MegaChurch or Catholic Church?

>> No one with an IQ over six or even the most rudimentary understanding of Greek/Koine would think that.<<

LOL Perhaps you need some extra study? Look at the word used for “body” in the verse Jesus is talking about “this is my body” and the verses that speak of the “body of Christ” the church. Same Greek word used in both.

I do know that you saying only the man Jesus died on the cross is seriously deficient.

Are you saying, then, that GOD died on the cross?

If only a man died, how does that repair the rift between man and God?

Because the wages of sin is death. Since Jesus had no sin, death could not hold Him. Therefore, everyone who trusts in Him, asks that the death He died be credited to their account, God will do that for them. It's throwing yourself on the mercy of the court because someone paid the penalty for the crime you committed so you can go free. It's a legal transaction.

Well done!

Cynical, cynical, cynical. Bear.

Such adoptions as in Christmas festive decoration as we know it today are TYPICAL of a “Christ the conqueror” faith. Who’s bigger, the pagan gods (demons) who used, say, the holly... or Christ? People afraid of Christmas trees have demons on the brain and very little faith in Christ.

This is a red herring if ever there was one.

The problem with Mary would be the adoption of NEW doctrine about her. I squarely rest on the bible with respect to Mary.

I have been told today that i am condemned and that i have denied the Holy Spirit because i hold a different opinion about things.

So?

I've been told by Catholics the same thing, as have many others here on this forum.

Nobody is impressed with a martyr complex.

I am simply exploring the statements you make and attempting to find the logic in them.

You seem committed to dividing Jesus into two halves. Catholics understand a union between the two.

So, no I don’t see this bearing any fruit or changing anyone’s mind. You insist that we believe the “Mother of God” is stating something that it is not. There is no way past this impass. If i can not define my terms and have you accept them, there is not point to the discussion.

Likewise, you seemingly can not answer the questions i ask as follow ups to hour statements. If Mary did not gove birth to a person who is God, then where was The God nature of Jesus when He was in her womb?

Catholics affirm that Jesus had two natures. We agree.

But we believe they are inseperable. You apparently do not.

So, let’s call the game. Enjoy your holiday.

I think you really need to study about the paganisms incorporated into Catholic practice and belief. God refers to those who spend time with paganism whores. Once you understand the depth of paganism in Catholicism you can understand God’s warnings to the whore of Babylon in Revelation and the admonition to people to “come out of her” or partake in her plagues. That’s the seriousness of what we are discussing. I truly fear for those in the Catholic Church. Many want to be true believes and may be saved but will “partake in her plagues” if they stay in her.

Count your change is 99% right. The Council of Toulouse did not ban reading the Bible, just a specific edition of the Bible. I am also pretty sure that most protestants would not look favorably on this particular edition/ translation.

The Council of Toulouse did ban the possession of vernacular Bibles for the laity without a license; not because the Church wished to discourage the authentic study of Scripture, but because the Bible was used as a tool for the promotion of the Albigensian heresy. In the Middle Ages, Bibles contained glosses, either in between verses or in the margins. These glosses served to guide the reader's interpretation of the text. A decently translated Bible could contain glosses which might lead the reader to reject the Church. Or the translation of the Bible could be perverted to support a heretical doctrine. For these reasons, some very poor and incorrectly translated bibles were burned.

The uncritical anti-Catholic also assumes that because there were relatively few bibles, knowledge of Scripture was limited. That was hardly the case. Catholics transmitted biblical knowledge in other forms. There were books which paraphrased stories in the Bible as is done today in children's books. The visual arts abounded in Scriptural themes. Stained-glass windows were the poor man's Bible. There were Miracle plays, which were the forerunners of modern Western theatre, as well as poems recounting Bible stories. Even the illiterate had access to the Bible through their families. Only a minority of people were literate during the Middle Ages, but sometimes one person in the family could read (often a woman) and the Bible, being the most widely-owned book in the Middle Ages, was read aloud.

The assumption driving this myth of bible-banning is that the Church, during the Middle Ages, was a big bad oppressor who wanted her flock to be ignorant so that it wouldn't challenge her power and her doctrines.

So the charge that the Church was against knowledge of Scripture is entirely unfounded. It's true that in some periods and some places vernacular versions of the Bible were rare or non-existent, but that's not the same thing as saying that the Church did not want the laity to read the Bible.

You can find out more about this heresy ion the Catholic Encyclopedia or In Karl Keating's "Catholicism and Fundamentalism".

