Eucharist
Chick makes the usual charges against the Eucharist. He doesn’t like the Real Presence and the sacrifice of the Mass in particular. He even says that the Mass is not mentioned in Scripture, despite the fact that the very first Mass occurred during the Last Supper (cf. Luke 22:19–20). The charges he makes have been answered many times.
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What is distinctive about his approach is the attempt he makes to link the Eucharist with paganism. He claims: "On the altars of Egypt were sun-shaped wafers made of unleavened bread. These wafers were consecrated by the Egyptian priests and supposedly they magically became the flesh of the sun god, Osiris."[52]
Although Osiris was an Egyptian god, he wasn’t the sun god. That was Ra (in some cases identified with Horus). Osiris was the grain god and the god of the dead. There were grain cakes (little and not so little) connected with the worship of Osiris, but, since he wasn’t the sun god, they were not shaped like the sun. They were shaped like a man since Osiris was pictured as a man. The use of these grain men was connected with Osiris’s annual cycle as the god of grain. Every year, the Egyptians made cakes shaped like Osiris out of grain as an offering asking the grain god to reappear and make the land fruitful again. According to Egyptian wall art, priests even watered the cakes to get the grain in them to sprout and send up shoots. These Osiris cakes weren’t anything like communion wafers.[53]
**http://www.catholic.com/images/Image34.gif**
**From *Man in Black***
Another of Chick’s attempts to link the Eucharist with paganism is found in his frequent depictions of the host imprinted with the letters
IHS. He tells the reader that this stands for a trio of Egyptian gods (who were *not *a trinity, incidentally). Chick’s claim is nonsense. The letters aren’t English at all, but Greek. In fact, they are the first three letters of Jesus’ name in Greek:
iota-eta-sigma (capital
eta in Greek looks like the English H). This has been a common abbreviation for
Jesus throughout Church history.
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Though you wouldn’t know it from Chick, few Catholics have ever *seen* a host imprinted with these letters. Most hosts either have nothing on them or a cross design. What design, if any, is imprinted on a host is up to the maker. There is no Church regulation on this, and few makers have used the IHS design. Yet Chick would lead one to believe that it is omnipresent in Catholic churches.
Guess it could be…