and that comes to us in TV shows, in the speeches of politicians, in how we conceive of school and work – will take serious effort to overcome.

It represents a grave distortion of the social way of life for which we were created. Vatican II taught the simple truth that: “God, Who has fatherly concern for everyone, has willed that all men should constitute one family and treat one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”

We cannot expect to steep ourselves in the individualism of the culture and then regard our subsequent attitudes as Catholic. These are two irreconcilable realities. And to think otherwise is to imagine that there is no particular truth in Catholicism.

To deny the Church as the Body of Christ is to deny who Jesus Christ is, the one who is God incarnate and present among us in a special way, as we celebrate today.

[FourtySeven]

You’ve demonstrated your ability to assert that things agree with you when they actually don’t.

Funny, that's the exact same impression I have after reading your last reply to me.

Go ahead, reply back, get that precious last word in if you desperately need it.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for your encouragements, dear brother in Christ!

There is an intersection of the spiritual and the earthly, and Jesus demonstrated it when the doors and windows were shut and suddenly He was in the midst of them.

The Spiritual is not only “real”, but it is the ultimate reality... For “God is Spirit”

So very true.

We mortals suffer from the "observer problem." We cannot stand apart from our physical sensory perceptions and see objectively. But someday...

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. - I Cor 13:12

You asked:

A question: Do you think a “Day” lengthens from our perspective as “time” goes on and we get farther from the source of creation?

From our space/time coordinate perspective the length of each advancing "Day" in Creation Week gets shorter, because the time required for the universe to expand gets longer from the inception space/time coordinate. The Big Bang/Inflationary Model supports that understanding as Jewish Physicist Schroeder describes when comparing Scripture to Physical Cosmology in his article on the Age of the Universe:

Now we can go one step further. Let's look at the development of time, day-by-day, based on the expansion factor. Every time the universe doubles, the perception of time is cut in half. Now when the universe was small, it was doubling very rapidly. But as the universe gets bigger, the doubling time gets longer. This rate of expansion is quoted in "The Principles of Physical Cosmology," a textbook that is used literally around the world.

(In case you want to know, this exponential rate of expansion has a specific number averaged at 10 to the 12th power. That is in fact the temperature of quark confinement, when matter freezes out of the energy: 10.9 times 10 to the 12th power Kelvin degrees divided by (or the ratio to) the temperature of the universe today, 2.73 degrees. That's the initial ratio which changes exponentially as the universe expands.)

The calculations come out to be as follows:

• The first of the Biblical days lasted 24 hours, viewed from the "beginning of time perspective." But the duration from our perspective was 8 billion years.

• The second day, from the Bible's perspective lasted 24 hours. From our perspective it lasted half of the previous day, 4 billion years.

• The third 24 hour day also included half of the previous day, 2 billion years.

• The fourth 24 hour day ― one billion years.

• The fifth 24 hour day ― one-half billion years.

• The sixth 24 hour day ― one-quarter billion years.

I agree with Schroeder that the universe is both billions of years old from our space/time coordinates and also a week old from the inception space/time coordinate.

Truly I believe God the Father has revealed Himself in four ways: 1) through the Person of His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, 2) through the Person of the indwelling Holy Spirit, 3) through Scripture and 4) through Creation both physical and spiritual. I perceive no conflict in His revelations.

God's Name is I AM.

[johngrace]

Amazing what a “lawyer” can try to do to a Catholic Bishop’s writing. Just amazing. Then to see others believe this logic. Astonishing. I have read these same type of writings on whole. Augustine literally writes how Christ had his own body in his hands in quotes then all “ lawyered”up by others. What is even more crazy is people who do not know what the key words this “ lawyer” is the opposite of what he was writing about. Just astonishing. Sad.

[johngrace]

I noticed that too. Lol!!!!

[Big Bopper]

Catholic doctrine is so intertwined with idiocy and false teachings galore that anyone that can defend them has some serious problems, especially when it comes to scripture. The whore of Babylon and her false teachings will never continue on and will be eliminated at the return of Christ. This is the home of the false prophet in case you forgot that fact.

[Greetings_Puny_Humans]

“So some followers of Christ died (”fell asleep”) for failing to “discern the body of Christ,” which is really just bread and wine?”

---

Paul is quite clear that they’re actually eating bread and drinking from a normal cup:

1Co_11:26 For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord’s death till he come.

As does Jesus “this is my blood.... I will not drink... of this fruit of the vine, until that day...”

Mat 26:27-29 And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; (28) For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins. (29) But I say unto you, I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.