I told you I am done with you on this. You have provided no scriptural base for any of you posts. You answer no questions but have the audacity to demand answers to yours.

Ok, good explanation. Thank you.

See here is the difference. You separate the spirit and body. If i understand correctly it is only your body holding you back from perfection.

I do not agree. If i was just a conscience, i would still have the tendency to sin. We are not perfect souls trapped in a body that is open to temptation.

Yes, the flesh is weak. But so is our spirit, until we are actually perfected.

I have said my piece. Have a good holiday.

In Scripture, the Holy Spirit calls her *mother of Jesus*.

John 2:1 On the third day there was a wedding at Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there.

John 2:3 When the wine ran out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.”

Acts 1:14 All these with one accord were devoting themselves to prayer, together with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and his brothers.

Scripture is clear in calling her *mother of Jesus* not *mother of God*.

Words mean things and Saying *mother of God* says something different than *mother of Jesus*.

Cynical, cynical, cynical, bear.

When Old Testament ideas are too literally pulled into New Testament practice, that’s what you get.

This “Whore” actually appears post rapture (I am being bold and going on a dispensational, pre-trib rapture model). All churches will have lost their believers and we have a very interesting new scene on earth by this time. What was left of the Southern Baptists (nonbelievers) could be this Whore, for all we know. Or an unholy conglomeration of what had been Christian churches. It’s a warning for that time. Not for now except as we can look at it and understand how God will continue to wrestle with the world until it is no longer worth wrestling with.

Thank you, too, and enjoy your holiday.

737 is correct; mechanical or absent-minded eating of the Holy Eucharist is a grave sin and not any kind of “elixir”. Cf. 1 Cor. 11:29.

Catholics understand a union between the two.

No. Catholics CONFUSE the the union between the two to support an unscriptural doctrine developed by their church.

it does mean that salvation is easy because it’s by grace, through faith in Christ and once you are born again, you do not have to continue to work to keep it. That takes all the pressure of performance off.

I knew that I was working too hard to get to Heaven, all I have to do is abandon the true Christian church, Catholicism, and give up a few chapters of the Bible, raise my hands on Sunday (don't have to be at a service of any kind, it's not required) claim a belief in Jesus as my savior....and I've got it made.

I could do that on a golf course, no sense wasting time at Mass any longer. I can live whatever lifestyle that I choose...WOO-HOO, I'm for that. I have no idea what the Bible meant when it said many are called, few are chosen, or the mention of a narrow gate, or any of the other seeming hardships to enter paradise....Just express a belief that Jesus is the Lord and Savior (Satan does that) and all your obligations are superceded by salvation through grace alone.......O.K.

Abraham lived before Old Testament was published. Moses wrote the Pentateuch 400 years later. What is the scripture that preached to Abraham. Could it have been Christ?

John 8:58 Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am.

Rev 19:13 And he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood: and his name is called The Word of God.

LOL Perhaps you need some extra study? Look at the word used for “body” in the verse Jesus is talking about “this is my body” and the verses that speak of the “body of Christ” the church. Same Greek word used in both.

Context matters.

Well, BlueDragon, since it was a private FReepmail feedback note to you (not a post), and you've already posted some of my private FReepmail note to you here (and severely mischaracterized it and attacked it intensely), I will post that private note to you in it's entirety here to set the record straight, especially since in the second half of it, it contains one of the best basic explanations of the Holy Eucharist I know of (to the best of our limited human understanding of a Holy Mystery of God), written by Frank Sheed. It might add something to the discussion here.

First of all, here's a link to the post you made which we are referring to here, in case anybody else would care to read it to obtain context:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-relig ion/3046031/posts?q=1&;page=601#629

Now, here (below) is my private FReepmail note to you back then (08/01/13) in it's entirety, including Frank Sheed's excellent explanation. (I apologize in advance to other posters here for its lengthy aspect, and urge you to just skip over this post completely if you're not interested.) In this FReepmail note, I did NOT call you a liar -- I just said that calling "self-flagellation" a "doctrine of the Church" is a falsehood. I also did not say you were the devil, but only that all falsehoods come from the "father of all lies" (even if a person expressing such a falsehood may not be aware it is a falsehood). If you really believe that it IS a doctrine of the Church, you are merely mistaken about it, not intentionally lying about it, but nevertheless, it is still a falsehood. And I was not trying to insult you in that note by talking about the Resurrection, but rather pointing out that we do not understand ANY of God's Mysteries fully. (By the way, BlueDragon, did I understand the gist of what you were saying correctly --- that you raised a bird from the dead?)

