A new survey shows that most people who say they’re Catholic think the Eucharist is just a symbol of Christ’s body. Trent shows how you can use “the Passover connection” and other examples to help people truly recognize the “source and summit” of our Faith.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Council Of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn: Do you ever read a headline that’s not surprising, but it’s still kind of a punch to the gut when you read it? Well, that’s what I experienced last week when I was reading a new report from the Pew Research Center. The headline says, just one third of U.S. Catholics agree with their church that the Eucharist is the body and blood of Christ. The article goes on to say transubstantiation, the idea that during mass the bread and wine used for communion become the body and blood of Jesus Christ, is central to the Catholic faith. Indeed, the Catholic church teaches that the Eucharist is the source and summit of the Christian life. Kudos to Pew Research for cracking open the catechism, but a new Pew Research Center survey finds that most self-described Catholics don’t believe this core teaching.
Trent Horn: In fact, nearly seven in ten Catholics, 69%, say they personally believe that during the Catholic mass, the bread and wine used in communion quote are symbols of the body and blood of Jesus Christ. Just one third of U.S. Catholics say they believe that quote during Catholic mass, the bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Jesus.
Trent Horn: That is the story I want to dive in today with you all here on the Council Of Trent podcast. I am your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker Trent Horn, and here on the Council of Trent podcast, we seek to equip you, to edify you, to help you better understand the Catholic faith, especially if you’re not Catholic. Over the past few months I’ve been traveling the country and interacting with people online and I’ve come to see there’s a lot of people who listen to this podcast who themselves are not Catholic. Maybe they appreciate my thoughts on moral issues, on defending mere Christianity, the existence of God, the deity of Christ, his resurrection, standing up to modernism and all of the different heresies we see in our world today.
Trent Horn: And if you are a non-Catholic listener, I’m very grateful that you’ve given this podcast to chance and I hope to produce a lot more content that will benefit you and also present the Catholic faith to you in a way that is at least reasonable. You may not agree with it, at least at first, but hopefully I can present it to you in a reasonable way. And if you are a Catholic listener, I hope that what I present to you is reasonable. In fact, as we see today in the Pew Research Center poll teaching people that the Eucharist is the body and blood of Christ is no longer something where we have to go out and explain this to our Protestant brothers and sisters. It seems like we have to turn our catechetical guns inwards and help members of our own flocks see that this truly is the body and blood of Christ.
Trent Horn: So that’s what I want to focus on today. But before I get to that, once again, a big shout out and thank you to our supporters at Trenthornpodcast.com. We’ve surpassed 600 patrons. That’s helping us get to our next goal so that we can put forward new projects to help reach more people with the podcast, bring on more guests, fly them out. Have really great interviews back and forth and dialogues with people who disagree about the faith. And if you are a subscriber for as little as $5 a month, you get access to bonus content. This week I’ll be releasing another excerpt, a free preview of my new book with Katherine Pakaluk, Why Catholics Can’t Be Socialists. So if you’re interested in that, be sure to go and check out Trenthornpodcast.com. Consider becoming a subscriber or at the very least leave a review for us on iTunes or Google play. That is always a big help.
Trent Horn: Now onto the Pew Research Center survey. I want to break down this article because you hear this stuff all the time, not just about the Eucharist, but you’ll hear reports that say Catholics believe abortion should be illegal or Catholics support same sex marriage. And you always got to zero in on what they mean by Catholic. And what I appreciate about the Pew Research poll that was just released was that you get a lot of good data behind it to see who are the Catholics who are making these claims. So let’s go and let’s break this down a little bit. I’m going to continue reading the article because what I liked about this survey is that it asks people what they thought about the Eucharist, but also what they thought the church thinks about the Eucharist.
