Catholicism 101, Part 1

OK, since Erin asked, I'll try to answer.  I can't say that I'm the best person to explain Catholicism, but here we go.

First, for those who don't really know much about the Catholic Church, let's start with the fact that the modern Catholic Church as most people today know it is fairly new.  The modern church follows the rules laid out by the Second Vatican Council in 1965, or Vatican II as it's popularly known.  Prior to Vatican II, the Mass offered by Catholic churches world wide was the Tridentine Mass.  That's the Latin Mass.  The modern Catholic church service is known as the Novus Ordo.

I was raised in a Novus Ordo church.  I also walked away from it once I left my parent's house and started living on my own.  My return to the church started when I started thinking about marriage, and has to this point brought me back to the Tridentine Rite.

In my opinion, the Novus Ordo mass is the Catholic Mass with the spirituality and beauty removed.

Let's talk about a few of the fundamentals of Catholic faith, shall we?  First and foremost, we believe that Christ is present on the alter at Mass.  A priest doesn't "say" mass, he offers the sacrifice of the Mass.  We believe that Christ is present in the Tabernacle, which is why Catholics are supposed to genuflect before they sit in a pew.  Christ is our God and Savior.  We treat him as higher than any king who lived on the Earth.  I won't bow or kneel for any man or woman on this planet; I kneel before God and God alone.

When the priest consecrates the Eucharist, God is present in the Host.  That little wafer of bread?  Yep.  Trans-substantiation.  In effect, the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ.  In the traditional Mass, when you take Communion (receiving the Eucharist), you kneel as you receive the body of Christ.  There is an alter server or deacon holding a plate under your chin just in case the priest drops the Eucharist, or you fail to keep it in your mouth.  Why?  Because you do not drop Christ on the floor,  period.

I suppose that there are a lot of folks out there wondering just why the hell Catholics are so darn caught up in the Body and Blood thing.  Well, because Christ himself commanded it.  "Take this, all of you, and eat it.  This is my body, which will be given up for you and for many."  The Mass is the bloodless recreation of God's sacrifice for us, and he has commanded us to perform that sacrifice.  So we do.

For those who wonder about the whole "Sit, stand, kneel, stand, sit, kneel, Sunday Calisthenics!" that Catholics do, it's pretty simple.  You stand for the entrance/exit of the Priest, and you stand for the word of God in the Gospels.  You kneel as you pray, and you sit for everything else.

I think that's about all I can write for today - my scattered thought patterns are pretty darn evident in my writing at this point.  In Part 2 I'll go over the Virgin Mary, who is an important person in the Catholic and Orthodox churches.