Anyway, here is my real private FReepmail feedback note to you, BlueDragon, from 08/01/13.

Re: Does the Catholic Church Teach "Doctrines of Demons?"
To BlueDragon | 08/01/2013 3:52:18 PM PDT sent
You post to me here is unbelievable! I don’t think I’ve ever been accused of being dishonest and stupid in the same post before, like you’ve done here. Why don’t we just take another look at the real facts, and forego the baseless and scurrilous name-calling?
Among other things you said in your post, you said, “No, I understand the terms well enough, and they were not exactly “Latin” terms, for it was Aristotelian philosophical terminology which was employed by Aquinas, which explanation those at Trent borrowed from”.
You DO know that Aquinas wrote EVERYTHING in Latin, and those Church Council documents were ALL initially written in Latin, don’t you? There are many English translations of those books and documents available today, and they all differ according to who is doing the translations.
I merely told you that I was not one to be able to discuss with you the wording of Latin original documents translated into the archaic English language spoken in the 1500’s (as I know very little Latin, and have not studied those Latin documents and am not an expert in them). Like I told you in my post, a Church history professor who knows Latin at a good Catholic University or Seminary would be a much better person to go to have an intelligent discussion about that.
You also said “I am a person -— not an opportunity for internet advertisement of Roman Catholic promotional materials.” BlueDragon, you obviously did not read ANY of the references I provided for you. None of those references were any kind of “internet advertisement of Roman Catholic promotional materials”. Try reading them, and you will know that without any doubt, and won’t say such ridiculous things again (if you are an honorable person).
The first references I gave you were texts with Biblical quotes from Jesus. You made it clear in your reply-post that you did not want to read those quotes from Jesus again for some reason.
The next reference I gave you was to a neutral (non-Catholic) “wikipedia” page that gave a brief explanation of how Catholics view the Eucharist, as well as how the Orthodox Churches view it, how the various major Protestant denominations view it, and so forth. They also provided a couple brief, quick summaries of how a few Early Church Fathers viewed it, which is exactly how the Catholic Church still views it today, and exactly how Jesus Christ taught it right from the beginning. (There is NO difference whatsoever— check it for yourself.)
The next reference was to a page showing a chapter of a book by a noted Catholic teacher where you can see quite clearly what the Catholic Church teaches about transubstantiation and the “Real Presence” (as far as it is understood by us limited human beings). It is a very valuable and helpful reference I was sharing with you so you could see precisely the extent of our Catholic understanding of that great mystery, and you called it a mere worthless advertisement. If you care to have the decency to check that reference for yourself this time, I will post that page at the bottom of this “private mail” post, and you can try really reading it this time.
The next two references I provided for you were to both the online and the printed versions of the “Catechism of the Catholic Church”, where you can learn exactly what the Catholic Church teaches, including what the Church teaches about the Eucharist. (The online version of the Catechism is searchable.) You read it if you seriously, honestly want to find out exactly what those Catholic Church teachings are. It is NOT a “commercial” to anyone who has actually, honestly read it. (You don’t have to agree with the teachings of the Catholic Church as spelled out in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, but at least you will actually know what those teachings really, truly are, and not continue to believe some wildly inaccurate caricature of them.)
Regarding the Church’s teachings about some of these mysteries (like the Eucharist) you used the term “Purposely ‘fuzzy’” in reference to those teachings. Does that mean you don’t believe St. Paul when he said we currently see everything “through the glass darkly”? God does not teach humans everything there is to know about ANYTHING (especially His Holy Mysteries), and you would do well to learn that unequivocally. You (and I) can ALWAYS learn more about ANY of the Mysteries of God — we will NEVER understand them completely.
For example, if you begin to think that you know everything there is to know about the mystery of the “Resurrection”, just take a stroll into the nearest funeral parlor, and try raising one or two of the dead people there from the dead. Then sheepishly go home and read this from the Bible, and absorb it with great humility:
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” Isaiah 55:8-9
God only reveals a VERY SMALL amount of knowledge about ANYTHING to humans.
You also said, “All the other medieval “do penance” self-flagellation type of thing which ‘some’ Roman Catholics of old (and still to this day?) engage in, or else seek to assert that others must continually do, to somehow earn His favor, to make us good enough by being punished enough -— well, those sort of things ARE the “doctrines of demons”, to work the subject title of this FR thread into this reply... “
BlueDragon, those kinds of strange things are most certainly NOT doctrines or teachings of the Catholic Church. That is a blatant falsehood, and you know where all falsehoods come from, don’t you? What individuals do privately by their own choices should NEVER be confused with the real doctrinal teachings of the Church, so please don’t get those things mixed up.
- - - - - - -
In the future BlueDragon, if you cannot post a post to me on FR without shamelessly impugning my integrity and honesty, or insulting my intelligence, please do not post to me. That kind of garbage is entirely uncalled for, and should never be posted on FR (or anywhere else frankly). (I will extend that same courtesy of not posting to you again as well.)
However, if you do honestly want to learn what the Catholic Church’s teachings are about transubstantiation (and how they relate to Aquinas and to classical philosophy), I will include in this “private mail” not just the link this time, but the actual chapter from that “Frank Sheed” reference I gave you.
You can (of course) read it or not. That’s your call.
Here is that chapter:

