Welcome Guest [Log In] [Register]
We hope you enjoy your visit!
You're currently viewing Catholic CyberForum as a guest. This means you are limited to certain areas of the board and there are some features you can't use. If you join our online cyberparish, you'll be able to access member-only sections, and use many member-only features such as customizing your profile, sending personal messages, and voting in polls. Registration is simple, fast, and completely free.
Join our community!
Messages posted to this board must be polite and free of abuse, personal attacks, blasphemy, racism, threats, harrassment, and crude or sexually-explicit language.
If you're already a member please log in to your account to access all of our features:

Username:   Password:
Add Reply
Transubstantiation; At the heart of the mass and the sustenance of our faith.
Topic Started: Thursday, 8. November 2012, 11:20 (481 Views)
Penfold
Member Avatar

Rose of York
Thursday, 8. November 2012, 18:17
Penfold, do you think it would be best if this topic is closed, giving you an opportunity to begin afresh?
No. let it wander. I have given an invitation to reflect on one of the most sacred aspects of our faith, if people prefer to discuss other things and poke abuse at the church then that is their prerogative. I shall be in a wifi free zone in an hour so for a few days I shall not be around anyway.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Josephine
Member Avatar

Transubstantiation si the heart of the Mass - and of our Faith.

It kept me going when the rest of my life was in ruins.

It is the single most important thing in my life.

And still I sin - why?

Because I'm sometimes weak, sometimes obstinate, sometimes......fill in as appropriate.

But there's always confession (reconciliation) and then I can make a new firm purpose of amendment and try again...and again...and again...and Jesus said seventy times seven - for us as well as for him (I might have had my 70 x7 from Him already but He doesn't seem to be counting) and still he comes to us on the altar every Mass and in Holy Communion.

He is there for us.

When all else fails, He is there for us.

Nothing to do with other people in the church and what they do or don't do.

He IS there , for us, for me.



Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
James
James
I, also, have found the consecration of the mass the focal point in my religion.
I view mass in all its aspects from self examination to actual communion, as a spiritual hospital.
I go, not because, I am a "holy joe" or better than anybody else but because I am spiritually wanting or ill and need healing constantly.
I do not know how transubstaniation works to explain the mechanics , as it were, to another person,
I do know the effects on me spiritually and I need it.

I think it does make me more reflective and , no doubt, makes me act and think differently in many ways
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
garfield

I remember getting into quite a muddle about Christian unity once and talking to a wise friend about it she said that she prayed that we would be one as Jesus prayed in John 17:21 'May they all be one, just as, Father, you are in me and I am in you, so that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe it was you who sent me.'
It brought home to me that I didn't need to obsess over the details of what kind of unity we were trying to achieve, we needed to trust Jesus and pray those words with him.
I don't understand how transubstantiation works but I believe and trust that Jesus meant what he said at the Last Supper when he said 'This is my body' and 'This is my blood', and 'Do this in memory of me' and that this is what happens in the Eucharist today
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Deleted User
Deleted User

I think Clare has some justification for her statement that many Catholics do not believe in Transubstantiation. I disagree with her reasons for saying why this is so. I think part of the reason is that people detect an ambivalence now in Church teaching which wasn't there when I was taught the doctrine. Then it was unequivocally the case that the bread and wine were turned into the real Body and Blood of our Saviour. Now, without any explanation the language has evolved into " The Real Presence" with clear undertones that suggest that we are looking at some mystical happening rather than a real, physical, miracle.
My view is that the Church needs to come out and re-state the doctrine in clear terms. I think if, just for argument's sake, the Church was to say that the Sacrament was just symbolic or if it took the opposite view and re-affirmed the physical change teaching, then people would be reassured . I even venture to think that any clear-cut view from the Church might help us get the transformational effect on our lives that Penfold outlines.


John
Quote Post Goto Top
 
Penfold
Member Avatar

John Sweeney
Tuesday, 13. November 2012, 02:34
I even venture to think that any clear-cut view from the Church might help us get the transformational effect on our lives that Penfold outlines.


John
The Churches teaching has not changed and was not changed in the past 2000 years.
The current Catechism, which is the clear cut distillation of the churches teaching. It is simple and with no frills.
Article 3

Quote:
 
THE SACRAMENT OF THE EUCHARIST

1322 The holy Eucharist completes Christian initiation. Those who have been raised to the dignity of the royal priesthood by Baptism and configured more deeply to Christ by Confirmation participate with the whole community in the Lord's own sacrifice by means of the Eucharist.