Trent Horn: They asked people, what do you believe about the Eucharist? Do you believe it’s really Jesus or it’s just a symbol? And then they asked them, what does the Catholic church teach about this? Because you go back to, and we’ve quoted him a million times but he’s always worth 1,000,001, Venerable Fulton Sheen who said that there are millions of people who hate the Catholic church for what they think the church teaches, but only hundreds who hate the church for what it actually teaches. So Sheen’s hypothesis was that many people oppose the Catholic church. They oppose a caricature. They oppose a church where it seems like people put Mary on equal footing with the Trinity and that Mary is a goddess. Obviously we don’t believe that. I would never belong to a church that believed that. But some people think the church teaches that so they don’t want to be Catholic.
Trent Horn: Well I wouldn’t want to be Catholic, too, if that’s what the church taught. Or they think the Catholic church teaches that you have to work your way into heaven and you get into heaven based on the number of good works you do. And if you get an indulgence, that’s an express ticket to heaven. That is 0% what we teach as the Catholic faith. Indulgences are not an express ticket to heaven. They are the remission of temporal punishments related to sin and no amount of indulgences can get you out of hell. You know that. So we could do an entire other episode on purgatory and indulgences, but when it comes to faith, works, purgatory, grace, once again, people misunderstand what the church teaches. So if you want to be a good apologist, a good defender of the Catholic faith, 80% of the time, 90% of the time, you’re just explaining to people what the Catholic church teaches.
Trent Horn: I mean, just a few days ago, at the beginning of the week, if you listened to Catholic Answers Live, I did my radio show, Why Aren’t You Catholic? And we had a lot of great calls coming in. There was one gentleman, his name is Javier, and he called because a friend of his who is an Uber Catholic, and I give him a lot of props, has been talking to him and dialoguing with him and his friend is a big fan of Catholic Answers. So he called in to us to ask us about the immaculate conception and he said he had problems with the dogma, the immaculate conception saying, “How can I believe this if Mary had to be … if Mary was conceived without original sin in order for Jesus to be sinless, Mary had to be sinless. How could that be? Then would Saint Anne have to be sinless? How does this have to be necessary?”
Trent Horn: And I explained to him, the church does not teach that the immaculate conception of Mary is necessary or that God had to do this, but merely that it was fitting for God to do this for Christ, to honor his mother, the mother of God in this way. Now, I know I’m getting off track a little bit. We are veering right back here onto the Eucharist which I want to talk about in this episode, but my point is when you go through and you actually break down the numbers, it’s very clear that this is primarily a failure of catechesis, not a failure of apologetics. I mean there’s still people who know what the church teaches. They go to mass every week and they don’t accept that the Eucharist is the body and blood of Christ.
Trent Horn: The Pew Research Center poll … Well, let me read it through and you’ll get the idea and then I’ll comment on it. So here’s what it says. In addition to asking Catholics what they believe about the Eucharist, the new survey also included a question that tested whether Catholics know what the church teaches on the subject. Most Catholics who believe that the bread and wine are symbolic do not know that the church holds a transubstantiation occurs. Overall 43% of Catholics believe that the bread and wine are symbolic and also that this reflects the position of the church. So there’s a great graph here. I’ll include this link in the show notes at Trenthornpodcast.com so you can go and read it for yourself and get a breakdown of the data because they show what people believe the Eucharist is the real presence of Christ, those who believe it’s a symbol, and those who aren’t sure.
Trent Horn: And they contrast it with whether they know the teaching or not. So for example, take those people who attend mass weekly or more. And I’m glad that they do this because I hate when people survey Catholics and you don’t find out what kind of Catholic they are. There is a big difference between the Catholic who shows up once a year on Easter and the Catholic who makes sure to go to mass every single week. The Catholic who goes to mass every single week understands, hopefully. The person who only goes once a year, they are ignorant and not simply … I’m not going to use, not malicious, but hopefully the person who only goes once a year is ignorant of the teaching that you’re supposed to go weekly. Because the person who goes weekly probably knows that this is a requirement of our faith, to uphold the commandments, to keep Holy the Sabbath, to go and receive.
