Many different anti-Catholic groups and individuals enjoy creating elaborate theories and schemes to justify their particular beliefs as to why the Church is the “anti-Christ.” Whether it is ridiculous claims over dubious theological ideas, cults of personality, or both inane and insane theories rooted in historical fiction and personal fancy, there is scarcely an untouched category for somebody willing to explore if he so desires.
However, there are a few- select few -points that one should very much pay attention to that may be a real sign of malicious evil, and according to the words and writings of the saints, could be a premonition of the end times, including even the antichrist.
One of those signs has just appeared at the Vatican with a proposal to alter the Eucharist:
Experts including Cardinal Raymond Burke and Bishop Athanasius Schneider are sounding the alarm over a shocking proposal at the Vatican to consider changing the matter of the Eucharist.
Such a move, critics warn, would invalidate the Sacrament and create, in effect, a “new religion.”
Jesuit theologian Father Francisco Taborda last week raised the possibility that the upcoming Amazonian Synod scheduled for next October might consider changing the matter of the Eucharist, allowing the use of a South American vegetable called yuca rather than wheaten bread.
Fr. Taborda told Crux on Feb. 28 that climate issues and inculturation warrant the change. Intense humidity during the Amazonian rainy season turns wheaten hosts into a pasty mush, he said, adding that “in the Amazon, bread is made out of yuca,” a shrub native to South America from which tapioca is derived.
Taborda, a professor of theology at the Jesuit university in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, was a featured speaker at a study seminar held at the Vatican on Feb. 25-27, in preparation for the October synod on “Amazonia: New Paths for the Church and for an Integral Ecology.”
Key figures at the two-day seminar included Italian Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, secretary general of the Synod of Bishops, and Brazilian Cardinal Claudio Hummes, a principal proponent of married priests in the Latin Rite. Also in attendance were presidents of Pan-Amazonian bishops conferences and other “prelates and experts” from Amazonia and other geographical regions.
While Fr. Taborda acknowledged that a change to the matter of the Eucharist is a “very complex question,” he said he believes it should be decided by local bishops.
Yucarist: A new religion
LifeSite approached a number of prominent Catholic theologians and ecclesiastics to ask them if such a change is even conceivable. They replied unanimously and vehemently in the negative.“It would be entirely improper for the Synod on the Amazon to discuss the change of the matter of the Holy Eucharist,” Cardinal Burke told LifeSite. “To depart from the use of what has always been the matter of the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist has the gravest of implications,” he said.
“This is completely impossible because it is against the divine law which God has given us,” Bishop Athanasius Schneider, auxiliary of Astana, responded to the proposed change. “To celebrate the Eucharist with yuca would mean introducing a kind of a new religion.”
Fr. John Saward, senior research fellow at Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford, said that replacing wheaten bread with yuca would contravene the witness of Tradition, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the Code of Canon Law.
And one prominent theologian, speaking on condition of anonymity, told LifeSite:
If the Pope were to press ahead with this permission on the grounds of “development of doctrine,” thereby aiding and abetting the heterodox theologians in Rome (or Brazil or Germany or wherever) who proposed it, then he will be authorizing a change of the substance of the Sacrament as determined by the action of Christ our Lord at the Last Supper. “Masses” celebrated with “yuca” bread would not be Masses; there would be no Real Presence, no Sacrifice.
Prominent theologians and prelates weigh in
We asked these authorities to explain in more detail why it is simply impossible for such a change to occur.Cardinal Burke explained that “according to the Faith of the Roman Church, the matter of the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist is wheat bread and natural grape wine.”
“If any other matter is used, the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist is not validly confected,” he said.
The cardinal noted that “the ancient custom of the Church, according to which only wheaten bread may be used for the Eucharistic Sacrifice, was confirmed at the Council of Florence (Bull of Union with the Armenians Exsultate Deo, November 22, 1439).”
“The matter of the sacraments respects what is taught in the Holy Scriptures,” Cardinal Burke also explained. “The narrative of the Institution of the Holy Eucharist specifies that Christ took wheat bread, not barley bread or any other form of bread, at the Last Supper and changed its substance into the substance of His Body. The Greek word, artos, nearly always signifies wheaten bread.”
Bishop Athanasius Schneider agreed, saying: “Our Lord Jesus Christ took wheat bread and natural grape wine, and the Church has constantly and in the same sense taught for over two thousand years that only wheat bread is the matter of the sacrament of the Eucharist. This is an infallible teaching of the Ordinary Universal Magisterium.”