" "

THEOLOGY FOR BEGINNERS F. J. Sheed
Chapter 18—Eucharist And Mass
The Real Presence
The Blessed Eucharist is the Sacrament. Baptism exists for it, all the others are enriched by it. The whole being is nourished by it. It is precisely food, which explains why it is the one sacrament meant to be received daily. Without it, one petition in the Our Father—”Give us this day our daily bread”—lacks the fullness of its meaning.
Early in his ministry, as St. John tells us (ch 6), Our Lord gave the first promise of it. He had just worked what is probably the most famous of his miracles, the feeding of the five thousand. The next day, in the synagogue at Capernaum on the shore of the sea of Galilee, Our Lord made a speech which should be read and reread. Here we quote a few phrases: “I am the Bread of Life”; “I am the Living Bread, which came down from heaven. If any man eat of this bread, he shall live forever: and the bread that I will give, is my flesh for the life of the world”; “He that eats my flesh, and drinks my blood, has everlasting life: and I will raise him up in the last day. For my flesh is meat indeed: and my blood is drink indeed. He that eats my flesh, and drinks my blood, abides in me, and I in him”; “He that eats me shall live by me.”
He saw that many of his own disciples were horrified at what he was saying. He went on: “It is the spirit that quickens: the flesh profits nothing.” We know what he meant: in saying they must eat his flesh, he did not mean dead flesh but his body with the life in it, with the living soul in it. In some way he himself, living, was to be the food of their soul’s life. Needless to say, all this meant nothing whatever to those who heard it first. For many, it was the end of discipleship. They simply left him, probably thinking that for a man to talk of giving them his flesh to eat was mere insanity.
When he asked the Apostles if they would go too, Peter gave him one of the most moving answers in all man’s history: “Lord, to whom shall we go?” He had not the faintest idea of what it all meant; but he had a total belief in the Master he had chosen and simply hoped that some day it would be made plain.
There is no hint that Our Lord ever raised the matter again until the Last Supper. Then his meaning was most marvelously made plain. What he said and did then is told us by Matthew, Mark, and Luke; and St. Paul tells it to the Corinthians (1 Cor 10 and 11). St. John, who gives the longest account of the Last Supper, does not mention the institution of the Blessed Eucharist; his Gospel was written perhaps thirty years after the others, to be read in a church which had been receiving Our Lord’s body and blood for some sixty years. What he had provided is the account we have just been considering of Our Lord’s first promise.
Here is St. Matthew’s account of the establishment: “Jesus took bread, and blessed, and broke: and gave to his disciples, and said, Take ye and eat: This is my body. And taking the chalice he gave thanks: and gave to them, saying: Drink ye all of this. For this is my blood of the New Testament, which shall be shed for many unto remission of sins.”
Since they deal with the food of our life, we must examine these words closely. What we are about to say of “This is my body” will do for “This is my blood” too. The word is need not detain us. There are those, bent upon escaping the plain meaning of the words used, who say that the phrase really means “This represents my body.” It sounds very close to desperation! No competent speaker would ever talk like that, least of all Our Lord, least of all then;. The word this;, deserves a closer look.
Had he said, “Here is my body,” he might have meant that, in some mysterious way, his body was there as well as, along with, the bread which seems so plainly to be there. But he said, “This is my body”—this which I am holding, this which looks like bread but is not, this which was bread before I blessed it, this is now my body. Similarly this, which was wine, which still looks like wine, is not wine. It is now my blood.
Every life is nourished by its own kind—the body by material food, the intellect by mental food. But the life we are now concerned with is Christ living in us; the only possible food for it is Christ.
So much is this so that in our own day you will scarcely find grace held to be Christ’s life in us unless the Eucharist is held to be Christ himself.
What Our Lord was giving us was a union with himself closer than the Apostles had in the three years of their companionship, than Mary Magdalen had when she clung to him after his Resurrection. Two of St. Paul’s phrases, from 1 Corinthians 11 and 10, are specially worth noting: “Whosoever shall eat this bread, or drink the chalice of the Lord unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and of the blood of the Lord”; and “We, being many, are one bread, one body, all that partake of one bread”—a reminder that the Eucharist is not only for each man’s soul but for the unity of the Mystical Body.
I can see why a Christian might be unable to bring himself to believe it, finding it beyond his power to accept the idea that a man can give us his flesh to eat. But why should anyone want to escape the plain meaning of the words?