The discernment was telling the difference between a regular supper, and the sacred supper done for the remembrance of the Lord’s death and resurrection. Since the Corinthians were abusing it, getting drunk, and feasting as if they were starving. They were profaning the Lord’s Supper, and for that reason were punished. Not because the bread and the wine were poisonous to those who did not believe it was the literal body of Christ (which, actually, is the real unlawful thing to do... to eat human flesh and drink blood, which is condemned throughout the Books of Moses).

Augustine celebrated the Lord’s Supper every day, though he did not believe in transubstantiation. Protestant congregations celebrate the Lord’s Supper as well, though they don’t believe in transubstantiation. And yet, none of them are getting sick and dying.

Though, on the other hand, I have Roman Catholic family members who go to communion, and return home to practice witchcraft, so maybe the lack of punishment doesn’t settle it one way or the other.

[Greetings_Puny_Humans]

“Go ahead, reply back, get that precious last word in if you desperately need it.”

---

Ok

“Why do you prepare your teeth and stomach? Believe, and thou hast eaten already.” ~ Augustine

[Steelfish]

Precisely the kind of “low-intellect” stuff you expect from people who cannot grasp the beauty of Catholic Christology. For starters, to see the depth of your own idiocy you may consult the book by England’s greatest essayist, Hillaire Belloc’s- Heresies. I would also recommend reading Chesterton. In the end all those who deny the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist must admit that He either mis-spoke or mis-led His Jewish audience or worse mis-led His Own Church. Or, Christ spoke too plainly in this passage that these fundamentalist, like the Jews, couldn’t fully comprehend.

“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him” (John 6:53–56).

[Iscool]

Precisely the kind of “low-intellect” stuff you expect from people who cannot grasp the beauty of Catholic Christology.

Well that's not true at all...Your religion is definately a beautiful religion...The stories of the Saints and Martyrs...The beautiful paintings...

I mean look at the set-up...Beautiful, sometimes majestic buildings...Billions of bucks in gold ornaments...Tapestries...The beautiful religious statues...

And the nuns...Chaste virgins giving their lives to God...

And the robes...Look at the cardinals...Beautiful robes, a different color for each day of the week...And what about that pope, eh??? Gold thread in his robe...Sits on the throne of David...I mean man, if you ain't got nothing else, you got the appearance of religion...

And each hamlet and village has it's own personal Saint to pray to...And then the real cake-topper...The ghost of Mary...People see her all over the world...She gets around...They even see her in tree trunks and on a pieces of toast...

If that ain't religious Christology, I don't know what is...And I'm sure that's what draws most people to your religion...There is no religion that looks so religious...

Problem is, we have a bible...The written, preserved word of God...And we know it's from God because it has tons of miracles prophecied in it that have come true...There's no other book like it on the face of the earth...

But sadly, this book from God condemns your religion left and right...That's a hard pill to swallow when you give yourself the title of the one, tru religion...And for sure, no where in the book did God instruct or ask or tell anyone to turn a slice of bread into his body...And God certainly didn't tell anyone how to achieve that feat...God never told anyone that his death was ongoing and would last for thousands of years...In fact, as Jesus was dying, he said, 'it is finished'...The sacrifice was fulfilled and over...

And then someone said, 'He is not here, he is risen...Not that he will be risen but, He is risen right now...The Cross is empty...And to top it off, his disciples saw him head up toward the North Star...

Now Jesus couldn't go up til his body was glorified, whatever that means...But we do know that his glorified body could travel thru walls and disappear on command...That's no normal human flesh...It cannot be the same flesh as Mary had for Jesus would continue to age and ultimately die if that was so...If he had Mary's blood, it would have eventually killed him...

So while Jesus said, eat my flesh and drink my blood for my flesh is food and my blood is drink, an even not so astute Christian needs to look a bit farther into the scriptures to see what actually takes place...

Don't waste your time on those who write things that agree with you...They were taught those 'talking points' just like you were...From the same people...Immerse yourself into the scriptures and really see what God says about it...

[johngrace]

http://haydock1859.tripod.com/id99.html

[BlueDragon]

Why ping me to this particular reply? To have me share in with being insulted, then to recommend to me also what I should be reading?

Leave me out of your battles with others here. Thank you.

[Steelfish]

On such a central issue as this Jesus spoke clearly and emphatically. He would leave no doubt. If the Jews really were wrong about what He said, Christ being The Truth would have immediately corrected them. He would not have allowed His Church for centuries to err on such a core doctrine.

