Next🇺🇸Move 리트윗함
I’ve seen many comments from Roman Catholics over the past several days that go something like this:
“Yeah, I think what the Pope is doing is wrong (cozying up to Islam), and it’s unsettling to me—but I can’t and won’t leave the Roman Church because of the Eucharist/the Mass.”
This precisely highlights what I would argue is Rome’s trap. They’ve convinced—or confused—their members into believing the following sequence:
1. The Eucharist (Communion/the Lord’s Supper) is the actual, physical body and blood of Christ. The bread and wine ARE Jesus.
2. The Roman Catholic Church is the only true church (“the one true Church”), and therefore the only institution with the authority to “transubstantiate” the Eucharist into the physical body and blood of Jesus.
3. Taking the Eucharist at a Catholic Mass is how one primarily makes atonement for sin. Baptism, they claim, washes away “original sin,” wiping past transgressions from one’s record from the point in time of the baptism—but future sins must be cleansed through participation in the seven sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church, chief among them the Eucharist.
In other words, they believe their eternal salvation is dependent on the Roman Catholic Church administering the Mass.
Given that framework, it’s not hard to see why leaving the Roman Catholic Church would feel existentially dangerous to many adherents.
If you’ve been taught that grace is uniquely dispensed through that institution—and that your ongoing forgiveness is tied to participation in its sacraments—then walking away doesn’t feel like switching churches; it feels like forfeiting access to Christ Himself.
That creates a powerful psychological and spiritual dependency: the Church is no longer a guide for discipleship & a community of believers (a family of families), but the gatekeeper of salvation (right-standing before God) itself. In other words, you need their rituals, specifically, to go to heaven.
From a structural standpoint, this system reinforces loyalty by raising the perceived cost of dissent to the highest possible level. I would argue that this isn’t incidental—it functions to preserve institutional authority by binding the individual’s eternal security to continued participation in that specific system.
So when the Pope does something unbelievably wicked (as has happened many times in history, as it is now), what are the members of Rome to do? They must submit anyways.
Does this sound like an honest, godly, or Christ-honoring institution/system?
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