I really think that the Catholic Church is a pagan church that's just looking like a
Christian church. For instance, in the book of Ezekiel chapter 8:16, the prophet was sent
to the temple and he saw all the priests there, their back towards the altar,
but they were facing the sun in the east. So why is it that the Catholic priest takes the
the bread which is round, it looks like a disk representing the sun, and he faces the east with
that? And also we see all the statues that have what you would think is a halo behind the head,
it's more a sunburst behind the head of those idols right there.
Can I ask a clarifying question? Do you think that there was a—like, when do you think this happened,
that, you know, the true church was replaced with this sun-worship cult? Well, I think it has always
been that way, because, you know, you took the Sabbath and you said, "Okay, Sunday, which is
to be the day you worship the sun, and that's now a day of obligation in the Catholic Church,
as opposed to the holy Sabbath day, the seventh day of God." I wondered—okay, so it sounds like
you're maybe coming from an Adventist background. Really interesting. So you know Ellen Gould White,
I'm going to assume you're familiar with with her kind of claims about this, right? I am, but I'm
talking strictly Bible. Okay, sure. So I mention the historical part just because the Christians
are worshiping on Sunday in the first century. So if your claims were right, we would have to say
that during the time of the apostles, Christianity was replaced with a sun-worshipping cult
and nobody knew it, and like, the apostles didn't stop it. And if that were true, I wouldn't trust
the apostles. Like, I wouldn't become Adventist, I would just give up on Christianity and say "Well,
how could we trust this?" So I just bring that up to say: what sounds like an argument against
Catholicism specifically is really an argument against Christianity as a whole. So to get into
the particulars. In terms of Ezekiel 8: yeah, the problem with them was not that they were
facing east, the problem was that they were worshiping the sun and turning their backs
to the holy of holies. Now the holy of holies, the fulfillment of that is what? It's Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ is the one who was already present in the form in the Shekinah glory, right? So
Jesus is the one who was the the proper center of temple worship. Do we agree on that part? I
agree on that, yeah. Okay. So in John chapter 6, Jesus promises that he will give his true flesh
and true blood to eat and drink. Now he repeatedly reaffirms that he means this literally; he says in
verse 55, "my flesh is food indeed....my blood is drink indeed," he says in verse 56, "He who eats
my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in him." In verse 57 he says, "As the living father
sent me, and I live because of the father, so he who eats me will live because of me."
In verse 58 he said, "This is the bread which came down from heaven. Not such as the fathers
ate and died...he who eats this bread will live forever." So repeatedly he's driving home
the centrality and the reality that the the core of Christian worship is to be centered around
his body and blood. The worship and even the consumption of his body and blood, the communion
with his body and blood. Now, go back to Malachi 1:11; there's a prophecy that in the days of the
new covenant, the pure sacrifice will be offered all around the world, that rather than just having
the temple in Jerusalem where you have the holy of holies, that all around the world people will be
able to offer this true sacrifice. Well, what is that true sacrifice? The true sacrifice is
what we call the sacrifice of the Mass: that we present the body and blood of Jesus to the Father
and then we receive him as the sacrificial meal, just as the Jews of old ate the manna
and ate the Passover, and in the Passover this was a sacrificial participation. All of that is
being fulfilled. So the reason the host looks like that is it's calling our mind back to the manna,
not to the sun. I mean, sure, it's round, it looks vaguely like the sun. So do a lot of things. So
does a frisbee. But that doesn't mean that it's sun-worship. Rather, it reminds us of the manna.
Remember, he said that he is the living bread come down from heaven. That's a reference to the manna
in in the Old Testament so it looks like bread, it looks like manna, and it truly is, we believe,
the body and blood of Jesus Christ in the center of Christian worship. And the last thing I'd
say on this is, again, this is what Christians believed from the earliest days. Saint Ignatius,
one of the students of the Apostle John, explained that we couldn't be in communion with the Gnostics
because they don't confess the Eucharist as the true body and blood of Jesus.
They weren't considered Christians because they didn't have this Eucharistic theology right.
So the two possibilities, then, are either: Christianity had already become pagan
by the time of the apostles, and the apostles just went along with this transition into paganism;
or that this bit about the Real Presence, this Eucharistic realism, is true,
and that therefore these attacks, you know, Ezekiel 8 is being taken wildly out of context,
and was never meant to be attacking the Catholic Mass or anything like that.