Trent Horn: Maybe you can’t even receive the Eucharist, but you can still attend mass. We’re obliged to do that on Sundays and on Holy days of obligation. And of course today is a Holy day of obligation. I don’t know if it was dispensed in your diocese or not, but it’s the feast of the assumption. Thursday … well, August 15th, not always on a Thursday. My wife and I were talking about this today. She said, “Is it always on a Thursday?” And she said, “No, no, no. That’s assentian Thursday.” So that’s the mark of a good Catholic here who can keep all the Holy days and Sundays all tracked in their mind. That’s important because according to the Pew Research Survey, it says that those who believe that the … Let’s say those who believe that it’s symbolic. What’s sad here is that 37% of people who attend mass weekly do think that it’s a symbol. 63% of people who attend mass weekly believe in the real presence.
Trent Horn: Now, I would have thought that number would be a lot higher. There’s a strange group right here. There’s 5% of people who believe in the real presence, but they don’t know that’s what the church teaches. So I’m not sure what’s going on with this group. Maybe they misunderstood the survey or maybe they just don’t give the church enough credit. I’m not … Or they’re misinformed in some way, but I’m glad they have … I would much rather have somebody who is mistaken about what the church teaches and gets the real presence, than is mistaken about the real presence, but gets what the church teaches. You see what I’m saying here? I would rather have somebody know the Eucharist is Jesus and seek to receive him. And they’ve kind of botched their understanding of what the church teaches, rather than somebody who knows the church teaches the real presence but doesn’t believe that themselves.
Trent Horn: So if you put it all together, 68%, about 70%, of Catholics who go to mass weekly do believe in the real presence. So that is good. I mean, I would like that to be higher, but I’m glad it’s not much lower. But then when you go down to let’s say monthly or yearly, someone who rarely goes, and you go to monthly or yearly, the numbers change up a lot. Among Catholics who go monthly or maybe once or twice a year. You know the Christmas Easter Catholics, only 25% of them believe the Eucharist is the body and blood of Christ. Believe in the real presence. 75% of them think that it’s symbolic. And then among Catholics who seldom or never go … and these are the Catholics, of course, the monthly, yearly, seldom, nevers, they’re the ones who mess up all the survey questions when they ask people, “You’re Catholic, what do you think about same sex marriage?” Or, “You’re Catholic, what do you think about abortion?”
Trent Horn: The ones who go monthly, yearly, or seldom, never, they’re the ones who are more likely to say, “Oh, I think same sex marriage is fine.” Or “Oh, I’m pro choice.” And then you get these headlines, Catholics are pro choice or Catholics are for same sex marriage. No. The people who are weighing the survey questions, they don’t understand what the church teaches. They may say that they’re Catholic, but they don’t fully accept the church’s teachings or choose to live by it because they don’t accept that one of the most fundamental teachings, the source and summit of our faith, belief in the real presence of the Eucharist and our moral obligation to go and worship at mass and receive the Eucharist at least once a year.
Trent Horn: See, a lot of people think … And this is a problem we find more in the Western world than like in Latin America, for example. I remember a priest, he was a priest from Latin America, he once told me, “When I go to the United States, your communion lines are very long but your confession lines are very short. But when I go back home to South America, our confession lines are very, very long but our communion lines are very, very short.” Now that can lead to an error, of course. And Pope Benedict the 16th has talked about this, how the Eucharist is not a reward for good behavior. The Eucharist is salutary medicine. It’s something that it takes away venial sin. It strengthens our souls. It helps restore … not restore our friendship with God, but strengthen our friendship with God. Because if you’re in a state of mortal sin, you ought not receive the Eucharist. So some people who are scrupulous think that they can never have the Eucharist because they did something bad.
Trent Horn: Well, no. James three two says, “The just man stumbles several times a day. We all make many small mistakes. We all sin.” And frequent reception of the Eucharist is a way for us to strengthen ourselves to not fall as much. Okay. So to be clear, we don’t want to fall into the sin of scrupulosity and think that we’re never worthy to receive the Eucharist and we never approach Jesus and the sacrament.
