Most people have little experience with the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church. Most are rather fearful or disdainful of the Papists. That’s understandable; why deal with lunacy if unnecessary? Few know just how bloody and gore-filled is the Catholic liturgy and its imagery.
Here’s a taste.
Seth Andrews, a former Christian pastor and proselytizer, gave a lecture on the blood rituals and symbology of Christianity. Mr. Andrews talked about the ‘Passion of Christ’ and Holy Week.
(nota bene: crucifixion has the same Latin root as excruciating; crux, cruc- ‘cross’ + figere ‘fix’.) The whole gory magilla begins with the Last Supper.
(One wonders how they split the check).
Seth calls the Roman Catholic communion the ‘pinnacle of communions’ as Catholics believe in transubstantiation; the host (a thin wafer) and the wine (real wine!), by dint of the miraculous power of god and his servant on earth, the ordained priest, become, in fact, the actual flesh and blood of Christ.
Ugh… It’s ritual, symbolic cannibalism.
When the priest raises the host (bread wafer) to be observed and adored by the congregation, it is believed to be the actual flesh of Jesus of Nazareth.
(A slice from the thigh, perhaps.)
All the priest needs do is to say ‘This is my body.’ Followed by a prop shift, and ‘This is my blood’. Done deal; he’s holding and eating the flesh of Our Lord and sipping the blood ‘that is shed to save the world’. And of course, it is.
What was never, ever, mentioned was that ritual communal meals were a standard feature of most of the many mystery cults of the Mediterranean. Christian communion can be traced to the rituals of those mystery cults.
That’s it as far as the transubstantiation part of the ritual went, but the blood ritual went on. It was now on to the stage of the Mass when the miraculous carnage was doled out to those ‘believers’ in attendance who were in a ‘state of grace’.
Let’s take a moment to consider the dogma of transubstantiation. The wine was actually the blood and the bread was actually the flesh of Jesus of Nazareth, Prince of Peace, Savior, lamb of god, who was tortured and slaughtered in order to ‘take away the sins of the world’ and redeem us from our sins; flesh and blood which we all had to consume physically, psychically and theologically if we were ‘good’ and if we wanted to remain in a ‘state of grace’.
Ghastly!
To set the stage for all this blood magic, the costumery (i.e. the cassocks, the surplices, the albs, the chasubles, etc) and the grand, solemn demeanor of a church or a cathedral, the burning candles, the stark lighting, the sun-light filtered by the stain-glass images of saints and the horrific scenes from the Passion of Christ, the exotic fragrance of incense and the tinkling bells all help to sell this to the Believers. It’s all about the setting and the staging. Right?
Seth Andrews remarked in his lecture ‘…and Catholics don’t think twice about this.” I answered back to the video, ‘I thought about it several times’. In my experience, it’s the go-to, snarky, comic query that the class arse might ask; “Sister, that’s cannibalism, ain’t it?”
(Obviously, a Catholic school.)
If the teacher was a mean nun or a no-nonsense priest, the kid would get it but good. The nun - as teacher - would make him sweat and suffer for days. The priest might simply smack the kid on the back of the head as Father Mayer had done to Rick in Spanish class.
It was a personal risk to ask a question like that. In the Dark Ages, a comment like that would have you burning as a heretic at the stake after you’d been made anathema, imprisoned and tortured.
You know, the good ol’ days. Before the Enlightenment.
So, the question was never asked out loud, by me. But I asked it to myself a few times; not about the bloody, sacrificial sense of it but from the physics of it; bread can’t become human flesh and the rest was too icky to dwell on. It was impossible, so it was silly to consider what came after the impossible.
However, after the snarky grade-school heretic had been dealt with by stern look and corporal punishment, the cross-brained, incoherent, schizophrenic explanation for transubstantiation - something that is so far outside the natural world that the mind would experience a kind of brain-freeze - would begin.
Cognitive dissonance all over the place. It’s like being in three places at once and being nowhere at all.
After the deluded nonsense that was meant to explain a preposterous theological concept, the cleric would begin a series of horror stories which were meant to terrorize and traumatize the listeners into accepting the preposterous as fact.
One such story went: a man who doubted transubstantiation took communion in bad faith and slipped the communion wafer, into his hanky. He then took it home and sliced it with a knife and it bled and bled and continued bleeding! The Horror!
Another similar story had the non-believer drive nails through the wafer with the same profuse sanguinity.
Another famous story of the Catholic Church and the bloody ritual of the Eucharist is the Miracle of Lanciano, a Eucharistic miracle which is alleged to have occurred in the eighth century in the city of Lanciano, Italy. The host and wine actually became flesh and blood which coagulated. (yuck!) In 1971, a scientific examination of the material from the 8thcentury was conducted and found that the ‘blood’ was blood and the flesh was flesh - of the heart! Heart tissue! And, the blood was type AB! A bloody miracle, right!? But wait, there’s more! (Here’s the kicker) That blood type matched with the Shroud of Turin… (ahem) one of the most infamous frauds ever; denounced as a fake in 1389 and determined by radiocarbon dating in 1988 which established that the shroud was from the Middle Ages, between the years 1260 and 1390. Yet, still, the bogus Shroud and the bloody Miracle of Lanciano persist in bemusing the gullible.
I know whereof I speak. I was an altar boy and served at the Mass many times in Latin. I was an accomplice to this farce; the farcical ‘miracle of the Eucharist’. I prepped and set the props, set the stage, (lit the candles, flipped on lights, etc.), wore a costume, said my lines and made my marks. It was a ritualized staged play celebrating bloody sacrificial murder and facilitating ritual cannibalism.
