Year of the Eucharist: The Prophet Malachi and the Mass.

 Have you ever argued texts of the bible with a Protestant or a slip away Catholic?    It can be fun, but it is also fruitless, for neither you nor they will change positions.    The difficulty is you are both making scripture 'sola scriptura', the only basis on which to reach a conclusion, for the Bible is regarded as the only authority.   But this is a false assumption, for there is a whole history of the Christian people from the time of Christ and what they believed, and much of it has been written down for posterity in the writings of the Fathers of the Church, and although their works were not chosen by the Church as the Word of God to be used in our liturgies, they are a guide we can use in disputes as to what is true and what is false.    In the Catholic Church we do not believe just in the Bible but we believe in such writings or 'traditions'  of the Fathers.

So in this Year of the Eucharist when we look at scripture and then tradition, or the thoughts of the Early Fathers, what do we find?   

HND Kelly, a Protestant historian writes that in the Early Church they took it literally that the bread was the flesh of Christ and the wine his blood.    He quotes Ignatius of Antioch  in one example. 

"Ignatius (a contemporary of the Aplostles) roundly declares that ".........the bread is the flesh of Jesus, the cup his blood".   Clearly he intends this realism to be taken strictly for he makes it as  the basis of his argument against the Docetists denial of the real body of Christ......Irenaeus teaches that the bread and wine are really the Lord's Body and Blood.  His witness indeed is all the more impressive because he produces it quite incidentally while refuting the Gnostic and Docetic rejection of the Lord's real humanity (AD 197).

But from where did the early Church get such an idea, this idea they were dealing with the flesh off Jesus.    We must start with the Prophet Malachi 1.10.  'From the rising of the sun until its setting my name is great among the gentiles, and everywhere there is offered sacrifice, a spotless victim'.    So today what sacrifice is offered throughout the world?   The Sacrifice of the Mass.     What is incredible is that there was never any council held nor discussion about what Jesus meant when he said "Unless you eat of the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you cannot have life in you"   Certainly in John 16 we find the disciples as confused as everyone else about his words but they never left him like so many others. "...you have the words of eternal life"    It was probably all worked out in the upper room with the coming of the Holy Spirit.   So if I say on this evidence that Mass was celebrated by the Apostles themselves, I have good cause to do so.    This sharing in the Divinity of Christ was there in the Church right from the beginning

Do not be confused by modern scholars who present themselves as experts and talk about the Middle Ages.    In the 7th century when the Eastern Church separated from Rome, they brought the Mass and the belief in the Real Presence with them.    So the vast majority of Christians throughout the world believe in the Real Presence.

        

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