The Catholic Church Won't Waver on Wafers

A report and comment on religious trends and events being covered by the media.  This week’s item is from the Las Vegas Review Journal for February 2001 with the headline:  “Church Won’t Waver on Wheat Wafers.”  Five year old Jenny Richardson doesn’t go to McDonald’s like other kids and doesn’t share cupcakes with her friends.  And now, because of Roman Catholic Church rules, she can’t have part of her first communion rite either.  Jenny suffers from celiac disease which causes her to get sick from eating gluten, a protein in wheat and other grains.  She can safely eat rice.  The Archdiocese of Boston has told the family that the church cannot substitute a rice communion wafer for the traditional wheat one citing 2000 years of tradition.  The Richardson family now worships at a Methodist church where the rules on communion are more flexible because Methodists believe the bread and wine are symbolic, not the actual transubstantiated body and blood of Jesus.  Doug and Janice Richardson were told by their parish priest that Jenny could take communion in the form of wine instead of bread.  They declined.  Jenny feels different wherever she goes but shouldn’t be made to feel different in church, her mother says.  The family received a letter from Cardinal Bernard Law, who explained the church would not make an exception.  John B. Walsh of the Archdiocese of Boston added, “This is not an arbitrary sort of thing and we are talking about a religious sacrament.”  Annette Bentley, President of the American Celiac Society and a practicing Catholic says some priests quietly make a substitution to help parishioners.

Tom:

Dave, this is regrettable but I want to speak first to the issue of the sacrament.  You know, the Roman Catholic Church—I have the Code of Canon Law in my office, 1750 rules and regulations.  Some of them, if you don’t conform to them you are damned to hell for eternity and some of them aren’t that serious.  But this is the Galatian heresy.  This is adding so much to what we had talked about on an earlier segment.  This is adding rules and regulations.  This is keeping as the scripture says keeping those from entering into the kingdom of God because of man’s rules and regulations.

Dave:

Well, it’s because of the interpretation of the Catholic Church.  They say they take John 6 literally where Jesus says, “Except you eat my flesh and drink my blood you have no life in you.”  And they say that that means His literal flesh and blood.  Not believing in Him, which John 6—Jesus makes it very clear, “He that cometh to me and believeth in me has everlasting life.”  He says you eat of me you will never hunger again, you will never thirst again, you eat of me and drink of me you will never hunger and never thirst again.  Now, if He is speaking physically then you don’t need any more food and you don’t need any water, so obviously, He is not speaking physically.  But, because they take this that way and then they claim that their priests have the power to transmute this bread and wine into the body of Jesus, I would think they could transmute rice into the body of Jesus just as well as they could transmute wheat into the body of Jesus.  Nowhere in the Bible does it say this had to be wheat.

Tom:

Some of the priests have said here, are doing it on the sly.

Dave:

Right.  Here’s the seriousness of it, Tom.  They take this literally. Now you remember there were some Popes that took it literally and they said that a baby, even though it has been baptized, if it hasn’t literally partaken of this bread and wine that was blessed by the priest to become the body and blood of Jesus, they are finished, they are in hell, they are gone because it says, “Except you eat my flesh and drink my blood you have no life in you.”  Now, therefore, they are preventing this girl from going to heaven.  They are preventing her from having life because they are so firm on this—

Tom:

If their belief was true.

Dave:

If their belief is true, but Tom, it’s really a tragic thing!  You know, when Jesus said, “I am the door,” He wasn’t a literal door, was He?  When He said I am the true vine you are the branches, is He literally a grapevine and we are branches?  When He said, “I am the light of the world,” when He said, “If any man thirst let him come unto me and drink,” was He talking about H2O? Was He talking about holy water when He said to the woman at the well, “You drink of this water you will thirst again, you drink of the water that I will give you, you will never thirst again?”  Was He talking about physical water?  No, and He is not talking about physical eating of His body and blood.  That’s quite obvious.  In order to maintain that the Catholic has to have Christ dying perpetually on His altars over and over and over, immolate is the term—Jesus is still suffering.

Tom:

To immolate means to kill on an altar.

Dave:

That’s right.  Jesus is still suffering on Catholic altars.  No! The Bible says He is in a resurrected glorified body.  There is no more sacrifice.  He is at the Father’s right hand.  He is not continuing to die.  But they say oh we take this literally.  Really!  This little wafer is literally the body and blood of Jesus, but several million other wafers are literally, at the same time, the body and blood of Jesus?  You let this body of Jesus, they call it, let it sit around this way for a while [and] it will be in worms and mold, but the body of Jesus does not corrupt.  It’s not the body of Jesus and Tom, the tragedy is people think they are ingesting Christ into their stomachs and getting life by some physical piece of bread when what they need is to receive Him into their hearts by faith and they will never thirst again, never hunger again because they have eternal life.

Tom:

Dave—Augustine, St. Augustine of the Catholic Church, a doctor of the church, he had an interesting perspective on this.  Let me read this to you.  I’m quoting—“Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, says Christ, and drink His blood, ye have no life in you.  This seems to enjoin a crime or a vice.  It is therefore, a figure enjoining that we should have a share in the sufferings of our Lord and that we should retain a sweet and profitable memory of the fact that His flesh was wounded and crucified for us.”  Augustine is saying simply, it’s a crime; it’s a vice if we take it literally.  So, we are not to take it literally.  Now, how do they deal with that?

Dave:

Well, he is the chief Catholic, the founder really of modern Catholicism but they don’t take everything that he says.  But what we need to do is go back to the Bible, what did Jesus say?