1323 "At the Last Supper, on the night he was betrayed, our Saviour instituted the Eucharistic sacrifice of his Body and Blood. This he did in order to perpetuate the sacrifice of the cross throughout the ages until he should come again, and so to entrust to his beloved Spouse, the Church, a memorial of his death and resurrection: a sacrament of love, a sign of unity, a bond of charity, a Paschal banquet 'in which Christ is consumed, the mind is filled with grace, and a pledge of future glory is given to us.'"133


http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P3Y.HTM

Quote:
 
" the signs of bread and wine become, in a way surpassing understanding, the Body and Blood of Christ; they continue also to signify the goodness of creation. Thus in the Offertory we give thanks to the Creator for bread and wine,152 fruit of the "work of human hands," but above all as "fruit of the earth" and "of the vine" - gifts of the Creator. the Church sees in the gesture of the king-priest Melchizedek, who "brought out bread and wine," a prefiguring of her own offering.153

1334 In the Old Covenant bread and wine were offered in sacrifice among the first fruits of the earth as a sign of grateful acknowledgment to the Creator. But they also received a new significance in the context of the Exodus: the unleavened bread that Israel eats every year at Passover commemorates the haste of the departure that liberated them from Egypt; the remembrance of the manna in the desert will always recall to Israel that it lives by the bread of the Word of God;154 their daily bread is the fruit of the promised land, the pledge of God's faithfulness to his promises.
The "cup of blessing"155 at the end of the Jewish Passover meal adds to the festive joy of wine an eschatology dimension: the messianic expectation of the rebuilding of Jerusalem. When Jesus instituted the Eucharist, he gave a new and definitive meaning to the blessing of the bread and the cup.

1335 The miracles of the multiplication of the loaves, when the Lord says the blessing, breaks and distributes the loaves through his disciples to feed the multitude, prefigure the superabundance of this unique bread of his Eucharist.156 The sign of water turned into wine at Cana already announces the Hour of Jesus' glorification. It makes manifest the fulfilment of the wedding feast in the Father's kingdom, where the faithful will drink the new wine that has become the Blood of Christ.157

Edited by Penfold, Wednesday, 14. November 2012, 07:52.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
garfield

I wonder sometimes about how the very literal 'Bible Believing' protestants, who take their scripture so very literally that they tie themselves in knots about whether dinosaurs existed, can deny transubstantiation when the words of Jesus are so specific. How else could you interpret 'This is my body' and 'This is my blood'?
If Jesus had wanted to institute some kind of memorial or symbolic meal, why would he have used those words? He could have done something different but he did what he did and said what he said and if we believe in him at all then we accept those words as truth.
He also said he would be with us always and I see transubstantiation as the way in which he is not just a spiritual presence in our lives but a physical one, matter is transformed in some way, the atoms in the bread and wine become part of him and then part of us, just as we are all part of the physical universe, we can't be separated.
I think that the Eucharist doesn't have a magical effect because it is like the seed in the parable of the sower, sometimes it falls on the stony path or in the thorns but the seed is important and given the right soil it can grow
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
PJD

"If Jesus had wanted to institute some kind of memorial or symbolic meal, why would he have used those words? He could have done something different but he did what he did and said what he said and if we believe in him at all then we accept those words as truth. "

I agree with that part. For me it is far easier to understand the Sacrifice of the Holy Mass [and Eucharist] as a 'continuation' of the Last Supper and Life of Christ in Sacramental Form; rather than concentrating on intellectual considerations of what exactly happens during the Consecration e.g. transubstantiation etc.

PJD
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Rose of York
Member Avatar
Administrator
All I know about "how transubstantiation works" is that Jesus was capable of putting his whole being into a human body, and taking on a fully human nature, and later on, after being dead for three days, rose again and ate food, so if he wants to come to us in the form of bread and wine, when he says this is his body and his blood, well, he is quite capable of doing that.
Keep the Faith!

Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
paul

For me transubstantiation and the scriptures are the two most beautiful gifts bestowed on us by God. What more is needed? Guidance from scripture and Grace from the body and blood.

Q.E.D.

Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
1 user reading this topic (1 Guest and 0 Anonymous)
« Previous Topic · General Catholic Discussion · Next Topic »
Add Reply