The ceremonies were a real drag when I was little and learning them. Later on I came to like some of them a lot. And yeah, I think a lot of Catholics like having the same ceremonies as other Catholics everywhere. Sort of a secret hand shake sort of thing.
What do I miss most about being a Catholic? Hmm . . . I’m gonna say Mary (as in the Mother of God). Lots of comfort there for true believers. I do miss certain aspects of Mass, though.
I think that psychological incapacity to enter into a sustain a marital relationship can be a basis for annulment. Your own assessment of your capacity isn’t definitive, of course; you’ll have to undergo professional assessment of some kind.
Rumour has it that some tribunals apply this test with greater latitude than others. I don’t know if that’s true.
Re infallibilty.
I thought the position was as follows:
The pope doesn’t just wake up one day and decide that henceforth all cats will be dogs so he makes the required announcement and, BINGO, all cats are now considered dogs.
The Vatican consults with all the Bishops all over the world and together they decide that the church’s position on cats is that they are in fact dogs. And so in this way the world church grants it’s permission for the pope to make an Infallible statement.
ie an infallible statement comes by agreement from the wider church ie it comes from the bottom up. It doesn’t just come from nowhere out of a vacuum, it isn’t imposed from the top in a Hitlerite edict.
Have I got it wrong?
Transubstantiation has always been a sticking point with many protestants. I won’t argue the presence of the spirit but ask this: can communion only be given by a Roman Catholic priest? When I take communion as a Lutheran or give it as a lay assistant is it just an empty gesture?
FWIW my mother pulled out family out of the RC church before I completed catechism. I never took R.C. communion until I went to Easter mass with a woman I was dating a few years ago.
Jojo, you have it right up through December, 1869. At the first Vatican Council, Pius IX pushed through the motion that if the pope chooses to make a declaration on faith and morals (so your cats and dogs are excluded) and does so declaring that he speaks from the chair of the papal office (ex cathedra), then the Holy Spirit will ensure that such declarations are infallibly true. (I suspect that the church will have to go back and “clarify” that position, some day, after some pope makes a really bone-headed proclamation, but neither of the two “infallible” statements issued to date are worth getting upset over. Joe Ratzinger had one of his boys try to claim that John Paul’s closure of the debate on the ordination of women was an infallible statement, but JP II told him that it was not.)
That’s one of the points that the groups fight over. The RCC and the Anglicans have issued statements that came close to recognizing each other as legitimate, but movement cooled off when the Anglicans decided to ordain women. Similar efforts were under way between the Catholics and some Lutheran groups, but they have also cooled in recent years.
The RCC would recognize the Eucharist in the Orthodox patriarchies, but I don’t believe that it is ready to formally recognize anyone else at this time.
I’d really like to know what lay Catholics believe. I thought that was the gist of the OP.
Among lay Catholics, you’re going to find a bewildering array of opinions. In the associations that I have had with non-Catholics, those who believed in the Real Presence in the Eucharist tended to come from those denominations who are in (now sporadic) discussions with the RCC regarding that very issue. I don’t feel competent to judge the quality of their belief, so I’ll let the theologians on both sides wrangle over how close they can come.
Tomb-are you serious? Ratzinger tried to do THAT?
What are the chances that he’ll be the next Pope? Because THAT would push me over to Russian Orthodoxy!
LOL
As for lay assistants distributing the Host-indeed, my father is one-they’re called Eucharistic Ministers.
Yeah, he wants to start being pope, already:
http://www.cin.org/users/james/files/w-ordination.htm#letter
Despite his declarations, however, JP II has never backed him up with a claim that he was speaking ex cathedra, and a number of theologians have pointed out the ways in which the CDF statements went too far.
Ratzinger’s had delusions of grandeur for years now. I always imagine JPII rolling his eyes and throwing up his hands in private whenever Ratzinger goes on record with any kind of quote.
Ok, explain transubstantiation to me. I’ve heard people say that it’s not symbolic at all, that the bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Christ. How? Why?
Do they believe it’s the actual body of Christ? What part of Christ’s body does it become? Is it white meat or dark meat? 
Transubstantiation means that the bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Christ, while retaining their appearance as bread and wine.
The consecrated Host is treated with the utmost respect. I know several ne’er-do-wells in my (parochial) grade school classes who were suspended for spitting out the Host after communion. Consecrated Hosts are never thrown away. They’re replaced in the tabernacle for use at the next Mass, and after a certain amount of time if they’re not used in the Eucharist, are consumed by the priest. The wine as well…the priest finishes off any leftover wine immediately after communion is over and before the Mass moves on.
Also, what is the reasoning for the celibacy of Priests? I understand the “no sex before marriage” but have trouble understanding the prohibition placed on Priests marrying just like their congregrants do.
Do any of the Catholics here care if their Priest is celibate/unmarried? Does it matter to you either way?
Back during the Middle Ages, there was a legitimate worry that the offspring of the clergy would inherit church property-which they wanted to remain with the church. And so it was issued that priests could no longer be married.
Nowadays, it is still used because of the heavy duties of the priests-they are so incredibly busy they might not have time for a family.
Although, there are those of us who point out that voluntary celibacy would be better, and with married priests you’d probably have more men wanting to be priests which would lighten the work load…
Now, I know that Catholicism itself doesn’t involve worship the Virgin Mary.
However, I grew up in Buffalo, New York. Buffalo, for a variety of historical reasons (mainly, the predominant immigrant groups came from the most devoutly Catholic regions of Europe), is very, very, very Catholic, in the same way that Salt Lake City is very, very, very Mormon. Most non-public schools and colleges are Catholic, and all the non-secular hospitals are Catholic. (I’m Lutheran on paper and Unitarian Universalist in practice, but I attended Catholic schools for a good portion of my childhood; I had a good Catholic religious education.)