Trent Horn: But the other extreme is the sin of indifference or even the sin of sacrilege and thinking that the Eucharist, oh, it’s just bread and wine. It’s just something to remember Jesus. It doesn’t matter when I receive it. It doesn’t matter what I’m doing. Jesus always loves me. He would never want me to not receive him. That’s not what Saint Paul teaches in First Corinthians chapter 11. First Corinthians 1128 through 29 talks about how there were people in Corinth and Corinth was, oh, so many problems in Corinth. So many problems dealing with things like idolatry. You had a guy who was living with his own stepmother, engaged in an incestuous relationship with the wife of his father. So probably not his biological mother, but his stepmother and the community was kind of, oh live and let live, you know, love is love type thing.
Trent Horn: And Paul railed against the community for allowing this and not saying anything about it in First Corinthians five. Lots of problems in Corinth. I always heard this joke that there is a lost third letter of the Corinthians and Paul just says, “I’m done. I’m done with you all.” But they always gave him grief. And so in First Corinthians 1128 through 29 Paul says, “There are people who receive the body and blood of Christ without discerning the body and blood of Christ. And that is why some of you are sick and even some of you are dying.” That there are people who the injury of their souls and in a special case of God, making the holiness of the sacrament manifest, even allow people to die as a result of their careless reception of the Eucharist while they were in a state of mortal sin.
Trent Horn: All right, so those are the errors, but what do we do to combat then this other error, that you had people, lots of people, who are Catholic who go to mass weekly even … Now fortunately, even those who go monthly, yearly or seldom, we look at them, those who believe the bread and wine are symbols, only about 25% of them know the church’s teaching on transubstantiation. That even those who rarely go, those who go monthly, only half of them don’t know the teaching. Those who never go, 62% of them don’t know the teaching. So it seems that the percent of people who know what the church teaches, but they cannot accept it, they don’t believe it and who go weekly, that’s 14% of people in the survey. Still a lot of people and that is an apologetic problem of showing them that the church’s teaching is true.
Trent Horn: It is something we ought to live out. For others, it’s more of a catechetical problem. They don’t even know this teaching. So we need to share it with them. But when we share it with them, there’s bound to be objections to it. And I could go on and on and on about apologetics for the Eucharist. In fact, as a little sneak peek, my colleague Tim Staples, his next book is going to be on the Eucharist. We were discussing titles back and forth, and I think he … You know, he wrote Behold Your Mother, which is his book about Mary. Wonderful book, by the way. And we’re thinking maybe the title of this one will be Behold The Lamb Of God. Now at first I thought, oh, This Is My Body would just be perfect. I mean, that’s the perfect title for a book on the Eucharist, right?
Trent Horn: And we can get that nice stylized print with a classical painting for the cover. But I told him, I liked Behold The Lamb Of God and I hope we run with that title because for me, when I explained the Eucharist to people, some people say, “Well, okay, why can’t it be a symbol? It’s a symbol that reminds me of Jesus. Why does it have to be him? I don’t get that. If it’s a symbol, isn’t that good enough?” And it’s not good enough because it fails to recognize that the Eucharist is a Pascal sacrifice. It is our Christian Passover sacrifice and when we come to see that, it makes the sacrament, it makes so much more sense to people. And that’s what helped it make sense for me during my conversion experience. Why does this matter?
Trent Horn: It’s because through the teaching of the real presence in the Eucharist, we come full circle in understanding how the Passover that took place in the Exodus where the Jews were saved from the angel of death from the 10th plague, death passed over their homes. How did it do that ladies and gentlemen? Well you had to take a lamb and it’s legs couldn’t be broken, it had to be male without blemish. It was slain. Blood is put over the doorposts and then you eat the lamb. All throughout scripture, Christ is seen as our Passover lamb. John 129, John the Baptist says to Jesus, “Behold the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” Saint Paul says in First Corinthians five seven, “Christ our paschal lamb has been sacrificed.” So it’s very clear that Christ is offered to us as a sacrifice and for that sacrifice to come to fruition, to be efficacious for us, we have to receive the sacrifice just like the Jews in the old Testament during the Exodus had to eat the lamb after its blood was slain. Jesus is our Passover lamb. He’s male without blemish.
