Go see this week's Catholic Carnival at To Jesus through Mary. The theme this week is Lord, Have Mercy and the posts seem particularly appropriate. Be sure to check it out.
God bless,
Jay
April 2006 Archives
But as it is, [Jesus] has appeared once for all at the end of the age to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself. - - Hebrews 9:26When Catholics begin talking about the “Sacrifice of the Mass,” it tends to make protestants a little jumpy. Without a doubt they immediately point to Hebrews, which unequivocally explains that Jesus Christ died once and for all to take care of our sins and does not need to be “re-sacrificed” repeatedly on Catholic altars. But is this what is taking place?
The Catholic Mass
Actually, the Catholic Church has never taught that Jesus is repeatedly sacrificed in the Catholic mass. The Church teaches that the Eucharistic sacrifice in the mass is a participation in the once and for all sacrifice of Christ at Calvary:
CCC 1367. The sacrifice of Christ and the sacrifice of the Eucharist are one single sacrifice: “The victim is one and the same: the same now offers through the ministry of priests, who then offered Himself on the cross; only the manner of being is different.” “In this divine sacrifice which is celebrated in the Mass, the same Christ who offered Himself once in a bloody manner on the altar of the cross is contained and offered in an unbloody manner.” (Quoted text from the Council of Trent DS 1740)
The laws of science do not restrict the God which created those laws. Which means that God has the ability to transcend time and space and allow each Eucharistic sacrifice to be a participation in the actual sacrifice of Jesus upon the cross two thousand years ago.
As Alan Schrek puts it in Catholic and Christian:
What Jesus did in the past - his death on the cross – is present to God. God can make this sacrifice present to us when Christians gather to celebrate the Lord’s Supper or Eucharist in his memory.
The Sacrifice at Calvary
What Jesus did at Calvary was sufficient for us as a single occurrence. There is no need for a resacrifice of Christ now or at any point in the future, since He took the weight of our sins and paid for them in a perfect manner. However, Jesus did instruct us to eat His body and blood (John 6:53) and in the very first Mass, which we call the Last Supper, Jesus showed the apostles exactly how we are to consume God. Since then the Mass has been celebrated with the Eucharistic sacrifice as the pinnacle and central function of the liturgy. And during that liturgy, we follow Jesus’ lead and re-present the sacrifice at Calvary as we as participate in that sacrifice in a completely unique way.
Bread becomes God
As part of the process, the ordained priest actually turns bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ in a real way. Jesus is present body, blood, soul, and divinity in the Eucharistic feast as we participate in the Mass. Thus we are consuming exactly what the apostles consumed 2,000 years ago at the Last Supper. Ultimately this intimate relationship with God – more personal than any other relationship could be – is what called me into the Catholic Church and into a deeper relationship with my savior. I won’t go into the details of the Eucharist here, but you can read this article on the Eucharist for more details.
Conclusion
In the end I’ll quote an excellent passage:
Futhermore, in the Mass, Jesus Christ ultimately offers the sacrifice of himself (just as at the Last Supper), with the priest merely acting in his stead, as a purely secondary, instrumental agent. In no sense, then, is the Mass some sort of magic or “hocus pocus” (this phrase itself is a caricature of the Latin words of consecration: Hoc est enim corpus meum). The priest and congregation are willing participants in what is God’s supernatural work from beginning to end. This is the furthest thing from sorcery, which is the utilization of either demonic supernatural powers, or those thought to be natural, apart from the originating agency of a personal God (see Acts 8:17-23).
That is from Dave Armstrong’s A Biblical Defense of Catholicism.
God bless,
Jay
This week's Catholic Carnival has been posted -- be sure to check it out. It's a great overview of Catholic blogging.
God bless,
Jay
PS - sorry for the light posting, I've been out of town. It should pick up now that I'm back.
Happy Easter to you all and God bless!
At the Transfiguration of Mount Tabor, Peter and James and John had seen Jesus radiating light from His body and clothes, in a manner outside all earthly experience. The evidence of the Holy Shroud of Turin, analyzed scientifically by micro-densitometer, VP-8 image analyzer, spectroscope, and other modern scientific instruments and methods, suggests that the extraordinary impressions upon its cloth could only have been formed by a brief scorching flash at a level of energy approaching themonuclear.
"Let there be light . . ."
Christ had slain death, the last enemy. He had come back from the fathomless abyss from which no man had ever emerged. - - Warren H. Carroll The Founding of Christendom
God bless,
Jay
Leonard Klein was a concerned Lutheran minister. According to this article he:
As a conservative Lutheran, Klein, 60, has not felt [good to be where he is] for a very long time. He was an outspoken critic of what he describes as the liberal direction of his denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), and challenged the group on issues of abortion, inclusive language, gay ordination and gay marriage.
Why convert? And most especially, why choose Catholicism?