The auxiliary of Astana added that the Catechism of the Council of Trent states that the matter of the Holy Eucharist is only wheaten bread. The relevant passage reads:
There are, however, various sorts of bread, either because they consist of different materials — such as wheat, barley, pulse and other products of the earth; or because they possess different qualities — some being leavened, others altogether without leaven. It is to be observed that, with regard to the former kinds, the words of the Savior show that the bread should be wheaten; for, according to the common usage, when we simply say bread, we are sufficiently understood to mean wheaten bread. This is also declared by a figure in the Old Testament, because the Lord commanded that the loaves of proposition, which signified this Sacrament, should be made of fine flour.
He therefore argued that “to change the matter of the Eucharist from wheat bread to another kind of matter would be tantamount to inventing a sacrament, alien to the one established by Our Lord, which has been preserved unchangingly by the bi-millennial tradition of the entire Church in East and West.”
“To celebrate the Eucharist with yuca would mean introducing a kind of a new religion,” Schneider contended. “Were they to introduce yuca as matter for the Eucharist, it would no longer be the sacrament of the Catholic religion. It would be a new Amazonian religion with Catholic decoration, but it would no longer be the sacrament of the Eucharist of the Catholic Apostolic Church.”
Bishop Schneider also pointed out:
The Council of Trent, Pope Pius XII and John Paul II taught that the Church has no power to change the substance of the sacraments. The Church can only change what she has established. However, the Church did not establish the matter of the Eucharist. It was established by Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, who likewise established that water be the matter of Baptism.
LifeSite also asked the highly regarded English theologian and author, Father John Saward, to explain why it is impossible to introduce a change in the matter of the Eucharist. He said:
The witness of Tradition is as clear as can be: the only valid matter of the Eucharist is wheaten bread (panis triticeus). It is the teaching of the Council of Florence and is argued for by St. Thomas in his treatise on the Eucharist in the Summa: “We believe that Christ used this kind of bread when He instituted the Eucharist” (3a q. 74, a. 3). “Without wheaten bread,” St. Thomas goes on to say, “the Sacrament is not validly confected” (sine quo non perficitur sacramentum) (3a q. 74, a. 4).
“The 1983 Code is likewise unambiguous: ‘The bread must be made of wheat alone’ (can. 924/2),” he added.
Saward argued that a vague notion of “development of doctrine” cannot be invoked to justify this rupture with Sacred Tradition. The limits of such development, he said, are carefully set out by the First Vatican Council: “That meaning of the sacred dogmas is perpetually to be retained which our Holy Mother Church has once declared, and there must never be a deviation from that meaning on the specious ground and title of a more profound understanding.” (Dogmatic Constitution Dei Filius on the Catholic Faith, ch. 4).
The English theologian noted that “Blessed John Henry Newman made the same point in this way: ‘There is nothing which the Church has defined or shall define but what an Apostle, if asked, would have been fully able to answer and would have answered.’ (Letter to Flannigan). In other words, if you had asked St. Peter, ‘What is the only valid matter of the Eucharist?’ he would have replied, ‘Wheaten bread.’”
Fr. Saward also observed that, in recent times, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has insisted that celiac priests “must consecrate and consume altar breads made of wheat, even if the gluten content is reduced.”
As recently as 2017, in fact, the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments also issued guidelines for bishops on the bread and wine to be used for the Holy Eucharist.
Serious questions raised
For all these reasons, Cardinal Burke has said “it would be entirely improper for the Synod on the Amazon to discuss the change of the matter of the Holy Eucharist.”“It would signify some doubt about the unbroken Tradition by which the Holy Eucharist continues to be the action of Christ in our midst, in fact, the highest and most perfect manifestation of His Presence with us,” he argued.
“To depart from the use of what has always been the matter of the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist has the gravest of implications.”
The cardinal added: “One wonders why, after centuries of the celebration of the Holy Eucharist in the Amazon, now there is so much difficulty surrounding the use of hosts of wheaten bread.”
“There is something more involved than a problem of keeping the hosts fresh,” Cardinal Burke observed. “The use of some local food, which is like bread but is not the kind of bread which Our Lord used at the Last Supper, reflects a totally horizontal view of the Holy Eucharist, in which the Holy Eucharist is the action of the community which gathers instead of the action of Christ Who gathers the community.”
If, as these authorities suggest, the proposal to change the matter of the Eucharist from wheaten bread to yuca represents a clear and manifest break with the Catholic Faith, the question arises: Should an orthodox bishop refuse even to participate in the Amazonian Synod were such a question on its agenda? (source, source)
The seriousness of this proposal cannot be underestimated. For all of the anti-Catholic lies and drivel that pass as serious fact, this incident above needs to be taken seriously because it would result in the creation of a new and false church within the Church.
Let’s delve into this further to understand why this is such a big deal.
First, one must understand the theology of the Eucharist. Our very own Walid Shoebat, the founder of Shoebat.com, was brought into the Catholic Church because of the theology of the Eucharist. If you have not read his very important work on it, you should start here because this provides a detailed explanation as to the importance of the Eucharist with complete references from Sacred Scripture and Tradition.