Trent Horn: His legs were not broken on the cross. I mean, it’s just shouting at us for us to receive that. Even non-Catholic scholars admit that early Christians saw the Eucharist as a sacrifice. J.N.D. Kelly is an Anglican scholar and this is what he says about the first Christians. He says, “The fulfillment of prophecy demanded a solemn Christian offering and the Rite itself was wrapped in the sacrificial atmosphere with which our Lord invested the last supper. The words of institution do this or in Greek [Foreign Language 00:18:26] must have been charged with sacrificial overtones for second century ears.” Justin Martyr, who was a church father in the mid first century, at any rate, understood them to mean offer this. So when Jesus says, “Do this in remembrance of me,” he’s not saying, “Just do this as a symbol to remember me.” Do this in remembrance of me is not asking us to remember it, it’s asking God in an anthropomorphic way to remember Christ’s sacrifice on our behalf.
Trent Horn: In fact, another non-Catholic scholar has published on this, Joachim Jeremias. He is a Lutheran scholar, and he says that the word remembrance in Greek, [Foreign Language 00:00:19:07], it’s not just a purely spiritual recollection. When you go back into the Septuagint, the Greek old Testament and the Hebrew equivalent of that word, which is [Foreign language 00:19:16], you go back to Numbers 1010 which talks about sacrifices, sacrifices that are offered that shall serve you for remembrance before your God. That it’s God will remember the sacrifice that you have offered. So Jeremias says, “The command to repeat the right is not a summons to the disciples to preserve the memory of Jesus and be vigilant.” Or, you know, repeat the breaking of bread so that you may not forget me. But it is an eschatological oriented instruction.
Trent Horn: Keep joining yourselves together as the redeemed community by the table rite. That in this way, God may be daily implored to bring about the consummation on the second coming. So that’s Joachim Jeremias, a Lutheran scholar who’s not Catholic, but who understands that language in the liturgy and scripture that talk about remembrance. Do this in remembrance of me. This is something that’s talking about a memorial sacrifice.
Trent Horn: Another point that we should bring up in order to make this intelligible to people, especially to Catholics who don’t see, “Well, how can this not be a symbol? I mean I see that its bread and I see that it’s wine,” is the importance of transubstantiation. I know that’s like a $14 word, but it’s an important one to explain what is happening in mass. When Jesus held out the bread and wine at the last supper during the institution of the Eucharist, he did not say this bread or this contains my body or this represents my body or this symbolizes my body.
Trent Horn: He simply said, “This is my body.” You know, saying, “This contains my body,” would say, okay, then maybe we could believe in consubstantiation, which was what Lutherans believe, in that Jesus is spiritually present in bread and in wine. But that’s not what we believe as Catholics. What we believe is that the substance, the underlying metaphysical core of the bread and wine, it changes. While the accidents, what we see, touch, taste, hear, and feel, remain the same. And that’s hard for people to wrap their heads around because we live in the atomic age, and not one about nuclear power. Go back to my Free For All Friday on nuclear power. We need to usher in the atomic age and get more nuclear power up here. But more when I say atomic age, I mean the age of atoms, thinking that everything that exists is material and it’s just a bunch of atoms that go together. When you get the right atoms, you get stuff.
Trent Horn: And so we imagine the world is full of atomic Lego like building blocks. And so we think of the Eucharist that, hey, here’s bred molecules, here’s wine molecules. It’s bread and wine. When I look at it with a microscope at its deepest level, I just see bread and wine or bread and … or the molecules that make up these substances. So there’s no room for Jesus to be here. Well, look, if you brought Jesus into a laboratory today, our Lord who is incarnate and forever incarnate, will always have a human nature. If you brought him into a laboratory today and they did a DNA test on him, scientists are not going to find his divinity in his DNA. So there’s a good analogy there that the divinity of Christ is present in Jesus in a way that is invisible that we cannot see, but it’s still truly present, much the same way that the body and blood of Christ is present in the Eucharist in a way that we can’t see.
