I clicked onto this thread hoping to read some intelligent discussions about end times prophecy...and all I got was the meaning of “is”.
Exactly.
When I was a Catholic, I constructed a justification for the bread being the body and the wine being the blood, and that was that when the priest says he is giving both up for you, in the role of Jesus, he is, in a way, because he has given up his body (his sexual life, his family), and his blood because he is willing to die for the faith. And certainly Jesus did both of those.
Insofar as the priest believes both those things about what he has done and is willing to do, there is a certain mystical truth to the statements. They are not literal physical changes. The Church is full of mysticism, and a mystery is not something that is untrue but something that can be resolved and understood until it is no longer a mystery. My Catholic friends like and accept this idea.
To repeat what I said upthread, we don’t need to argue about these things. Do we repent, and have a firm purpose of amendment, whether Catholic or Protestant? I’d wager that that is what he cares about, whether we confess to a priest or directly to him.