The Sacramental Monster of popular Roman Catholicism: Christ remains present through the Eucharist, not through the Spirit

So David Warren, here:

At Mass yesterday, after the singing of Mark’s Gospel, the Paschal Candle was quietly extinguished. Christ has ascended into Heaven, and the flame in the Sanctuary, which through the forty days since Easter had symbolized the presence of the Resurrected Lord upon this earth, itself “ascends.”

We would now be on our own — were it not that Christ remains throughout the Church He gave us, in the Sacrifice of the Mass, until His coming again.

This is the teaching, from the highest source, and it must never be confused or toyed with.

What the Bible teaches seems irrelevant to your average Catholic devotee, that Christ is present by the Spirit after the ascension, constituting the church by an indwelling, not by a rite. Take it or leave it, but that is the plain teaching from the highest source, and it must never be confused or toyed with if we are to remain faithful to the sources. Hence Protestantism.

And I will pray the Father, and he will give you another Counselor, to be with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him; you know him, for he dwells with you, and will be in you. Yet a little while, and the world will see me no more, but you will see me; because I live, you will live also. In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.

-- John 14:16ff.

In the Name of the Infantilis, the Jejunus, and the Holy Puerilis

The otiose David Warren dissects our Atheocracy here. The best thing about it is that it can't last too long, because it won't reproduce itself, and is defenseless. The point of having a "quiver" full of sons, after all, is to have your own army to defend the gate. Happiness is both that easy, and that hard:

[W]e have an upside-down religion, in which there is no God, but that "Not God" commands an obedience more absolute than God ever required, stipulating everything from the sanctity of antinomian sexual behaviour, down to how we should sort our garbage.

It rides upon an inexhaustible series of mildly fluctuating, but invariably self-contradictory moral and epistemological premises (or more precisely, conceits); and because everything is "relative," nothing may be challenged. It is ... a religion for which an extremely arid Darwinist materialism provides the founding cosmological myth. And abortion is its principal sacrament.

Or to put it another way, a religion that is not going to last forever, but has nevertheless been growing at an accelerating pace for more than 200 years. Moreover, a religion not without some real appeal, to a society of nearly pure consumers. ...

I once commissioned an essay from the estimable Eric McLuhan, expounding the philosophy of Peter Pan. It was a subject I even began drafting a book upon, myself: about the ease with which people may be ruled, once the faith of Peter Pan has been accepted. According to that faith, those who age will die. The secret of immortality is thus to remain perpetually a child, wishing perpetually upon a star. It requires some Nanny, to fulfil all the wishes.

Hence, our theocracy.

Children, we, of a lesser god.