Really, outside of Catholicism what other faith is there?
The Eucharist IS the Resurrection.
To deny the Eucharist, you will have to REFUTE:
1. Scripture itself. John 6:53
2. The sacred oral tradition, the very tradition that was used to cross check and cross reference the books in the Bible that were infallibly assembled as authentic by the Catholic Church. So if you doubt the oral tradition, you must doubt the fact-checking sources for the Bible, and consequently the accuracy of the Bible itself. You cannot have it both ways by accepting the Bible as authentic and un-tether its infallibility from the sacred oral tradition.
3. The beliefs and practices of the early disciples of Christ before the Bible was assembled in the early fourth century.
4. The beliefs of saints, martyrs, and stigmatists who believed that the Sacrifice of the Mass and the Holy Eucharist is at the very center of Christian belief and this is why the Tabernacle was at the center of all Catholic Churches and worship and was so for FIFTEEN CENTURIES (AND CONTINUES TO BE) before the curse of Protestantism in 1517 (especially now with their mainline denominations using scriptural warrant to ordain gay, lesbian, and coming soon, transgender pastors) washed ashore spreading, what the great essayist Hillaire Belloc called, a “cluster of heresies.”
5. The explicit writings of the early Church fathers.
This would include St. Irenaeus of Lyons, an early Church Father and Doctor of the Church
In fact, the real presence of the body and blood of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist (transubstantiation), also known as Mass or the Lord’s Supper, was taken for granted in the early Church.
Written by St. Irenaeus about 185 AD, this excerpt in the link above makes clear the Church’s realistic interpretation of the Eucharist as the risen body of Christ.
6. The brilliant Catholic theologians after whom colleges and universities have been named.
7. The pre-eminent Episcopalian and Lutheran theologians who have converted to Catholicism such as Rev. Richard Neuhaus who wrote he found “the fullest expression of Christ in the Catholic Church.” (However, Bible Christians tell us the “Holy Spirit” rather than having led them to the ONE truth, instead deserted them and the Holy Spirit is somehow, somewhere else, perhaps among some Protestant sects but we don’t know for sure which sect it is: Joel Osteen’s or Jeremiah Wright’s)
The resurrection is not some simple belief of a dead man coming to life.
Pope Benedict XVI (the theological Einstein of our times) captured this brilliant in the following passage. In the middle volume of his triptych, Jesus of Nazareth, Pope Benedict XVI tried to describe those Resurrection-changes in history and nature (which are, of course, ultimately indescribable) like this:
“Christ’s Resurrection . . . is a historical event that nevertheless bursts open the dimensions of history and transcends it. Perhaps we may draw upon analogical language here . . . [and think of] the Resurrection as something akin to a radical “evolutionary leap,” in which a new dimension of life emerges, a new dimension of human existence. Indeed, matter itself is remolded into a new type of reality. “
“The man Jesus, complete with his body, now belongs to the sphere of the divine and eternal. From now on, as Tertullian once said, “spirit and blood” have a place within God. . . . Even if man by his nature is created for immortality, it is only now that the place exists in which his immortal soul can find its “space,” its “bodiliness,” in which immortality takes on its meaning as communion with God and with the whole of reconciled mankind.”
“This is what is meant by those passages in Saint Paul’s prison letters (cf. Colossians 1.12–23 and Ephesians 1. 3–23) that speak of the cosmic body of Christ, indicating thereby that Christ’s transformed body is also the place where men enter into communion with God and with one another and are therefore able to live definitively in the fullness of indestructible life. . .”
St. Paul says: “Let a man examine himself … for anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment upon himself (1 Corinthians 11:27-29).
“[Thus] Jesus’s Resurrection was not just about some deceased individual coming back to life at a certain point. . . . [An] ontological leap occurred, one that touches being as such, opening up a dimension that affects us all, creating for all of us a new space of life, a new space of being in union with God.”
You can now see without the living body and blood of Christ in the Holy Eucharist, without a belief in Eucharist, the Resurrection has no meaning.
Without a belief in the Eucharist, one may as well pack a McDonald’s breakfast, attend a sunrise service at the beach o rat Hollywood Bowl with picnic basket and dog in tow and join hands in a kumbaya dance.
God Bless the new Catachumens. They have seen the Light.
Great post!
Congrats to the new believers.
Amen. You cannot seperate the Eucharist from the Bible.