Second, the importance of the Eucharist that is denied to or overlooked by so many people and Christians is well-known by all serious satanists, who traffick in a “black market” of consecrated hosts which they use for blaspheming God in their rituals. As the Eucharist has within it the “body, blood, soul, and divinity of Christ,” to desecrate the Eucharist is no different in not merely a conceptual, but a literal way of torturing Christ on the cross. It is to do what the Jews did to Christ, first ordering him to be crucified and then insulted him saying:
“You who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself, if you are the Son of God, [and] come down from the cross!” Likewise the chief priests with the scribes and elders mocked him and said, “He saved others; he cannot save himself. So he is the king of Israel! Let him come down from the cross now, and we will believe in him. He trusted in God; let him deliver him now if he wants him. For he said, ‘I am the Son of God.’” The revolutionaries who were crucified with him also kept abusing him in the same way. (Matthew 27:40-44)
Third, and most relevant to the situation of our discussion, is a point made by many saints and also independently noted by our own Walid Shoebat in another must-read article about a warning from God of how the Eucharist is the new sacrifice and how the antichrist will attempt to abolish it, and how it is extensively prophesied in the Old and New Testaments. If you have not already read it, you need to read right here and now.
I want to highlight a passage which Walid wrote in a previous article, building upon the previous statement in point three above:
And I ask yet another Jesus-style question: if the Eucharist is simply “in remembrance” as if one observes a scene of Christ at the last supper or His Passion; why is it then, that Antichrist “put a stop to sacrifice and grain offering” that such an event is so crucial that it signals the countdown of His return?
Why is this “grain offering” called “sacrifice” and why did not Daniel speak of stopping the hymnals, prayers, abolish the Bible, church demolitions … which went on and off throughout history and yet all this never signaled Christ’s return.
To Christ, such a warning was very crucial “that when you see the abomination of desolation spoken of by Daniel the prophet” where Antichrist “will suspend [both] the sacrifice and grain offerings” (Daniel 9:27) which is the Communion of Bread Sacrifice that Christ warned in Mark 13:14, Matthew 24:15, to pay attention to Daniel 9:27.
Make no mistake, to abolish the “grain offering”- regardless of the means by which it is accomplished because it is the act of abolition that matters and not the form -is as the theologians interviewed above stated in very clear and deadly explicit language, the abolition of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass itself because the purpose of the Mass is for the Eucharist.
The number of abuses of the mass which have taken place in particular over the last century are almost too numerous to count. However, in spite of all of the troubles and the attacks made against the Eucharist, the Eucharist itself has never been assaulted in such a way. Any perversion of the mass is always intended to be an attack on the Eucharist, and while she has been gravely and continually abused, she has never been abolished.
Let me say it again. This proposal would abolish the Eucharist.
The grain offering foretold in Daniel 9 that God would bring and the antichrist would stop is happening.
Now to be explicitly clear, this would not actually abolish the Catholic Faith, for as we and many other Catholics throughout history have noted, the Church cannot be “abolished” because Her teachings come from the deposit of Faith that Christ Himself gave to her. No person, bishop, priest, or pope can change the Faith itself, for if one does declare that he has, his statements are not just objectively incorrect, but Catholics are required by Church law to disobey that person’s commands on pain of sin because at such a point, all that is taking place is that a person is pretending that something has changed when it has not.
It is similar to a law “abolishing” the existence of God. God does not disappear because of a legal declaration, and so it has no force, and one is required to disobey it.
That said, what it will do is to create a situation where the Church is being occupied and under attack by a false church in her own walls. This has direct spiritual consequences but also will show itself through a morass of legal fights, fighting within the ranks of the clergy, and direct opposition to bishop from priests and other bishops that may result in attempt to “transfer” priests that will in a legal context result in “property disputes” that will go to civil and possibly criminal courts.
St. Pio of Petrelcina, one of the great mystics of the 20th century, said much about the Holy Mass. One can read his quotes here, but two of them stood out in particular:
“If we only knew how God regards this Sacrifice, we would risk our lives to be present at a single Mass.”
“The earth could exist more easily without the sun than without the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.”
Yet this is what is happening. The true light of the world is being extinguished as the purpose of the Mass is now under open attack, by a Jesuit nonetheless, and is threatening to extinguish the mass as it will be so if passed for those priests who choose to follow with the false Eucharist instead of the true one. It will not require much of government then to advance further evils to only make happen faster the destruction that will have already been initiated.
Perhaps this Lent then it is a good time to seek the mercy of God and to prepare oneself, for as such actions are gravely testing the mercy of God, it is only hastening His judgement, which is perfect and final.
Prepare yourselves according.