TRANSUBSTANTIATION
A Case Of
Accidental Cannibalism
The doctrine of transubstantiation is transcendentally weird. It is the Roman Catholic doctrine that the bread and wine served at Mass are literally converted into the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ when "consecrated" by the priest. There is also the doctrine that Jesus Christ was both fully divine and fully human. The two together make it inescapable that Catholics who take communion believe that they are eating human flesh, i.e., that they are cannibals. From Encyclopedia Britannica:
[In] the 9th century, Hincmar of Reims and Haimo of Halberstadt . . . affirmed that . . . God leaves the colour, taste and other outward properties out of mercy to the worshippers who would be overcome with dread if the underlying real flesh and blood were nakedly revealed to their gaze!
This could just be a freethinker joke at the expense of the Catholics, who, after all, don't take medieval doctrines all that seriously. If they practice as much birth control as the rest of us, with the Pope fulminating against it, how could they consider themselves cannibals?
But it is no freethinker joke. The issue is alive and well in the pages of New Oxford Review, a magazine that takes its Roman Catholic orthodoxy very seriously. A naive fellow named Donald Whidden, a recent convert to Catholicism, wrote a letter to the editor that appeared in the January 1994 issue. He said in part: "Transubstantiation? I envy anyone who can believe it. But Thomas Aquinas didn't believe it, so why should I?" In other words, he couldn't bring himself to believe that he is a cannibal, and thought he had some backing. The April issue has no fewer than six letters blasting him, including one that provides documentary evidence that Thomas Aquinas did believe that he was a cannibal. Their common point was that either you're a cannibal or not a Catholic (of course, they didn't use just those words).
In the June issue Whidden defends himself, admitting his error on Thomas Aquinas and substituting St. Bernard of Clairvaux as a fellow Catholic non-cannibal. His naivete persists as he says: "At any rate, we live in an age when matters such as Transubstantiation can be settled in the science lab. All we have to do is have a consecrated wafer tested to see if its biochemical makeup is any different from an unconsecrated wafer." The editor is "dazzled." In the September issue Kenneth O'Loane sets poor Whidden straight once and for all "...both before and after consecration, the accidents of the wafer — its visual appearance, taste, touch, frangibility, dissolution in oral fluids — are the same. Before consecration the substance of the wafer is bread, but after the consecration the substance is Christ's body (blood, soul, and divinity). Chemical (biochemical) methods of analysis touch only the accidents, not the substance." So in substance Catholics are cannibals, but in accidents they are not.
Now if we apply this reasoning to the Resurrection...
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