Why do so few US Catholics believe in the Real Presence? Look at the liturgy
A generation of pastors stripped the altars and passed out the Eucharist like a leaflet
The latest Pew study shockingly states that only 31 per cent of Catholics in the United States believe that “during Catholic Mass, the bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Jesus.” Out of the 69 per cent of Catholics surveyed who believe that the bread and wine are mere “symbols,” only 22 per cent of those understand that they are dissenting from the Church’s actual teaching. The rest are accidental Zwinglians.
It sometimes surprises students how little dispute over the Eucharist there was in the early Church. Certainly one could see how Donatism or Pelagianism or Nestorianism might touch upon Eucharistic understanding, but there were no serious disputes until the ninth century — when the aptly named Ratramnus taught Charles the Bald that the elements of bread and wine should not be regarded as “verily” Christ’s body and blood, but as “figures” which spiritually communicated the reality to us. Yet this never rose to the level of a grand ecclesial dispute.
It was really later thinkers, in the eleventh and especially in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, who used Ratramnus to advance a broadly symbolic view of the Most Holy Eucharist. Berengar of Tours unwittingly utilized Ratramnus in a dispute with Lanfranc of Bec, and he was condemned and excommunicated in 1050 for opposing the doctrine of the Real Presence. By 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council saw fit to confirm the term “transubstantiation” as “the most apt” for securing against such errors the Church’s teaching on the Most Holy Eucharist.
Aquinas clearly has Berengar in mind when he raises the question in the third part of the Summa, whether the Eucharist is merely a figure, a sign or a symbol of Christ’s presence. He treats the possibility that perhaps when Jesus said “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink his blood,” he intended only a spiritual meaning. Aquinas even attends to those objections which would twist the words of St. Augustine and St. Gregory to support the spiritualizing interpretation, but finds them wanting any contact with reality at all. Any attempt to make the bread and wine into mere signs which have no substantial contact with the reality of Christ’s actual body and blood on the sacrament of the altar utterly fails to square with the faith of the Church. Flannery O’Connor famous dinner party quip about the Eucharist — “if it’s just a symbol, to hell with it!” — works very well as a summary of St Thomas. The Angelic Doctor is memorable in his own assessment of such Berengarian denials of the Real Presence, simply concluding, “this is a view to be rejected as heretical, since it is contrary to Christ’s words.”
St. Thomas, of course, held the correct view. The elements of bread and wine undergo a transformation so that they become “the presence of Christ’s true body and blood in this sacrament.” What changes? Certainly not just something in our understanding of signs. Rather, what changes is something objectively real. The substance of the bread and wine have become the true body and blood. The fact that this transubstantiation “cannot be detected by the senses but only by faith” is not something which makes the Eucharist less credible, though, as it might be for the rationalist and the materialist, but more credible for those with eyes to see: “since faith is in things unseen, just as Christ shows us his divinity invisibly, so too in this sacrament he shows us his flesh in an invisible manner.”
By the sixteenth century, dissenting theologians had become more sophisticated in their denials — usually rejecting the view of the Mass as Sacrifice, rather than the Doctrine of the Real Presence directly. Lutherans stepped back from “transubstantiation” as the “most apt description,” yet tried to preserve some liturgical continuity with Eucharistic celebration, while Calvinists loosened the liturgical continuity even more so, tending to speak of Christ’s “virtual presence,” and then Zwingli went for his hyper-Berengarian “memorialism” that broke every real connection between sign and reality. Thus it took sixteen centuries to arrive at a truly massive ecclesial dispute over the Eucharist.
Yet even in the sixteenth century, as historians such as Eamon Duffy have shown, it took time for the people’s understanding of the Eucharist to catch up with the theological and liturgical reforms of the theologians. But eventually, the people began to learn through the liturgical changes. They learned by hearing how the theologians and pastors spoke about the Eucharist, and they learned from the kind of reverence, or lack of it, given to the sacrament of sacraments.
What the Pew study shows is something like an echo of this protestant history, yet very much downstream from another set of reforms: a series of unnecessary and para-conciliar liturgical reforms that were implemented by Catholic priests in the United States to better accord with their view of what it meant to be “open to the modern world.”