Anyhow, many in Buffalo seem to express a great deal of adoration and veneration towards the Virgin Mary, to the exclusion of Jesus. You’ll find huge lawn shrines, devotionals to Mary on TV and the radio, and so on. Soem locals propose building a huge shrine to Mary on Buffalo’s waterfront; their Web site (http://www.archoftriumph.org/) hardly mentions Jesus or God.
For a while, I also lived in New Mexico. Among Catholics, there was almost no mention of Jesus or God; everything was Virgin of Guadalupe this, Virgin of Guadalupe that. On the surface, it appeared that Catholicism, New Mexico style, involved the worship not of God but of the Virgin Mary.
Again, I’ll say that I know that Catholicism doesn’t involve Mary worship. However, are there some lay Catholics that, for some reason, worship Mary? How do Catholic leaders feel about this?
There’s always been a parallel Catholic folk tradition in which saints tend to be blown completely out of proper proportion, Mary included. The trouble with assigning saints as patrons of particular problems or professions is that they have a tendency to become “little gods” in the minds of some laity. Coming from an Italian parish with a large proportion of the congregation being first or second generation Americans, I know St. Anthony of Padua and Our Lady of Mount Carmel (the parish namesaint) got the lion’s share of the extra-liturgical notice and veneration. God was still in the Mass…he just skipped the festivals. Doesn’t mean it’s official and has, as a matter of fact, been addressed within the last 10 years or so by the Vatican, I believe.
Catholics (and the Orthodox, the Anglican communion, and some Lutheran groups) believe that Jesus is physically present in the Eucharist. This is based on the passages in Matthew 26:26 - 28, Mark 14: 22 - 24, Luke 22: 19 - 20, I Corinthians 11: 23 - 27, and John 6: 48 - 58.
Transubstantiation is a way of attempting to explain the reality of the Divine Presence in bread and wine. It started off with Aristotle and his parsing of the world into philosophical constructs. One of the areas that he pondered was the nature of “being.” How is it that something is and what is its “true” nature. He defined the “true” nature of any object as its substance.
Years passed, Aristotle faded into memory while the writings of his teacher, Plato, held on through the writings of Philo and Plotinus and others, but Aristotle’s concepts of substance (that which something truly is) and accident (the way that something appears in the world), held on in various formulations. Around the eleventh century, various Christian theologians who were struggling with a way to explain the Divine Presence began to use the concept that at the Consecration of the mass, the bread and wine underwent a conversion of substance, and while they continued to look and taste like bread and wine, they were now really the body and blood of Jesus. The word that these theologians used to describe this action was transubstantiation. A few years later, contact with the Muslim world brought back copies of the works of Aristotle into Europe and Scholastic Philosophy/Theology was born, with the high point being the use of Aristotelian metaphysics by Thomas Aquinas to explain (or re-explain) most of Christian theology. At that point, Thomas was able to take the word transubstantiation and give it full explanation and meaning in the context of the entire Aristotelian logic. Instead of simply being one attempt to explain the phenomenon, it became a key point in a rigorous system of thought.
Interestingly, the (Platonically influenced) Franciscans initially attempted to have the works of Aquinas suppressed because so much of it was counter to their own ideas based on the squishy thoughts of Plato. (I freely confess that I find Plato and his ideals to be fairly silly.) However, the rigor and thoroughness that Thomas had brought to his work (probably aided by some attitudes of “look at this new stuff!”) eventually caused the Thomistic approach to win out.
A couple of hundred years later, Martin Luther, an Augustinian monk (while the Franciscans had reluctantly joined the Dominicans in switching to an Aristotelian view, the Augustinians had resolutely held out for the Platonic approach that had 1400 years of Christian commentary), reviewed the teachings and decided that transubstantiation had been a mistake. (This was not his single big break with the church, but it was a contributory argument.) His proposal was that Jesus was physically present in the Eucharist alongside the forms of bread and wine, and the name given to that holding was consubstantiation. In the ensuing brouhaha, the RCC, at Trent, proclaimed that transubstantiation was the only valid explanation for the Divine Presence, and various people have been glaring at each other over the terms ever since.
Of course, after Luther split, others did as well, and not all those who left the RCC continued to believe in the Divine Presence, so now we have some Catholics thinking that only Catholics believe in the Divine Presence, which is not true.
One obvious problem with the proclamation that only the word transubstantiation can describe the phenomenon, is that philosophy has moved on from the time of the Scholastics and Thomas Aquinas. A person who reviews the Aristotelian/Scholastic world view and comes to the conclusion that it does not actually describe the world has no reason to accept the word transubstantiation as descriptive, yet the church teaching enshrines the word in history.
My view has always been to say, that given a Scholastic approach, Transubstantiation is the appropriate word, whether I accept Scholastic Theology or not–and to the extent that I do not embrace Scholasticism, the word Transubstantiation is not really relevant to the discussion of the Divine Presence, in which I do believe.
You know, one of the (many) reasons why I am not Catholic (or, indeed, religious at all), is the thought of transubstantiation, and the idea that I would have to believe that I am drinking blood and eating someone’s flesh. Didn’t the Catholics purge vampires and cannibals? I don’t mean that to be insulting, but really its a very very creepy thought for me. Does anyone else have difficulty dealing with that?
I can certainly see the problems with the idea. The response is found in John 6: (NIV)
(Note that the Gospel word translated “eat” is the Greek verb trogein, to chew. It is pretty hard (although, obviously, not impossible), to portray this as some metaphor.)