"Of Course, the Eucharist is a symbol!" and "Consecration does not transform the bread and wine for anyone except the believer"

[ProVobis]

For serious Catholics, please be sitting down when you read this junk . . . my head is still spinning that this garbage is out there – and promulgated by a so-called Catholic university!

But don’t Catholic universities now admit non-Catholics who have to pass these same theology classes? Might make a difference as to what’s taught in those classes and their interpretation, I would think.

 

[Friar_David_O.Carm]

You must learn to choose your battles.

Is this one you can conceivably win? Will you sway the professor to your line (and the Church’s) of thinking? Or could it cause the professor to have issues with you and then possibly hurt your grade?

As an undergraduate student, or even a graduate student, you do not know enough and have no credentials to really argue many issues.

In one of my graduate **philosophy **classes the first night of class the professor told us that his class is a lecture class and not a seminar class. We are to feel free to ask any questions but if the answers are in the required readings or in the notes he supplies he will not answer and it will show us up as not having done the readings. We go through the notes he supplies in class but we are to be at least 7-10 pages a head of where he finishes for the night.

The class room is hardly ever the appropriate place to challenge anyone, especially the professor and while you may only be thinking of challenging an author of a required reading you must remember that the professor chose what you are reading for a reason, usually it is because they agree with it.

Though I did have one class where at the beginning the professor told us that she did not agree with one of the authors she had chosen for us to read but she wanted us to read it to get both sides of the arguments that would be discussed in class, this was a Medical Bio-ethics class.

Time ran out.

One minor bit of correction, philosophy should read theology,

 

[NewEnglandPriest]

Seeing that St. Augustine lived before Aristotelian philosophy was popular in Christianity, its a little unfair to expect him to express the transubstantiation with clarity.

In the ancient world symbols were believed to become what they symbolize. If you had a symbol of a god, it was believed that god was present via that symbol. St. Augustine was clumsily using ideas of his day to explain the Real Presence. The Real Presence is always clumsily explained outside of the the idea of transubstantiation (which St. Augustine never heard of).

Edit: Just realized post #13 explained this very well…

 

[Bernward]

Hi Suslar -

Consider this : - if I send you an email, and you choose not to open it - would you be prepared to believe that it never existed simply because you didn’t want to believe I sent it ? Perhaps the answer is ‘yes - unless you can supply a copy of the sent message’.

So to the priest, would you be prepared to believe that he did not consecrate the bread and wine to become the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, simply because you didn’t want to believe it, or because you have to believe it in order to ‘open the email’ ??
Then if the answer is yes, you have no basis for Christian belief.

If you accept scripture that the priest is authorised by the original Christian church, as founded by Christ through Peter, to consecrate bread and wine to become the body and blood of Christ - then when the priest conducts this process through the Mass, the bread and wine become the body of Chist - period - and it remains so whether anyone chooses to believe it or not - that has no bearing on the status of Christ’s presence, merely on the status of His doubters.

From a different perspective - when Pontius Pilot said to Jesus - ‘so You are a king then ?’, and Jesus answered -‘you say it - but my kingdom is not of this world - if my kingdom was of this world …’ what kind of Kingdom was He talking about ?? We have no primary knowledge of the afterlife, or the means by which it functions, so we have no way of judging, using our limited human science, the nature of God’s existence, in the Eucharist or otherwise. This question is pre-disposed towards a null-hypothesis, and therefore constitutes bias from the outset.

Any results from student research that conclude that Christ is not present in the Eucharist under any circumstances are based entirely on supposition,

I don’t know if this helps,

God bless

‘If you have faith, no explanation is necessary, if you have no faith - no explanation is possible’ - St. Thomas Aquinas