Trent Horn: Now the analogy breaks down, of course, because Jesus is fully human. He didn’t merely appear to be human. But when we have the Eucharist, we don’t have the substance of bread and wine. We have the accidents. Through a miracle, we taste, touch, hear and feel these effects of bread and wine while we receive Jesus beneath them. An analogy I like to use in my talks to help people understand how this can be is this, so when I talk about substances … So think about when did you begin to exist, all right? And if you’re pro-life, you believe I was conceived … even people who aren’t pro-life will talk about when they were conceived. At one point in your existence, you were a tiny zygote. You were a one celled organism. But that was you. That was you, a tiny one celled organism. And it was still you when you were an eight week old fetus.
Trent Horn: It was you when you were an infant that was born. And it’s still you, even though, this might be an urban legend, but there’s some truth to it, that every seven years your body changes out your cells. Now, I don’t think that’s entirely true, but at the very least, there’s a big difference between the one celled zygote that was you however many decades ago, and you today. Or you today and the infant that was born however many decades ago. So the accident’s change, what we see of you, what we hear of you, what we taste and touch … well I don’t know about tastes there, but touch and feel of you has changed so much through your life. But the only reason that it’s still you from zygote to fetus to infant, to adult, is because your substance, the underlying metaphysical core that makes you you, in this case, your rational soul, that underlying reality does not change.
Trent Horn: It is what grounds all of the accidental changes. And so when we can explain this to people, we can help them see that reality is much deeper than the atoms that are around us. And so that can help people see that in the Eucharist, God wants us to receive Jesus, to receive the Passover lamb, to bring to fulfillment the new Passover so that eternal death passes over us. He wants that for us, but he doesn’t want us to be cannibals. He didn’t want us to actually receive his body under the form of human flesh and human blood, but to still receive it nonetheless. And if he’s God and he’s all powerful, why can’t he give us his glorified body and blood under the form of bread and wine?
Trent Horn: And finally, an important point that we should share with people … And we ourselves should remember when we’re tempted to doze off at mass or to be distracted, I mean, I’ve got two little wonderful munchkins at home and they’re always crawling over me at mass and it’s easy to be distracted. But even if you don’t have kids at mass, it’s easy to be distracted or it’s easy to take the Eucharist for granted. But we should remember that people have died for this aspect of our faith. People have died for it, and we should not let their deaths be in vain and that we who are so privileged to be able to walk down the street without worry of persecution, to be able to receive the Eucharist, do not have to face what they faced. For example, today’s August 15th. This is very appropriate for our topic today. We’re celebrating the assumption today, but this is August 15th, in the Roman martyrology is the feast of Saint Tarsicius.
Trent Horn: So Saint Tarsicius was an early martyr in the apostolic church. There was a poem written about him by Pope Damasus and that he was a Pope during, I believe, the council of Hippo in the late fourth century. This is what the Catholic encyclopedia says, “In these lines, Damasus compares Tarsicius to the Protomartyr Stephen. Just as the latter was stoned by the people of Judea, so Tarsicius, carrying the blessed sacrament was attacked by a heathen rabble and he suffered death rather than surrender the sacred body of Christ to the raging dogs.” That Saint Tarsicius was someone who would bring the Eucharist to Christians who were in hiding and there was a gang, a pagan gang, that said, “Hey, give us that what you have.” And he wouldn’t surrender the Eucharist to them. He wouldn’t let our Lord be blasphemed by them. So the legend says that his grip around the Eucharist became like iron and his hands could not be unclenched from it.