"The Catholic Church understands that Christian teaching comes through scripture, and that is cared for and applied by the bishops," Klein said. "... A lot of things just aren't up for a vote."
In other words, he followed the Truth home to the Catholic Church. It's an interesting article, since it also points out that Klein is now a married Catholic priest.
God bless - and have a happy, holy Easter!
Jay
[The Gnostics] declare that Judas the traitor was thoroughly acquainted with these things, and that he alone, knowing the truth as no others did, accomplished the mystery of the betrayal; by him all things, both earthly and heavenly, were thus thrown into confusion. They produce a fictitious history of this kind, which they style the Gospel of Judas.
- - St. Irenaeus Against Heresies 1:31:1.
This week, moreso than any other, go check out the Catholic Carnival. The topics and bloggers involved are excellent, so you're sure to find something that interests and often challenges you.
God bless,
Jay
From The Founding of Christendom by Warren H. Carroll:
The next two days [after Palm Sunday] He went to the Temple. On Monday, April 3, 30 A.D., the preponderance of evidence suggests that for a second time He drove the money-changers and the animal sellers out of the Temple, the circumstances and His words being very similar to those of His first “cleansing of the Temple” at the beginning of His public ministry two Passovers before. It was this that probably prompted the first challenge flung at Him on that day of ultimate verbal battle, Tuesday, April 4, 30 A.D.: “By what authority are you doing these things, or who gave you this authority to do them?” Jesus’ answer was a counter-question: “Was the baptism of John from heaven or from men? Answer me.” His enemies dared not answer, because the people venerated the memory of John the Baptist and would have been furious if their leaders had publicly denied that God had sent John; yet if they admitted that, they could have no reason for continuing to resist Him Whose coming and glory John had proclaimed. Jesus’ response was far from a mere debating trick; it was both an answer in essence to the question He had been asked – for John was sent by God, and John had called upon all to follow Jesus – and at the same time an effective exposure of the hypocrisy and malice of the Pharisees.
After that, it was all-out war between Jesus and His foes.
God bless,
Jay
This is an excellent passage from Fulton Sheen’s Life of Christ:
“Tell the daughter of Zion, Here is your king, who comes to you in gentleness, riding on a donkey.” - - Matthew 21:5The prophecy came from God through a prophet, and now God Himself was bringing it to fulfillment. The prophecy of Zechariah was meant to contrast the majesty and the humility of the Savior. As one looks at the ancient sculptured slabs of Assyria and Babylon, the murals of Egypt, the tombs of the Persians, and the scrolls of the Roman columns, one is struck by the majesty of kings riding in triumph on horses or in chariots, and sometimes over the prostrate bodies of their foes. In contrast to this, here is One Who comes triumphant upon an ass. How Pilate, if he was looking out of his fortress that Sunday, must have been amused by the ridiculous spectacle of a man being proclaimed as a King, and yet seated on the beast that was the symbol of the outcast – a fitting vehicle for one riding into the jaws of death! If He had entered into the city with regal pomp in the manner of conquerors, He would have given occasion to believe that He was a political Messiah. But the circumstance He chose validated His claim that His Kingdom was not of this world. There is no suggestion that this pauper King was a rival of Caesar.
How can we stand and lay down the palm branches welcoming Christ in our lives? Christ desires deeply to enter in the Jerusalem within each of us and conquer the city through His love.
God bless,
Jay
We’re seeing an interesting trend in America these days that gives more credence to the controversial than the actual. In other words, people seem to crave controversy in a way that leads them away from Truth. In fact, Truth is simply not sought as the highest authority and much is believed that should not be.
The latest example is the Gospel of Judas, which is simply a non-Scriptural Gnostic text written around 300 A.D. The document is interesting and does provide insight into the Gnostic heresy, which was a huge problem in the early Church (before the Church defined the true nature of God). But the USA Today piece linked above is a joke and the author should be embarrassed. Take this passage:
Scripture, like history, was codified by the winners, by those who emerged with the greatest numbers at the end of three centuries of Christianity, said Michael White, director of the Institute for the Study of Antiquity and Christian Origins at the University of Texas-Austin, He has counted more than three dozen gospels that didn't make the canonical cut. The ones that did, he said, were not in total harmony but shared a theological view of the passion, the crucifixion and their significance that became the core of the new religion.
In other words, it isn’t because the Gospels chosen were True, it was because a political struggle elevated a group of men who chose texts they agreed with. This is pretty much total “Da Vinci Code” nonsense that assumes Christians are wrong and likely suckers in those not familiar with history.
