Crossed The Tiber

An Evangelical Converts to Catholicism

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Location: Pennsylvania, United States

I was born into the Catholic faith. At 14, I was "born again" and found Jesus personally but lost His Church. After thirty years as an evangelical protestant, I have come full circle to find that He has been there all the time, in the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. I wish others to find the beauty and truth of the Catholic faith as I have found.

Tuesday, June 20, 2006

Another Thought About the Eucharist


Regarding the Catholic and Orthodox belief in the Real Presence many voice this question; "How can Jesus be in that piece of bread? How can that wine really become the actual blood of Christ? It looks like bread and it looks like wine?" Allow me to venture a few questions first before I attempt an answer.
How can Jesus live and reign in me? How can Christ truly take up residence in my heart? How can the God of the universe come down and grow inside the womb of a virgin? How can that carpenter be the Son of God? He looks just like the rest of us! How then can that God-man bear the sins of the whole world past present and future as he hangs on the cross? He looks like a common criminal just like the two hanging beside him. How then can He rise from the dead after three days? How can this same God two thousand years later come into my life and change me for the better? As Christians of any denomination we use our faith for the answers to these questions and seem to have little problem with believing these things. I ask then.... why we cannot believe that the God of the Universe is able to convert bread and wine into His body and blood?

St Thomas Aquinas wrote this hymn to honor the Body and Blood of Our Lord in the Eucharist
in the 13th century:

Devoutly I Adore Thee

O Godhead hid, devoutly I adore Thee,Who truly art within the forms before me;
To Thee my heart I bow with bended knee,As failing quite in contemplating Thee.

Sight, touch, and taste in Thee are each deceived;The ear alone most safely is believed:
I believe all the Son of God has spoken,Than Truth's own word there is no truer token.

God only on the Cross lay hid from view;But here lies hid at once the Manhood too;
And I, in both professing my belief,Make the same prayer as the repentant thief.

Thy wounds, as Thomas saw, I do not see;Yet Thee confess my Lord and God to be:
Make me believe Thee ever more and more;In Thee my hope, in Thee my love to store.

O thou Memorial of our Lord's own dying!O Bread that living art and vivifying!
Make ever Thou my soul on Thee to live;Ever a taste of Heavenly sweetness give.

O loving Pelican! O Jesu, Lord!Unclean I am, but cleanse me in Thy Blood;
Of which a single drop, for sinners spilt,Is ransom for a world's entire guilt.

Jesu! Whom for the present veil'd I see,What I so thirst for, O vouchsafe to me:
That I may see Thy countenance unfolding,And may be blest Thy glory in beholding. Amen.

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