[Iscool]

He would not have allowed His Church for centuries to err on such a core doctrine

Very telling...You could really learn something from that observation...

[Steelfish]

Precisely, the Church that has produced thousands of saints, martyrs, and theologians of the kind like Aquinas, Augustine, Ambrose, and in our times Benedict XVI, called the theological Einstein of our times. This stuff is well beyond the pay grade of your neighborhood pastor. This is not the Church for fools from the camps of Joel Osteen to Rev. Jeremiah Wright to the Schullers and the Grahams who have turned Christianity into a profitable family enterprise right down the slippery slope to those HillBilly types who worship a brand of Christianity with baskets of slithering snakes, the ultimate curse of the Reformation.

[Iscool]

This is not the Church for fools

Right...YOu eat a cracker that someone told you that you must believe is actually a piece of flesh, even tho it still looks, feels, tastes, sounds, smells and digests like a cracker...

Then they told you to believe that the cracker transfers from your stomach to your soul even tho Jesus told you that whatever goes into the mouth comes back out...And I guess some of you believe that...Or claim to anyway...

Yep, you guys are the brainiacs...

[Big Bopper]

The Catholic churches teachings are so ridiculous, any student of the Bible knows that first hand. The worshipping of a piece of wafer is so laughable-people sit for hours staring straight ahead and we are to believe Jesus and the Father are impressed. Just another idol in a church of idols, idiocy daily and false teaching all about.Doing a lap around the beads, and despite scriptures warning to not pray that way, you just ignore that command. He isn’t my Holy Father, thats blasphemy to call a very sinful human being the “holy father.” Yeah, you’re a real intellect spiritually, just as dumb and repetitive as the last fool who came before you repeating the same mumbo-jumbo and was laughed at. Say, do you have any of those portable idols on your dashboard as you drive, for “ ahem-protection? Any cocrete idols in your backyard? How about the beads hanging from the rear view mirror? Oh, that’s real impressive-you’ll surely be protected from harm-NOT! And all this time I thought to pray to God for safety and protection, I guess that’s the Protestant way-How silly of me to think like that!

[Steelfish]

By your logic all the miracles are for fools as is the Virgin Birth, Christ’s very incarnation is incomprehensible. This curse of the Reformation is seen is seen in these shallow “thinkers” from your local neighborhood Foursquare Church to your Joel Osteens and Billy Grahams, the laughable lightweights of “Christian” doctrine and who cannot defend the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of the Christ who by His own words and would make Christ look like a “misleader” to His Jewish audience who actually believed His literal words and Christ double-downed it. The Catholic Eucharist theology is believed by saints and martyrs, theologians and even leading converts to the Catholic Faith including the Chief Rabbi of Rome, Cardinal Newman (Anglican Bishop and head of the Oxford Movement) and Neuhas, who was the leading Lutheran theologian of his time in America and even former Communist intellectuals.

All this is above your pay grade since you appear to swim in the gutter to defile sacred doctrine which just like low information voters, “low- information” Protestant Christians try the same tack. If this is too difficult a subject for you to comprehend then please say so.

[Iscool]

The Catholic Eucharist theology is believed by saints and martyrs, theologians and even leading converts to the Catholic Faith including the Chief Rabbi of Rome, Cardinal Newman (Anglican Bishop and head of the Oxford Movement) and Neuhas, who was the leading Lutheran theologian of his time in America and even former Communist intellectuals.

YOu forgot to mention former kings and queens, philosophers, every one in the Cosa Nostra, Tariq Aziz, and Joseph Goebbels just to mention a few more...

Like I said, braniacs...

While all these people are well educated, they all have one thing in common...They change, add to or delete words of God from the scriptures to suit and justify your religion...They are so educated and so smart they decide what God's scripture should say instead of what it clearly and plainly says...The scripture has a few things sto say about your wise intellectuals who constantly correct God...

1Co 2:1 And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God.
1Co 2:2 For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified.
1Co 2:3 And I was with you in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling.
1Co 2:4 And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power:
1Co 2:5 That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.
1Co 2:6 Howbeit we speak wisdom among them that are perfect: yet not the wisdom of this world, nor of the princes of this world, that come to nought:

I could have posted far more 'hard hitting' scripture but it's too early in the morning...

[Steelfish]

This is completely irrelevant stuff of the kind that low-information Christians thrive on. My post referred to theologians, saints, and martyrs. Those who had studied Scripture and many converts, leading theologians from other religions who realized the curse of Protestantism and converted to Catholicism.