“If a fly or spider fall into the chalice after the consecration, let the priest take and eat it, if he does not feel an insurmountable repugnance. But if he cannot swallow it, let him wash it and burn it, and throw the ashes into the sacrarium.” Well, these were the words that turned Charles Chiniquy off from being a Roman Catholic priest. Hello, and welcome back to our study of books from our resource desk. In today’s video, I examine our booklet called Communion: The False Doctrine of Transubstantiation. Here is a former Roman Catholic priest who has written a kind of exposé against his former church, and in this video we will look at the problems he faced as a child and the problems he faced as a priest, including the vomit clause and problems with rats eating God. That’s right. As a Roman Catholic priest, he was really bothered about the implications of his belief in the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, which is the idea that the substances of communion turn into the actual body and blood of Christ, and that is how people receive Christ through the Mass.
His First Communion
Well, the author, Charles Chiniquy, was a Roman Catholic priest in the mid-1800s, and he was absolutely devoted to God. He loved the Lord, yet he was so bothered by some of the teachings of his church that it eventually led him out of that and into Christianity, and one of those teachings was his church’s stance on communion. Now, these booklets are excerpts from the larger book called Fifty Years in the Church of Rome, and it was chapter 8 from the larger book that we pulled out to make these booklets. Chapter 8 is when he remembers taking his very first communion as a boy. Even as a child he was just so bothered that he was told that the wafer would turn into the actual body and blood of Christ. He is going, “I know it’s only bread.” Knowing it was only bread, he said later that he had to turn off his intellect, and he felt like they were condoning cannibalism. He said, “What troubled me most was the idea that God, who is represented to me as being so great, so glorious, so holy, was being eaten by me like a piece of common bread.” But here he is for his first communion, all dressed up. The priests are there, and his parents are so excited, and the choir is singing in Latin; there is not a word of understanding at all. Amid all the hustle and bustle of the ceremony, he is nervous about it all, and he describes a child’s first communion. He opens his mouth, and there is a wafer that is put on his tongue, and he chews and swallows, and they have supposedly received Christ through a piece of bread. Chiniquy says no, they have not believed in it, “neither will they ever do so with the firmness of faith which is accompanied by intelligence. The poor child thinks he believes, and he sincerely tries to do so. He believes in it as much as it is possible to believe in a most monstrous and ridiculous story, opposed to the simplest notions of truth and common sense.” So that is in chapter 8 of his larger book.
Creating His Own Saviour
Now, in chapter 17 he is telling the story of how he became a priest, when he was finally ordained into the priesthood, something that he had dreamed about since childhood. Now that it is finally here, he felt truly that he had the power to summon God. It is interesting to hear him talk about the process of baking the wafer and the process it goes through each day. He said, “The next morning the priest takes the newly baked wafers to the altar and changes them into the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ. It was one of those wafers that I had taken to the altar in that solemn hour of my first Mass, and I had turned it into my Saviour by the five magical words.” Then he quotes the five Latin words. “I have often been asked, ‘Was it possible you sincerely believed the wafer could be changed into God by you? And have you really worshipped the wafer as your Saviour?’ To my shame, and to the shame of poor humanity, I must say, yes. I believed as sincerely as every Roman Catholic priest is bound to believe it, that I was creating my own Saviour God every morning by the assumed consecration of the wafer. And I was saying to the people, as I presented it to them, ‘Ecce Agnus Dei, this is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world; let us adore him.’ Prostrating myself on my knees, I was adoring the God made by myself, with the help of my servant, and all the people prostrated themselves to adore the newly made God.” Those are the words of Charles Chiniquy. Much later in life, he felt like this was blasphemy and idolatry.
