hopefilled
Well-Known Member
Praise be to God for leading you out of that deception! There are many of us here...so lets continue to pray for those still deceived!My story is very similar, Rocky. Was an altar boy for years, and as a young adult in the RCC I even participated as a presenter at an even where our parish invited folks of other faiths to tour our church. Each of us described something to the folks - mine was in the sacristy, where I showed the visitors the communion wafers, wine, and the chalices used during communion. I remember explaining then (this was probably in the mid-1980s) in accordance with RCC belief, that the communion wafer BECAME JESUS HIMSELF during the Mass, and that the wine literally became his blood. Catholics do NOT believe that the bread and wine REPRESENT Christ during communion - but that it actually BECOMES Jesus in the literal sense of the word. I also remember telling the visitors something I had seen on TV during that era that showed a Catholic church in Europe that apparently has a piece of what has apparently been determined to be human heart muscle preserved for hundreds of years in a reliquary. As the story goes, one day a Catholic priest was saying Mass but he apparently had doubts about whether the communion wafer really "became" Jesus. At some point, the story continues, before his eyes that priest watched as the wafer "magically" turned in human heart muscle, and that church still displays it today. You can probably look the story up on Google. So I related that story to the visitors to reinforce at the time that the communions wafer "really does" turn into Jesus' flesh just like Catholics believe.
This is just one of many stories in which I unknowingly and naively at the time perpetuated the Catholic beliefs. So glad to be born again and away from all that mysticism and idolatry.