(Translated from “Le Chretien Francais,” a French Protestant paper.)
THE Italian newspapers convey the intelligence of a crime committed in such extraordinary circumstances as to fill us with horror. At the same time the whole case is so fraught with suggestive lessons that we think it right to bring the matter before our readers. The facts are these:—In a town of Italy, at Curato, a Roman Catholic priest has been poisoned by means of a liquid put into the communion cup, a liquid mingled with the wine which was intended to be used in the sacrifice of the Mass. In this way it has happened that what was regarded as the blood of our Lord became a poison which brought about the death of him who was celebrating the holy mysteries, with all the fervour of priestly piety.
The victim succumbed very soon after drinking the poison, tortured, as the Italian journals relate with fearful intestine pains.
Crimes of poisoning have all along, to a slight degree, been a characteristic of the morals of the Roman Catholic clergy. Specially this has been the case in Italy. There during a certain epoch poisoning is known to have been fearfully and disastrously prevalent within the principal courts of its little republics, and poisoning by means of the Eucharist appeared the best and the surest means of all. Thus died Pope Stephen X.; in this way Cardinal Ceccario, legate of Pope Clement VI., was poisoned by what was considered to be the body and blood of Jesus Christ. In France, twelve years ago, the Court of Assises passed sentence on a priest, within the diocese of Rodez, for having had recourse to this form of poisoning as the means of getting rid of a disagreeable rector. Abbot Brunean, who was beheaded at Laval, had, I believe, among other things, a few sins of this dye laid to his charge. The sword and the dagger are not for the hands of men used only to the handling of the communion cup!
The celebrated writer Zola is not after all so far without the limits of probability, as some suppose, when in his Rome he makes the incumbent Santobono take terrible vengeance on his Cardinal through a present of poisoned figs.
But there is another thought of much more consequence, suggested by the tragic end of Don Antonio. It ought to prove a terrible wound to the doctrine of transubstantiation. We ask ourselves, in effect, how the body and blood of Jesus Christ could have become deadly poison, if the doctrine of the Council of Trent be true, that not an atom of the bread and wine subsists in the species after consecration. All is transformed, say the holy canons, and become the body and blood of Jesus Christ. Let me cite Canon ii., Session xiii., as being the most curious and instructive:—”If any one saith, that, in the sacred and holy sacrament of the Eucharist; the substance of the bread and wine remains conjointly with the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, and denieth that wonderful and singular conversion of the whole substance of the bread into the body, and of the whole substance of the wine into the blood—the species only of the bread and wine remaining,—which conversion, indeed the Catholic Church most aptly calls transubstantiation—let him be anathema.”
Thus then after consecration there remain of the bread and wine only the “appearances” or “accidents,” such as the taste, the smell, the form, the colour. The senses are deceived by the magic of the change which has taken place. People imagine that they still see, feel, taste or touch bread and wine. They are in a mistake. It’s flesh and blood. But how then does it come about that the Abbot Antonio is poisoned by this body and by this blood? Wherefore does this wine cause drunkenness in one, internal disorders in another? “Accidents” or “appearances” cannot produce misfortunes of that kind. The victims, alas, are no mere appearances, they are too real.
The objection to the doctrine of transubstantiation is a serious one, and will be decisive to every intelligence save that of a theologian. He will not feel at all embarrassed by an objection so trivial, he will answer you, without a twitch of his face, that God leaves with the “accidents” or “appearances” the properties of the substance. “Don’t laugh my friends.” One could not better state that transubstantiation never occurred at all.
It had, but it had not—that is their logic. There is not even the intelligibility of the maxim, “I believe, because it is absurd.” It is a case of sheer jugglery. It comes to this—You believe yourself to eat the body of Jesus Christ, and to drink His blood. But it is not the case, your senses do not deceive you after all. You are only eating the appearances of a substance, but that substance retains all its former properties, so that it just remains what it was before consecration. You don’t communicate, you only believe yourself to communicate. Such are the absurdities of the Roman Catholic doctrine.
Among the 36 millions of Roman Catholics in France, how many are there who believe it? Not an individual, not even that Bishop Fava who piously preserved in his museum the famous torture box, in which, according to Leo Taxil, his underlings caused the consecrated host to undergo the pains of the rack. The holy bishop was constrained to allow that the tortures on the “species” or “appearances” produced only an appearance of pain. And I, for my part, say that there is no longer, nor for a good while back, faith in Roman Catholicism, there remain only species or appearances.
FRANK BOURRIER.