Seventy percent of Roman Catholics do not understand the Eucharist? There’s that anti-catholic James Swan again, making stuff up about the one true church. Everyone knows, those who are members of the one true church have the benefit of the infallible magisterium. The papacy has God-given authority keeping Catholics unified!
Actually, what most who may think this about me don’t realize is I probably read more Roman Catholic books at this point than Protestant books. I certainly listen to more Catholic broadcasts than Protestant. This particular fact was not something I made up. It comes from the April 6, 2009 broadcast of Catholic Answers Live. Catholic apologist Jim Burnham devoted an hour on “How to Defend and Explain the Eucharist.” You can listen to Jim’s statistics in this short clip. Jim says in part,
“Poll after poll in recent years has confirmed that more and more Catholics are mistaken… they have misguided views about the Eucharist. it used to be everybody understood that the Eucharist was Jesus. it was the true flesh and blood… the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus under the appearance of bread and wine. And now more recent polls suggest that sometimes up to fifty percent depending on how the question is phrased, sometimes as many as seventy percent of Catholics can’t identify that core Catholic belief…”
So, if I were to ask seven out of ten Catholics to explain the Eucharist, according to Burnham, I’d probably get a few different answers, or maybe even seven different answers. Here again we find a simple truth, typically ignored by Catholic apologists. Catholic apologists will repeatedly claim a Christian relying on the Bible as his sole infallible authority will produce confusion. They claim one must have another infallible authority, the Papacy. Yet, here is one of their key doctrines, what Burnham calls, “the crown jewel” of the Catholic faith, the Eucharist, and seven out of ten Catholics are confused on it.
In this period of economic crisis, many companies are evaluating their work plan, trying to find ways in which their company is failing and losing money. I submit, If your alleged infallible teaching magisterium is working as Burnham describes, you may want to evaluate the effectiveness of upper management at this point.