Many have said that the Pew study reflects a catechetical failure. I fear the opposite: it reflects a certain kind of catechetical success. It is the result of an unwritten catechesis that American Catholics have been slowly learning. Through a deracinated, spiritualistic, and emotivistic treatment of the Eucharist, many Catholics have learned their faith from a generation of pastors who stripped the altars, razed the bastions of reverence around the Lord in the sacrament, and who generally treated the Most Holy Eucharist itself as something to be passed out like a leaflet rather than received in awe, as people prostrate before the fire of divinity. Far too many have received this kind of unwritten catechesis.
It’s past time that our pastors preach what St. Cyril of Alexandria taught. Namely that the Eucharist is divine fire. Mistreat it, and it will burn you. The whole “razing of the bastions” theme has played itself out to disastrous effect in the Church. The bastions turned out to be things like altar rails, and liturgical actions which conform us to the reality of the Eucharist. The Pew study proves that it’s time to put the bastions back.
Read the source: https://catholicherald.co.uk/commentandblogs/2019/08/09/why-do-so-few-us-catholics-believe-in-the-real-presence-look-at-the-liturgy/
THE VORTEX: THEY DON’T BELIEVE – This rejection of the Faith MUST be corrected
August 9, 2019
TRANSCRIPT
The vast majority of self-identified Catholics do not believe in the Real Presence of Our Blessed Lord in the Eucharist.
That unsurprising news comes from a recent Pew Research poll released near the end of last month.
The vast majority, nearly 7 of 10 Catholics, believe the bread and wine are only symbols of Jesus’ Body and Blood.
Now, first off, those horrible numbers are of all self-described Catholics, meaning those who go to Mass each Sunday and Holy Days, as well as those who do not.
OK, but what about just those who go to Mass each week? Less than two-thirds of that group actually believe the Church’s teaching, which means that more than one-third don’t.
And while some might get all hepped up and excited that a majority believe, the dismal reality is — think about this — again, more than one out of every three people sitting in a typical parish Sunday Mass do not believe.
You have to stop for a moment and wrap your head around that.
Sifting through these numbers reveals the absolute carnage that is the normal case today owing to our modernist bishops. And it’s a carnage most laypeople don’t even recognize.
As usual, there are a thousand different ways to slice and dice through numbers, but in this case, each way points to the dismal reality of an epic failure on the part of bishops.
Before we get into the Pew numbers on this question, remember that only about 20% of Catholics in America actually goes to Mass each Sunday; the other 80% to do not.
So the very first reality to consider, which Pew does not, is this: When we say that two-thirds of weekly Massgoers believe in the Real Presence, we are talking about two-thirds of 20%, which, rounding up for ease, translates to approximately 15% of all Catholics.
Now interestingly, Pew digs down into the numbers to reveal that some non-Massgoers say they do believe in the Real Presence, but just don’t go to Mass. That’s a head-scratcher.
But when you add all the “believing” numbers together — those who go to Mass and those who do not — you arrive at the bottom line reality that less than one-third of Catholics in the United States accept this critical central teaching of the Church, which means 70%, 7 out of every 10 American Catholics, do not believe in the Real Presence of Our Blessed Lord in the Eucharist.
It’s almost impossible to conjure up a more damning indictment of the hierarchy in the United States than that poll number.
The list of wicked men in miters — and yes, many of them are wicked — has reached critical proportions. They have simply thrown aside their chief duty, which is to teach.
Exploring deeper into the Pew numbers, look at this sorry stat: Almost half of U.S. Catholics don’t actually know what the Church teaches about the Real Presence — 47% either do not know at all or actually think the Church teaches the bread and wine are just symbols.
How how can things have deteriorated to this abysmal level if not on purpose?
There is no way this is all from just a sorry job performance on the part of teachers. Compare this to any other job any teachers might do.
If half of all middle school students were to tell you that either 2+2=5, or they have never heard of 2+2 equaling anything, because they’d never been taught addition, you would rightfully conclude the teachers have been malicious, not just negligent — deliberately steering their students away from arithmetic truths.
The same goes here. Wicked shepherds have for 50-plus years tried to deemphasize the teaching of the Real Presence.
They introduced Holy Communion in the hand, for example, first brought in on a small scale by the devious Detroit Cdl. John Dearden and then spread across the country by the satanic homosexual predator Joseph Bernardin, Dearden’s protégé.
Bernardin, while president of the Useless Conference of Catholic Bishops in the late 1970s, tried unsuccessfully three different times to get the conference to accept the practice.
