[Sca-cooks] Bread and wine in the Catholic church

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On May 22, 2006, at 1:17 AM, grizly wrote:

> Most Protestant denominations "reinact" with saltines and grape  
> juice (or
> even wafers and/or wine).  Catholic and Orthodox Churches are the  
> only ones,
> IIRC, with doctrine of transubstantiation.

Just another example of an unnecessary (IMO) design feature that, if  
you buy the package, you're stuck with. Like Windows ;-).

My suspicion is that a lot of Catholics don't think about it too  
much, and wouldn't consider it the most important aspect of the  
package (Frank McCourt's grandmother notwithstanding) if they did.

> Makes you wonder if anyone ever really thinks about the  
> implications of
> actual weekly (or daily) ritual cannibalism as they cross  
> themselves in
> front of the priest . . . . I always do (did since my mid 20's).

Me, too, but eventually I sat down and thought about what I felt was  
essential to the belief system, and figured transubstantiation was a  
pretty low priority. You have to figure that religions are sort of  
Open Source, and any idiot can rewrite code with minimal effort,  
under the right circumstances. The trouble lies in the concept of  
papal infallibility, which is often misunderstood to mean that the  
Pope is always right on matters of doctrine, when in fact what it  
means is that he gets to decide what the package is/contains, and the  
end user only gets to decide whether to buy it.

For some reason I'm getting flashbacks of the story of Galileo  
recanting, and then recanting his recanting under his breath, and the  
reaction of a substitute high school history teacher when I mentioned  
this in class... she turned purple and shouted that "Galileo was a  
good Catholic" (note that this wasn't a Catholic school). I, of  
course, asked her if that meant she was saying that Galileo was  
wrong, was the earth really the center of the solar system? Or was  
Galileo actually a Bad Catholic?

Yes, all my teachers loved me...

Adamantius



"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
     -- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry  
Holt, 07/29/04