A Mock Last Will

A farmer, who owned a large and prosperous farm with barns, cattle, machinery and massive amounts of acreage for planting crops, often promised his children that he’d leave all of it to them after his death. He said to them, “It’ll be a sign of the love I have for you, my children. I’ll leave you better prepared than I was as a young man starting out.”

A few years later when the father took sick, the doctor assured him he only had a few hours to live. The dying father called his children to his bedside. He said to them, “I want to make known to you my last will and testament.”

The children remembered the promise he’d often made to them about the farm. They watched him as he reached under his pillow and withdrew a picture of his farm. Then he said, “This is what I leave you, my children—a picture of my farm. It’ll be a symbol, a reminder of me.

The children were surprised and angered to hear their father say these strange words! They whispered to each other: “Dad must be out of his mind! He’d never tell us goodbye with a mockery of all he’d said to us. If he were in his right mind, surely he wouldn’t make a joke of his last will by not leaving us the real farm which he promised, but only a small picture of it. The picture means nothing to us. It’s no reminder of his love for us.

Seventy percent of Catholics don’t believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist. They believe it to be a mere symbol—a cheap reminder of Him. Those Catholics believe Jesus was like the farmer in this story. By believing such, they make Him out to be a liar, a con artist.

An entire two years prior to the first Mass in the upper room at the Last Supper, Jesus promised us His real body and blood when He said, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink” (John 6:53-55).

How do we know that Jesus meant what He said literally? “After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him. So Jesus said to the twelve, ‘Do you want to go away as well?’ Simon Peter answered him, ‘Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God’” (John 6:66-69). 

It was at that point that everyone hearing His voice made a decision regarding their eternal destiny, just as everyone must make that same decision. Many of the people who listened to Christ’s Eucharistic discourse—perhaps most—forever walked away. And what I’ve quoted here isn’t nearly all of what Jesus had to say in this Eucharistic discourse. It covers almost all of John’s sixth chapter (vs 25-69). They heard the entire discourse and still refused to believe. Peter and the other apostles summed it up perfectly with Peter’s statement of supernatural faith when he asked, “You have the the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.” Jesus spoke literally in His discourse, and the people just couldn’t handle it.

When I began learning the Catholic faith, I was a third degree Blue Lodge Freemason—the son, grandson, and great-grandson of Masons. So the very last thing I wanted to do was to become a Catholic. However, when I learned the true two-thousand year teaching that Jesus established the Catholic Church (the ninth article of the Creed), I made the intellectual decision to become a Catholic. It seemed irrational to not become a member of the Church God Himself established. But I made the emotional decision to become a Catholic when the Holy Eucharist was fully explained to me. That’s apparently true of many other people as well.

God has used me to make literally hundreds of converts since my own conversion over thirty-plus years ago. These converts have come from one-on-one and small group venues, and eighty-four of them are my adult godchildren. The way I’ve done this is by teaching the catechism evangelistically. Experience has taught me that there are three points when a person makes the decision to become a Catholic. Many convert as too as I prove in the first article of the Creed that God exists. Both society and culture seem to have convinced people that there is no God, so for many of them all it takes is merely proof that He does exist.

The second point at which they convert is when I teach the fullness of both the scriptural and Catholic teaching on the ninth article of the Creed: “I believe in the Catholic Church, the communion of saints.” It’s here that we prove through scripture, history, and patristics that Jesus did indeed establish the Catholic Church.

Among those who convert, if they haven’t converted during the first or ninth articles of the Creed, they always convert when they hear the full teaching on the Most Holy Eucharist. That’s the dealmaker!

When I first read the statistic that said 70% of Catholics don’t believe in the Real Presence, I was shocked beyond belief. I wondered how Catholics who’d grown up with the full Eucharistic teaching could not believe. Then as I began to research it, it occurred to me that no one had ever given them the full teaching on the Eucharist. Agents of Darkness who’d infiltrated the Church with the intention of destroying the supernatural faith of Catholics in the Eucharist did so by dumbing down catechesis on it, along with introducing such evil practices as Communion in the hand and standing rather than kneeling to receive. After all, if the Eucharist is treated like ordinary bread the people will begin to believe it’s ordinary bread.

If you’re reading this and you’ve come to believe that the Eucharist is merely a symbol—a representation of Jesus—then you need to reach out to me so I can make certain that you get the entire Catholic teaching on the Eucharist. I’ll not only give you the fullness of the Church’s teaching on the Eucharist, but I’ll prove to you the reality of It. Reach out to me with an email at Joe@CantankerousCatholic.com.

If you’re reading this and you do believe in the Real Presence, you have a moral obligation to reach out to those 70% of non-believers. Don’t know who they are? Just start asking them.