For the Catholic nothing could be simpler. Whether he understands or not, he feels safe with Peter in the assurance that he who said he would give us his body to eat had the words of eternal life. Return again to what he said. The bread is not changed into the whole Christ, but into his body; the wine is not changed into the whole Christ, but into his blood. But Christ lives, death has no more dominion over him. The bread becomes his body, but where his body is, there he is; the wine becomes his blood but is not thereby separated from his body, for that would mean death; where his blood is, he is.
Where either body or blood is, there is Christ, body and blood, soul and divinity. That is the doctrine of the Real Presence.
Transubstantiation
Besides the Real Presence which faith accepts and delights in, there is the doctrine of ransubstantiation, from which we may at least get a glimpse of what happens when the priest consecrates bread and wine, so that they become Christ’s body and Christ’s blood.
At this stage, we must be content with only the simplest statement of the meaning of, and distinction between substance and accidents, without which we should make nothing at all of transubstantiation.
We shall concentrate upon bread, reminding ourselves once again that what is said applies in principle to wine as well.
We look at the bread the priest uses in the Sacrament. It is white, round, soft. The whiteness is not the bread, it is simply a quality that the bread has the same is true of the roundness and the softness. There is something there that has these and other properties, qualities, attributes—the philosophers call all of them accidents. Whiteness and roundness we see softness brings in the sense of touch. We might smell bread, and the smell of new bread is wonderful, but once again the smell is not the bread, but simply a property. The something which has the whiteness, the softness, the roundness, has the smell and if we try another sense, the sense of taste, the same something has that special effect upon our palate.
In other words, whatever the senses perceive—even with the aid of those instruments men are forever inventing to increase the reach of the senses—is always of this same sort, a quality, a property, an attribute no sense perceives the something which has all these qualities, which is the thing itself.
This something is what the philosophers call substance the rest are accidents which it possesses. Our senses perceive accidents; only the mind knows the substance. This is true of bread, it is true of every created thing. Left to itself, the mind assumes that the substance is that which, in all its past experience, has been found to have that particular group of accidents. But in these two instances, the bread and wine of the Eucharist, the mind is not left to itself. By the revelation of Christ it knows that the substance has been changed, in the one case into the substance of his body, in the other into the substance of his blood.
The senses can no more perceive the new substance resulting from the consecration than they could have perceived the substance there before. We cannot repeat too often that senses can perceive only accidents, and consecration changes only the substance. The accidents remain in their totality—for example, that which was wine and is now Christ’s blood still has the smell of wine, the intoxicating power of wine. One is occasionally startled to find some scientist claiming to have put all the resources of his laboratory into testing the consecrated bread; he announces triumphantly that there is no change whatever, no difference between this and any other bread. We could have told him that, without the aid of any instrument. For all that instruments can do is to make contact with the accidents, and it is part of the doctrine of transubstantiation that the accidents undergo no change whatever. If our scientist had announced that he had found a change, that would be really startling and upsetting.
The accidents, then, remain; but not, of course, as accidents of Christ’s body. It is not his body which has the whiteness and the roundness and the softness. The accidents once held in existence by the substance of bread, and those others once held in existence by the substance of wine, are now held in existence solely by God’s will to maintain them.
What of Christ’s body, now sacramentally present? We must leave the philosophy of this for a later stage in our study. All we shall say here is that his body is wholly present, though not (so St. Thomas among others tells us) extended in space. One further element in the doctrine of the Real Presence needs to be stated: Christ’s body remains in the communicant as long as the accidents remain themselves. Where, in the normal action of our bodily processes, they are so changed as to be no longer accidents of bread or accidents of wine, the Real Presence in us of Christ’s own individual body ceases. But we live on in his Mystical Body.
This very sketchy outline of the doctrine of transubstantiation is almost pathetic. But like so much in this book, what is here is only a beginning; you have the rest of life before you.
