Two weeks ago Friday, the tabernacle at St Francis of Assisi - the church on the east side of the intersection of Riverside and New York avenues - was stolen. The parish community reacted with shock and horror. By Church law, no mass may be celebrated in a space defiled by sacrilege and the theft of a tabernacle is considered sacrilege. A representative of the Bishop had to come from Lafayette and perform a reconciliation of the church space so the mass schedule could proceed.
Why the ado? If you're Catholic, you probably comprehend; if you're Protestant, you might understand, or you might just know that communion is a big deal to Catholics without knowing why or you might just be ignorant of the Catholic Church's beliefs and practices altogether. I'm fairly certain that such ignorance is astoundingly common, for the simple reason that the United States - along with most of the former British Empire - is a predominantly Protestant society. How many churches today would react with such dismay at the theft of their communion supplies? Not many. Yet for a millennium and a half, such consternation would have been uniform across all of Christendom.
So let me take this opportunity to inform you, dear reader, about Catholic beliefs. While still fundamentally Christian - in fact, as the source of the Nicene Creed, many Catholics would argue, originally Christian - the Catholic Church's beliefs can seem quite foreign to many Protestants. This is because the source of Catholic beliefs is the authority of the Church itself. This contrasts with the Protestant denominations, which generally take as the source of their beliefs the simple authority of the Bible.
Which beliefs in particular are different or, less charitably, incompatible to those of many Protestants? Take, for example, the doctrine of transubstantiation. The Church teaches that, in communion - known to Catholics as the Holy Eucharist - the bread and wine literally become the body and blood of Jesus. This is not a joke: Catholics believe they are, in some sense, committing a form of holy cannibalism. Protestant churches' teachings on the issue of Christ's presence in communion range from the Lutheran church's doctrine of consubstantiation to Presbyterians, following Calvin's teaching of spiritual presence, to modern evangelical denominations, who believe that nothing special happens in communion and it is merely a symbol of Christ's sacrifice on the cross to aid in remembrance.
None, however, teach that the consecrated bread and wine literally are Jesus.
By the way, that's why the theft of the tabernacle is such serious business: it wasn't merely about the communion wine, it was about larceny of Christ. It's also why the tabernacle was available in the chapel in the first place - people come day and night to be in Jesus' presence.
That is Catholic doctrine, and it has been Catholic doctrine since before records were kept of such things.
How does the Catholic Church relate to the Bible? This is a key question to Protestants because of the Reformation credo sola scriptura. As I mentioned above, Catholics do not build their faith on the foundation of the Bible; instead, they build it on the authority of the institution of the Church, and in particular the Papacy, which they believe was granted by divine mandate to St Peter. The Bible is certainly considered an integral part of the Church, but its authority is drawn from the Church's authority. It is not the opposite because the Church created the Bible by canonizing various pieces of the Church literature over the course of 1300 years, finalizing it in the Council of Trent in the 1500s. While the Church considers Scripture as support for various pieces of doctrine, it is not the final say.
Hopefully, this helps you better understand where the parish of St Francis is coming from in the aftermath of the theft of our tabernacle. After the Protestant Reformation, the religious wars that wrecked Europe and the formation of generally Protestant societies such as the United States, it is all too easy for Protestants to be ignorant of Catholic teachings. In the interest of harmony, ecumenism and interfaith dialogue, it's important for Protestants to understand Catholics and, of course, for Catholics to understand Protestants - and for you, dear reader, in particular, to make sure that you are responsibly learning about those different from you.
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