Rather than describe The Onion’s most recent sacrilege, you can take a look here [1]. Remember, if you so much as smirk, you will have paved your own ultimate path to hell.
I’ve written very little on [2] the doctrine of the transubstantiation, the topic of this Onion article. This surprises me, because the transubstantiation was one of the most puzzing aspects of my Catholic indoctrination. It is a strikingly ghoulish ritual, if one thinks about it. But that’s the problem: very few Catholics think about it. They think about it very little as adults, despite the fact that, as children, all Catholics were taught that transubstantiation is perhaps the most important thing distinguishing Catholics from other types of Christians.
Here’s a simple experiment you are invited to run. When you are next in the company of one or more Catholics, excitedly suggest that you’ve learned that there is a widely practiced American religious ritual based on cannibalism. Almost every time, the Catholics will look at you with surprise and curiosity. I’ve done this more than a few times, and it just amazes me. How is it that so many people give such little thought to the utterly fantastic beliefs of their own religions.
You can continue the experiement like this. Proceed to explain the transubstantiation to the Catholics. Watch their disgusted or puzled looks. Many of them will assure you that they don’t believe that the bread really turns into the body of Jesus. When they make this claim, they don’t like being reminded that they therefore don’t qualify as Catholics. Many Catholics (I would suspect most of them) put it completely out of their minds that when they eat the wafer of bread at Mass, they are, according to official church doctrine [3], eating the actual body of Jesus [4]. It’s not a symbol, but a real body. Others writers have addressed this topic [5] (that Catholics are confused about the ramifications of eating the communion bread).
How can it be that so many people (many of them well thought out regarding many other aspects of their lives) give so little thought to the things that they claim to be so utterly important? I suspect it’s that the claim of the transubstantiation makes no sense. It’s really bread. It’s not someone’s body. Very few Catholics would ever dare to consider eating a human body.
As I’ve written before, [6] false and oxymoronic proclamations can nonetheless be important (I believe that such proclamations occur in the course of both religious and civic rituals). I suspect that such proclamations constitute important displays that facilitate social bonding, and this is what is really at play during the Mass. This could explain both the felt importance of uttering such bizarre things (that a piece of bread is a human body) and the resistance to contemplating the literal meaning of such an utterance.
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