The Sacrifice of the Mass
Upon Calvary Christ Our Lord offered himself in sacrifice for the redemption of the human race. There had been sacrifices before Calvary, myriads of them—foreshadowings, figures, distortions often enough, but reaching out strongly or feebly towards the perfection of Calvary’s sacrifice.
These represented an awareness in men, a sort of instinct, that they must from time to time take something out of that vast store of things God has given them and give it back to him. Men might have used the thing for themselves but chose not to; they offered it to God, made it sacred (that is what the word sacrifice means). In itself, sacrifice is simply the admission that all things are God’s; even in a sinless world this would be true, and men would want to utter the trust by sacrifice. With sin, there was a new element; sacrifice would include the destruction of the thing offered—an animal, usually.
We can study these sacrifices, as they were before Calvary at once perfected and ended them, in the Temple sacrifices of the Jews, the Chosen People. The whole air of the Old Testament is heavy with the odor of animals slain and offered to God. The slaying and the offering—immolation and oblation—were both necessary elements. But whereas the offering was always made by the priests, the slaying need not be done by them; often it was the work of the Temple servants. For it was not the slaying that made the object sacred, but the offering. The essential thing was that the priest offer a living thing slain.
With Christ, we have said, sacrifice came to its perfection. The priest was perfect, for Christ was the priest. The victim was perfect, for he was the victim too. He offered himself, slain. But not slain by himself. He was slain by others, slain indeed by his enemies.
What he did was complete, once for all, not to be repeated. It accomplished three things principally—atoned for the sin of the race, healed the breach between the race and God, opened heaven to man, opened it never to be closed. His is “the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but for those of the whole world” (1 Jn 2:1).
With such completion, what was still to be done? For something was still to be done. Christ is still in action on men’s behalf, as the Epistle to the Hebrews tells us. Jesus has entered “into heaven itself, that he may appear now, in the presence of God for us” (9:24). He is “always living to make intercession for us” (7:25). What still remains to be done is not an addition to what was done on Calvary, but its application to each man—that each of us should receive for himself what Our Lord won for our race.
The “intercession” just spoken of is not a new sacrifice but the showing to God of the sacrifice of Calvary. The Victim, once slain, now deathless, stands before God, with the marks of the slaying still upon him—”a Lamb standing, as it were slain” (Rv 5:6).
We are now in a better position to understand the Sacrifice of the Mass. In heaving Christ is presenting himself, once slain upon Calvary, to his heavenly Father. On earth the priest—by Christ’s command, in Christ’s name, by Christ’s power—is offering to God the Victim once slain upon Calvary.
Nor does this mean a new sacrifice, but Calvary’s sacrifice presented anew—in order that the redemption won for our race should produce its fruit in us individually.
In the Mass the priest consecrates bread and wine, so that they become Christ’s body and blood. Thus the Christ he offers is truly there really there. The Church sees the separate consecration as belonging to the very essence of the Mass. It is a remainder of Christ’s death—and he had told his first priests at the Last Supper that, in doing what he had just done, “they should show forth the death of the Lord, until he come (1 Cor 11:26). They should show forth Christ’s death, remind us of his death, not, of course, kill him, any more than he had killed himself on Calvary.
The priest offers the sacrifice. But we are, in our lesser way, offerers too. Twice we are told so in the Ordinary of the Mass. We have already seen how after the Consecration the priest says, “We thy servants but also thy holy people [plebs tua sancta] . . . offer . . . a pure, holy and immaculate Victim.” To see ourselves merely as spectators at Mass is to miss the opportunity to take our part in the highest action done upon earth.
One element in the Mass remains to be mentioned. We, united with Christ’s priests, have offered Our Lord to God. And God gives him back to us, to be the Life of our life. That is what Holy Communion means. God, while retaining Christ for his own, also shares him with us. So that God and man, each in his own way, receive the slain and risen God-man.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chapter 18 — Eucharist and Mass
Theology for Beginners (c) 1981 by F. J. Sheed (from online EWTN web page)

Kind of a surrogate mother for Jesus-in-the-flesh. I wouldn’t even see the need for incorporation of Mary’s own genetic material at all here. Whatever our best scientists can do, God can obviously do in spades.

Why the Megachurch?

What About the Eucharist?

The Problem