the storied jesus

Religion Killed Jesus

"This [the Last Supper] was the meal that was to be repeated "to keep his memory until he comes" (1 Corinthians 11:25-26).  The love meal (agape) was the home service by which the Christian gatherings expressed their unity in the mystical body of Christ.

Why, in the richness of this banquet tradition, would Benedict XVI, when he was Cardinal Ratzinger, say that it was unworthy to treat the Catholic Mass as a meal?  Why would he say that altars should not allow the priest to face his brothers and sisters in Christ as across a dinner table?  Why would he say that the priest should turn his back on the congregation and commune only with his God?  Why would he say that others should not share in this activity of the priest, who is alone responsible for what occurs?  Did he think that Jesus, at the Last Supper, stopped in the course of the meal, stood up, crossed a barrier separating him from his followers, and muttered to God in a language (Latin) neither he nor they understood?

The pope makes all these astonishing claims because he thinks the Mass is not a meal but a sacrifice, made by a priest.  Not for him the Epistle to the Hebrews, which says that Christ is the unique priest making one last sacrifice.  The pope, like his predecessors, is returning to the religion Jesus renounced, with all its paraphernalia of priesthood, separation from the laity, consecration of places and things, distance from the "unclean" life of those not privileged by consecration.  This is what led to the idea that priests can say private Masses, without any community at all, since their consecrating words are all that is needed to repeat the sacrifice of Calvary, and the more such Masses are said the more the pleasing results of sacrifice are accumulated.  In other words, we repeat what Jesus did at the Last Supper "to keep his memory" by doing what he never did there.  I began this book by noting that we cannot be "other Christs," since he is God and we are not.  But priesthood is an attempt to pretend that some men are other Christs, who can do what he did in his one sacrafice.  Religion is still trying to kill Jesus."