Week 2

So we’re only in week 2, and already I’ve hit a snag. My open attitude has run up smack against dogma, and it’s a little annoying.

The homily saturday evening was about the Eucharist. If you’re unfamiliar, that’s the communion or sacrament or what have you, the wafer and wine (or just the wafer, it turns out. the wine is sort of optional). Father Anderson laid out in no uncertain terms what you needed to believe in order to participate.

I understand that you’re supposed to be a card-carrying Catholic to take communion, and I have no problem with that. I wouldn’t presume to take part in a ritual I don’t qualify for. But as the priest said, when Catholics take communion, they “believe” that they are actually partaking of the body and blood of Christ. Not a symbol, but flesh and blood. I’m informed that “by the consecration of the bread and wine there takes place a change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood” (paragraph 1376, if you’re keeping score at home).

Now I’ve said that I’m not going to make fun, so I won’t compare and contrast this (as my hero Robert Anton Wilson did) to cannibalistic rituals that have been carried out throughout history. And we’ll set aside the logistics of that much flesh and blood being miraculously recreated on demand five times a weekend in parishes all across the country and around the world, by priests who apparently have all received the necromantic training necessary to accomplish such a feat.

What I want to know is what is meant by the word “believe” in this context. Does the average Catholic actually accept that they are placing human flesh in their mouths, and they’re okay with that? Or is it the sort of “believe” like we practice elsewhere in our lives? We all have ideals and goals and hopes that we would say we “believe” in, but in practice, we understand that our reality comes up short of our aspirations. Charity is a great concept, but most people don’t give change to every panhandler they pass by. In the same way, I wouldn’t blame a Catholic practitioner if she answered “yes” when asked if she believes in transubstantiation, but admits privately that this is a convenient fiction, a way of participating in the infinite.

And if the Church were okay with that, even implicitly, I think it would make their position easier to accept. The problem is that no such allowance is made for the fact that this fundamental aspect of the faith is (and you’ll have to pardon me saying so) bat-shit crazy. I can be thrown out of the Church and barred from communion for saying that the wafer is not the body of Christ. Just ask John Frith what happens when you speak out against this particular crazy idea. The upshot of this problem is that most (non-bat-shit-crazy) Catholic practitioners are already heretics in some sense, if only silent ones.

So I don’t really know what to say about it, at the end of the day. It’s not going to stop me from fulfilling my obligation, but I may have to dial down my optimism a bit at integrating Catholic belief with my life.