Nine Startling Consequences
So in chapter 8 of the book, he details nine startling consequences of the dogma of transubstantiation. One is that the priest can pronounce bread in baskets, bread in bakeries, to be holy. Two, priests can make this pronouncement over all the bakeries of the world if they so choose. Three, this pronouncement is binding no matter the circumstances. He tells a story of a priest on his way to be hanged who, as an act of revenge, is going down the streets and starts blessing the bakeries in Paris just out of spite, and there was nothing the other Roman Catholics could do about it. That was an implication of the belief. Four is that priests should replace or ingest any defiled bread or wine. If a fly or spider lands in it, they were just told to drink it, or they can wash it and burn it and throw the ashes in the sacrarium. The fifth consequence of believing this doctrine was given in the form of a story, and it is several pages long. It tells of a priest who was carrying a wafer while he was completely drunk, and he gets into a brawl with a local farmer about who should move his sleigh off the road and let the other pass. So they are out in the snow punching each other, and in the scuffle the box falls out of the sleigh into the snow. It was only months later, after the snow melts, that they find this little bag and this little silver box, and they open it, and to their great drunken amusement, the priest telling the story said, “The good God melted away,” and they all break out into raucous laughter. This was such a disturbing story to Chiniquy. He felt disgusted that his fellow priests were droning on in their drunken stupor, because he sincerely believed that they were talking about Christ. All of this was an implication of his belief in transubstantiation. Sixth was the story of a wafer being mistakenly dropped into a chamber pot. Man, this poor mother and father are nearly having a nervous breakdown, let alone Chiniquy himself, feeling that he had just defiled the Lord himself by dropping him into that vessel. But that was what he really believed, so it caused some real psychological turmoil. That was the sixth. The seventh upsetting implication was the priest’s vomit clause, which said, and I quote, “If the priest, after the communion, vomit, and that in the vomited matter the consecrated bread appears, let him swallow what he has vomited. But if he feels too much repugnance to swallow it, let him separate the body of Christ, the consecrated bread, from the vomited matter, till it be entirely corrupted, and then throw it into the sacrarium.” Well, eighth was Chiniquy’s belief that Jesus literally cannibalized himself and then offered his own flesh to the disciples on the night of the very first communion. That is what he believed, and so that was disturbing. The ninth point was that he just called the reader to decide for himself what kind of notion transubstantiation leads you to. And I have got to say, I completely see his point. I kind of agree with him on that. Those are some disturbing implications.
The Good God Travels Incognito
Well, in chapter 27 of the book, which we pulled out for our booklet, Chiniquy tells the long story of carrying “the good God,” as the communion wafer is called. At first, when he was a young priest, it was carried in a conspicuous way, often with fanfare and multiple people, and traveling through distinctly Protestant areas of town, he would endure ridicule for all that fanfare. Eventually his own bishop said, “Let’s just hide it in your coat pocket. Let the good God travel incognito.” At first this bothered him very much, until one day he sensed a still, small voice of the Lord asking him something to the effect of, “Okay, you think you have confined me to your vest pocket. You feel bad because you have made me a prisoner. I am no prisoner, because I am not a wafer.” That was what Chiniquy was hearing, the still, small voice of the Lord, even before he was a Christian.
Rats and the Wafer
Well, this kind of thing went on for some time, and another entire chapter, chapter 36, is devoted to the absurdities of the dogma, saying that if we really believed in transubstantiation, then we should be really bothered if rats ate the bread. There was an elderly priest he found weeping over rats that had eaten the wafers, and he was weeping so much that Chiniquy had to scold him to stop him from crying so much and told him to just move on. He said later he realized that even he had grown somewhat callous to it, that if he really believed the dogma, he would have been as upset as that man was that day.
The Idolatry of Replacing God with a Thing
Well, the final chapter of this booklet on communion is a final spiritual look at what Chiniquy calls the idolatry of replacing God with a thing. It comes from a series of articles he wrote rebutting Dr. Newman, who was a Protestant who had converted to Catholicism. Chiniquy, later, was a Christian who had converted from Catholicism. Chiniquy spends some time talking about the false gods of the Eastern religions, saying, look, at least they worship the beautiful sun or an elephant. At least it is a powerful animal, based in powerful symbols. But here is what he says: “But is not Dr. Newman, with his Roman Catholic people, a thousand times more worthy of our compassion and our tears, when they abjectly prostrate before this ignoble wafer to adore it as their Saviour, their Creator, their God? Is it possible to imagine a spectacle more humiliating, blasphemous, and sacrilegious than a multitude of men and women prostrating their faces to the dust to adore a god whom the rats and mice have thousands of times dragged and eaten in their dark holes? Where are the rays of light and life coming from that wafer? Instead of being enlarged and elevated at the approach of this ridiculous modern divinity, is not the human intelligence contracted, diminished, paralyzed, chilled, and struck with idiocy and death at its feet? Can we be surprised that the Roman Catholic nations are so fast falling into the abyss of infidelity and atheism, when they hear their priests telling them that more than two hundred thousand times every day this contemptible wafer is changed by them into the great God who created heaven and earth at the beginning, and who has saved this perishing world by sacrificing the body and blood which he had taken as his tabernacle, to show us his eternal love? But look at this modern divinity of Rome. It has eyes, but does not see; feet, but does not move; a mouth, but does not speak. There is neither life nor strength in the wafer god of Rome.” Those are the words, directly from a former Roman Catholic priest, about the false doctrine of transubstantiation. In the next video we are going to look at this same Roman Catholic priest challenging some of his superiors, and what it meant for a Roman Catholic priest to be celibate. Well, in the meantime, grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. God bless you.