One thing that must be kept in mind about the Eucharist ritual is that it is blood magic. However, in this case, it is blood magic performed without burning the actual source of the blood; but it’s blood magic for certain. (i.e. A bird or goat or bull or a human killed as a sacrificial offering to god is then burned to complete the ritual). As has been observed, the god of the Bible really enjoyed the smell of burning blood and flesh.
Nasty, gore-filled sermons were all we, as Catholics, heard during Lent, when the bloody and woeful statues and paintings are covered with shrouds and the priests wore purple. Not a somber purple, but rather a regal purple. (Perhaps another subliminal nod to royalty.)
Catholics are raised with all that savage imagery of bloody scenes and the tortured look of penitence on the faces of saints. We were made to meditate on the gore and blood and pain of the ‘Christ’s Passion’, as Catholic children. Think of Mel Gibson's movie being played in an endless loop once a year for the six weeks of Lent when we were all meant to sacrifice by depriving ourselves of candy or meat or some other minor pleasure. The gore-fest of the ‘Passion’ was what we had to concentrate on, extemporize on, write about and even illustrate.
I would like to say that all the gore was a turn-off but as the bloody mess was so commonplace, I can’t honestly say that. Depictions of bloody suffering abounded in paintings, drawings, graphic illustrations, statuary, etc. There was nowhere one could escape the gore; in fact, even the thought of escaping the bloody horror was discouraged as an avoidance of truth and a shirking of duty. That’s how commonplace – how normal - it was presented and constantly reinforced.
It would be analogous to watching one gore-filled horror story after another (Hallowe’en, Nightmare on Elm Street, etc.) in which each nightmarish iteration of horror stressed your personal stake in the drama itself. This cavalcade of bloody angst would then be off-set by the fairies and light of the Nativity and the warm-and-fuzzy retelling of the feeding of the multitudes, the healing of the sick and the raising of the dead.
Glory Be!
By the by, my favorite subject in drawing class during my time in parochial school was the ‘Sacred Heart’. (If you’re unfamiliar with this image, Google it.) It’s the motif of many paintings and sculptures of the Middle Ages. Gruesome stuff; a human heart, encircled with the crown of thorns, which pierces the heart, causing it to bleed. The right ventricle slashed and bleeding (as was Jesus’s side on the cross at Calvary, purportedly). This delightful, winsome image was topped with a cross of granite or marble with bright, glorious rays of golden light radiating from it. This image, itself, was often then capped with a very regal crown which a king or an emperor would wear.
More regal, medieval clap trap.
Dr. Seth Andrews, in his video, goes on to highlight the bizarre, psychopathic euphoria in Christians Churches of being ‘bathed in the blood’.
Ew…
For Catholics, we had a more prosaic take on the savage, bloody imagery and spoke of the ’Blood of the Lamb’; the ‘lamb’ being Jesus who was sacrificed to his father for our transgressions. It makes the gruesome image gentler, what with the cuddly lamb and all. The lamb was usually pictured as meek, mild and cozy in its resignation to being slaughtered.
‘Virgin Mary had a lamb. Its fleece was soaked in blood…’
The blood ritual was playing out a scenario that he/it, him/itself, concocted to teach humans a lesson for …being human, I suppose. More blood magic; Abraham was ordered by god to kill his only begotten son, Isaac, then accepts the slaughter of a nearby ram in lieu of the boy’s blood.
In the ‘pagan’ ceremonies of Rome, the penitent/petitioner would kill an ox to gain favor with a god.
In Christianity, the ‘father-god’ kills the son of self-same god in order to ‘take away the sins of the world’, as the saying goes.
Or something…
That’s a big task. It takes godly blood to do that kind of magic.
And get this; this insane blood ritual is the culmination of an act of ‘mercy’ from a loving god. Who loved us so much that ‘he’ sent his only begotten son to redeem the world…from the mess, he/it had made.
On a distinctly lighter note, I once worked at a Catholic hospital, St Mary’s. Grunt work; making noise with the pots and pans. A co-worker was named ‘Debbie; she introduced herself as BVD: Blessed Virgin Debbie. She was a partying girl and obviously did not fit the profile of a virgin and the elicitation of a famous under-wear manufacturer, BVD, made her blasphemous sobriquet both hilarious and insightful. In the bowels of a building dedicated to the BVM (i.e. Blessed Virgin Mary), Debbie had flipped the script.
The script, known to all Catholics due to incessant indoctrination, was the Mother of god was set apart from all other women. Holier. Purer. Blessed. Unstained. Immaculate. Without the bane of Original Sin; the ‘Curse of Eve’ which precipitated all of the bloody sacrifice of god’s son in some crazy scheme. None of that vile, sordid business of grunt and thrust normally necessary for human procreation was involved with the incarnation of the ‘son of god’. No, sirree! No messy menstruation or ovulation or semen or vaginal secretions required. Child birth without all the typical fuss and muss; human procreation without the untidiness of being human.
Thus, to be the BVM, all that was necessary was to strip the young Galilean girl of her humanity and separate her in the minds of Faithful from the act of sex, menstruation and childbirth altogether. Recall that when the shepherds and the Magi visited the manger, there were no signs of childbirth or placenta or wet-nurse or, indeed, of a prostrate, exhausted woman to attest to the birth of a human baby. There was only a tranquil scene of peace and glory – without the gory bits every other woman in history has ever experienced in giving birth.
Also, to be noted ironically is that Joseph, the Carpenter, is the most lauded cuckold in all of Christendom.
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