Background on Gnosticism
Gnosticism first cropped up in the second century and evolved out of pre-Christian pagan religions. The key to understanding Gnosticism is the idea of gnosis, which is secret knowledge that revealed the true way of salvation – it was supposedly only transmitted to those deemed “worthy” of receiving it. Most early Gnostic texts claimed to be from Jesus or the Twelve disciples and handed down secretly by oral tradition. In general these teachings created a split between the spiritual and the material worlds in which material was always bad and spiritual good (thus it was Gnostics who first suggested Christ was not man but wholly God and only spiritual).
The biggest problem with Gnostic teachings is of course that they are false: if Gnosticism is true, then why did the teachings of the Twelve apostles contradict them? And why did Jesus teach differently? Gnosticism eventually died out after writers like St. Clement of Rome, St. Irenaeus, and St. Hippolytus challenged them and pointed out the errors inherent in their teachings.
The Problem of Today: Authority
Although Gnostic fallacies continue to crop up now and again throughout the Church’s history, we seem to see an increase in these today. Another quote in the article points out the obvious:
"Just because you can date a document to early Christian times doesn't make it theologically true," said Pastor Rod Loy of the First Assembly of God in North Little Rock "Do you decide everything you read on the Internet is true because it was written on April 6, 2006? Fiction has been around for as long as man."
Pastor Loy makes a great point but fails to answer the bigger question: how do you separate fact from fiction and determine the Scriptural Canon? The problem is one of Authority: if you don’t accept the Church’s authority to (a) compose the Bible and (b) teach authoritatively, then it becomes easy to get caught up in these errors. As the passage above shows, if you don’t believe the Catholic Church chose the texts in the Bible because they were true (rather than for some political reason), you start to question why the Church chose the books She did. There are numerous other Gospels and supposed writings of the apostles, but these were rejected for one reason, the weren’t True.
Authority is becoming the issue of the day. Writers are challenging every aspect of Christian thought and belief in books like The Da Vinci Code. How can you assert that you know what is True? As Catholics we can point to Jesus’ promise in Matthew 16:18 that His Church will never fail. What can you point to? Where does the authority for your beliefs come from?
If you are protestant you are accepting Martin Luther’s revision of the Bible in the 1500’s – over 1,100 years after the Bible was originally compiled by the Catholic Church. How does this affect your notion of Authority? How can you discredit other claims that try to remake the Bible if you accept Luther’s (remember, he was no scholar and died a terrible sinner)?
God bless,
Jay
The Eucharist is the biggest difference in protestant vs. Catholic theology. It is today, as it was for Judas and many of Jesus’ disciples, a stumbling stone for believers. We have written pretty extensively on the Eucharist and the Biblical arguments for the reality of Jesus’ Body and Blood in the Eucharist on this site, but it’s been a while since we wrote anything comprehensive on it, so I wanted to point everyone back to the main articles:
- This is the Lamb of God Who Takes Away the Sins of the World: Understanding the Eucharist
- Why Does Jesus Call Himself “Bread”?
- REFERENCE: The Real Presence (The Eucharist). This article points out the majority of the Biblical references to the Eucharist as Catholics understand it.
- Union through Communion: The Necessity of the Eucharist
- The Eucharist in the Economy of Salvation: What the Church Teaches
The Eucharist is what calls non-Catholics to join Christ’s Church – it is the center of Mass and the key Sacrament of the Church. I pray that everyone reading this one day gets to experience the power of partaking in the Eucharistic meal.
God bless,
Jay
Don't miss this week's Catholic Carnival. It's enjoyable and organized around a great theme.
God bless,
Jay
This article on abortions in New York stunned me:
For every 100 babies born in New York City, women had 74 abortions in 2004, according to newly released figures that reaffirm the city as the abortion capital of the country.
But it's not just New Yorkers that are being killed:
And abortions for out-of-town women performed in the city increased from 57 to 70 out of every 1,000 between 1996 and 2004, a subtle yet noticeable trend that experts say may reflect growing hurdles against the procedure in more conservative parts of the country.
These type of numbers should scare even abortion advocates. Almost half of all babies conceived in New York City were killed before they were born. What does this say about the decay and moral decadence of our culture? What does God think when a city kills almost half of the miraculous conceptions He creates there?
This article underlines one of the reasons for this - it's very slanted toward the pro-abortion position and seems to warn against the dangers of confirming Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. But despite this, we may be seeing the tide turn in the rest of the country because of "The Roe Effect": South Dakota banned almost all abortions earlier this year and Mississippi looks to be on the same path. I personally believe the new Supreme Court is likely to allow these laws to stand, which means the potential for this to spread is high (let's hope Georgia jumps on this list!). At one point Planned Parenthood (the biggest abortion provider in the country) estimated that 22 states were at "high risk" of banning abortion with a pro-life Supreme Court. Needless to say New York wasn't one of those!
Much prayer and work is needed to get more states to follow the path of South Dakota. We're finally beginning to imagine an America where the most vunerable of our society can't be killed at the will of another.
God bless,
Jay