When straight-up attempts failed, he rammed it through anyway with parliamentary tricks behind the scenes, with support from some of his fellow diabolical-minded prelates.
Reception of Holy Communion in the hand was one of the very first things the Protestant revolutionaries of the 16th century instituted to begin to lessen, and eventually end, belief in the Real Presence.
Something Catholics seem to forget 500 years after the Protty revolt is that the first generation of heretics and apostates were born and raised as Catholics.
Those people had to be untaught, had their Catholic belief in the Real Presence washed out of their minds, scrubbed from their daily worldview, and that was something that would have to be done gradually at first.
Insisting on reception in the hand, and then the later addition of drinking from the cup, were the first steps to degrading those Catholics’ belief in the Real Presence.
It’s also been marvelously successful in our day as well as 70% of U.S. Catholics do not believe.
Bishop Robert Barron earlier this week chimed in on this disaster posting on social media how “angry” — his word, “angry” — he was after reading the Pew Research study.
Really, Bishop? Your shock at these facts makes you angry? You and your ridiculous preaching that we have a reasonable hope all men are saved has been a contributor to this spiritual poison.
Why should anyone give a hoot about the Eucharist if they are encouraged by you to believe they go to Heaven regardless?
After all, you yourself are on record as saying that Christianity is the “preferred way” to salvation.
Now, in all charity, perhaps you are so completely out of touch or have cocooned yourself within a circle of admirers that you don’t really understand how the common man on the street hears and interpret a comment like that coming out of the mouth of a Catholic bishop, but you should.
Of course, another reading of your words, because you refuse to clear up the confusion must be, that you don’t have a real interest in actually declaring the hard truths of the Faith with stunning clarity because you will lose your popular following.
And yes, you probably would, just as Our Lord did in Capernaum when crowds of them got up and walked away and Judas secretly decided that he no longer believed.
In fact, how could any bishop be surprised by these results from Pew? Frankly, what is surprising, shocking in some ways, is that 3 out of every 10 still do believe in Our Lord’s Real Presence.
But there is even a dark cloud with that silver lining, because of all the demographic groups polled, it was white, college-educated, middle-aged men and those over 60 who scored highest in terms of belief in the Real Presence, coming in at a little more than a third.
When it comes to the categories of the young as well as Hispanics, 3 out of every 4 of them reject the Church’s teaching, 74% of those under 40, and 76% of Hispanics.
And what’s disgraceful about those findings is this: These malevolent bishops have directed all their energies toward these two groups — “the youth” and Hispanics — for most of the past two decades.
So the question needs to be asked: What have you lot produced, what fruits have you brought forth? Bad fruit is the answer.
Older white men, a larger percentage of whom were in some ways out of reach of your corruption, this is the group that still believes more than any other.
But the people you have most associated with the “young” that you never stop going on about, and Hispanics, which now represent close to 40% of the entire U.S. Catholic population, these you have out and out betrayed.
Speaking as one, and on behalf of the demographic of white men approaching 60 and who went to college, it’s up to us, still in the minority, to step forward and fight this evil from the bad bishops.
Church Militant is in the final stages of editing our first full-length documentary called The Holy Eucharist: God’s Lamb.
We shot this documentary in Israel during Easter week, specifically with an eye to the near-complete loss of faith in the Real Presence among Catholics, owing to the corrupt practice of so many shepherds.
For more details or to place your order, just click on the provided link.
If the bishops will not teach, if they continually fall down on this, the source and summit of the Catholic faith, then the laity must step up, even if we are just a bunch of toxic masculine, college-educated, white, middle-aged men.
Read the source: https://www.churchmilitant.com/video/episode/vortex-they-dont-believe
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Jesus Christ is really, truly and substantially present in the Eucharist. And because of this, Eucharistic adoration is not only a wonderful thing, but also a wonderful gift to us from God. “The Eucharistic presence of Christ begins at the moment of the consecration and endures as long as the Eucharistic species subsist. Christ is present whole and entire in each of each of the species and whole and entire in each of their parts, in such a way that the breaking of the bread does not divide Christ. In the liturgy of the Mass we express our faith in the real presence of Christ under the species of bread and wine by, among other ways, genuflecting or bowing deeply as a sign of adoration of the Lord” (CCC: 1377-1378).