Trent Horn: And so then the mob beat him to death while he still held the Eucharist tight and did not let it go. And then he was later buried in the catacomb of Saint Callista’s and an inscription by Pope Damasus was placed on his tomb. So that was back in the early apostolic church. But we fast forward even to the 20th century in between, we have martyrs for the Eucharist over and over again. One of my favorites is Saint Oscar Romero. So Saint Oscar Romero was the fourth Bishop of … Archdiocese of San Salvador and El Salvador. And in 1979 there was a military coup. And so there was civil war and infighting in the country and the Catholic church was caught in the middle.
Trent Horn: And there’s a great scene in the 1989 movie Romero … And in this movie Romero is played by Raul Julia, who’s just an awesome actor by the way. And I love that his very last role was playing M. Bison in the Street Fighter Two movie. And he did that role because, he just did it because his kids really liked that video game. And he just, he wanted to make his kids happy. But he was a wonderful actor.
Trent Horn: And so he took on this role to play Oscar Romero in the 1989 movie. And there is a great scene to show his dedication to the Eucharist no matter what, where he walks into the church … I don’t know if it’s the cathedral or not, but one of the churches in San Salvador that has been taken over by this military junta, by the military members who are starting the civil war and they’ve turned it into a barrack. And so all the people have been kicked out, but the sacrament, the Eucharist is still there and Romero goes to retrieve it. So I want to play that clip for you now.
Oscar Romero: We are here to remove the blessed sacrament while the town is occupied.
Commando: This is a barracks.
Oscar Romero: This is a church.
Commando: What is he doing here?
Oscar Romero: We are here to take care of the Eucharist.
Trent Horn: So just to fill you in the, the lead commando guy just shot up the altar with his machine gun and Romero is standing there with his mouth open. Like this guy just shot the tabernacle. He shot the altar, he plugged it full of machine guns and then he turns to Romero.
Commando: Now get out of here. Now.
Trent Horn: So then he leaves and he feels defeated. He leaves outside. But then he goes over to his car to be driven away and he sees the people and he sees just a crowd of people, just the towns people looking at him like he’s their only hope. They want to receive the Eucharist. They want to receive Jesus. And without him they have no hope. And he sees them and he turns defiantly, and he walks briskly back into the cathedral and he doesn’t care what’s going to happen to him. So let me turn the volume up and I’ll continue the scene.
Commando: Hey, hey, hey. You again.
Trent Horn: So now he’s picking up the pieces that have fallen from the altar while he’s being shot at and he picks them up and then eventually he’s grabbed by the shoulders and he’s thrown outside. So that’s just a powerful scene. It gives me goosebumps. You can actually watch the movie online. It’s a Gloria.Tv. I’ll include it in the show notes for the episode today. Would we … You know, it’s so funny, we always say like, “Oh, I’d be a martyr. I would have that courage. I wish I-” You heroically think to yourself that … or put yourself in those martyr situations. And yet at the end of the day, we can’t get excited to go to daily mass. You know, we can’t keep our minds focused when we’re there. You know, if we can’t do what Christ wants in ordinary situations, how could we do it in an extraordinary situations?
Trent Horn: And at the end of the day we can’t. We can’t do it without Him. We can’t do the extraordinary without his grace. And we can’t do the ordinary without his grace. We need him. But it’s Philippians 413 says, “I can do all things in Christ who strengthens me.” And the way that Christ strengthens us is primarily is by receiving him in the Eucharist. So pray for me that as an apologist, I get tempted for all of this to become familiar and to take it for granted. I do not want to do that. Pray for me that I do not do that and I’ll pray for you that you not do that as well. And so I hope this was helpful for you. Thank you guys for listening. Be sure to go to Trenthornpodcast.com. If you’re a subscriber, you get access to the bonus excerpt of Why Catholics Can’t Be Socialists. Otherwise, thank you guys so much and I hope you have a very blessed day.
Speaker 1: If you like today’s episode, become a premium subscriber at our Patrion page and get access to member only content. For more information, visit Trenthornpodcast.com.