I just thought I would say a few words about the Ebay sacrilege.
I believe it is a failure on the part of Catholic religious educators that we have come to this point. People like the guy who was selling Christ like some ticket stub memento of Ozfest, obviously do not know who it is they are offending.
This guy must not have even known a real Catholic person or he would have been stopped from going to Holy Communion the first time. He was at a papal event. Someone took him there. He says he is not Catholic but if received the Eucharist from the Holy Father, he was with someone who was Catholic and a conspicuous one at that. You don’t get that close to a Pope unless you are a high ranking official or a true believer. That person, whoever they are, dropped the ball by not explaining our belief in the True Presence of Our Lord (Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity) in the Eucharist.
Why didn’t that person take quick and decisive action when they found out their friend had gone to Communion? I’m willing to bet they did not believe the Church teachings themselves or they were too embarrassed to say anything about it. This was a colossal failure on the part of every Catholic that ever met that guy or his non-catholic friend.
I’m sure the guy selling Our Lord, had told someone else who is a Catholic his story about the event that day. I’m certain he had shown at least a few Catholics his scrap book with the program and the bottle opener and all his other verifying materials. Who else would he most likely show his trophies to but a Catholic, or Catholics?
Why didn’t anyone in that whole line of Catholic people immediately take action to correct the situation?
We can boycott Ebay, I’m fine with that. We can write letters and get people to pay attention to us, but if we do not teach what the Church teaches, we are just kidding ourselves. I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but we are only reaping what was sown by our dissenting and rebellious predecessors.
I pray that we all take seriously the charge to catechize our own so that this sort of thing will not ever happen again in the future. It is estimated that 70% of Catholics in America do not believe in the True Presence. This figure is alarming and can be traced back to the same 70% who dissented from Church teachings in Humane Vitae which dealt with artificial methods of Birth Control.
It was the same authority that we told not to tell us “American Catholics” what to do in the bedroom, that vouched for the veracity of the True Presence teaching. When we dissent from that authority (which Christ set up and gave to St. Peter (our first Pope) in The Gospel of St. Matthew Chapter 16 vs 18 (and on), we lost our moral compass, and our certainty that the same authority could bolster our belief in that which we could not see.
Sadly, I think this is going to get much worse before it gets better.
“Forgive them Father… they know not what they do!”
“But to him that much has been given, much will be expected.”
Michael A. Barone