Testimony of Judith, a former Roman Catholic:
I freely admit that I knew little about the Catholic faith in my growing-up years. And the church did little to teach me anything about it. I was constantly told that the priests had worked out all the details and that they were the only ones who could understand so I shouldn’t even think about it, but just trust the priests who were the only ones who could talk directly with God anyway. The priests were needed as the mediators between man and God. Yet the Bible says there is only ONE mediator between man and God, and that is Christ.
When I made my first holy communion, I was taught that this conferred grace upon me, but that grace was only good until I did my next sin, then that grace was gone and I had to go to confession and communion to get more grace, which lasted until the next sin, and so on. I was 8 years old but realized that this was merely a mechanism that the church used to keep people coming to church. If every time you sin you need additional booster shots of grace that you take orally and can only be administered in the church by a priest, you HAD to keep coming every week, every day if possible, because no one can ever stop sinning.
Even in third grade I figured out that there was no real presence of Christ in the cup, no grace really conferred, that the communion was only a way to scare people into attending church as often as possible. We had been taught that if you died without grace, purgatory was a lot worse than if you died in a state of grace. At 8 years old, I felt frustrated that I could never be in good standing with God because grace was so perishable.
When I think of Catholic Eucharist now, I see it as a corruption of communion, a twisting of the true meaning of the cross, an idolatry that fills me with loathing at the thought that Christ is constantly still suffering on the cross as he is sacrificed over and over in thousands of Catholic churches around the world 24 hours a day. That is not the real Christ in that cup.
The real Christ was sacrificed once and for all, 2000 years ago. The crucifixion ended and Christ was buried. Period. It isn’t happening over and over and over continuously everyday. He arose, He lives. He can die no more because He is in a new, incorruptible body, the same kind of bodies believers will have one day. If Christ in in a constant state of dying on the cross, how can he possibly be living in our hearts at the same time? How is it possible for anyone to be alive and dead at the same time? No, God only had to die once to atone for all the sins of all the people who lived and would ever live. One death was sufficient, one sacrifice covers all.
Recently I attended a first holy communion mass for one of my nephews-in-law. The children had been taught that it is by taking communion that they get Jesus in their hearts. No faith was required, only the swallowing of the bread and wine was required. One little boy was so excited because he couldn’t wait to have Jesus in his heart. He stood up on the pew and said, “Today we get Jesus in our hearts!” Later I asked the little boy what it meant to have Jesus in his heart. He couldn’t answer. He stood silent, looking puzzled. His mother said, “He’s a little to young to understand it.”
I asked him what it meant for him to have communion for the first time today. He said it meant that he would have cake and a party and presents. My point is, yes, I knew nothing about Catholicism as a child, because the children aren’t taught to know anything about it, the practice of Catholicism doesn’t require a person to know anything about it. If the church assumes that children can’t understand it and only teaches it to adults, then why baptize, confirm and give communion to children? Why not wait until they are old enough to study the faith and understand the meanings of these rituals? I think the answer is very obvious. It is easy to habituate children to a fearful dependency on the church to insure that they will remain supporting members. When unindoctrinated adults think for themselves, it’s too easy for them to see through the scare tactics.
St. Augustine taught that the purpose of the local church and its priest is not to carry out a mission or to nurture the souls of the parishioners, but to insure the continuance of the institution of the Church. Out of the mouth of Catholicism’s most revered leader came the words that confirmed what I believed in third grade: that the communion was given not for the spiritual well-being of the parishioners, but to insure the continuance of the institution of the Church.