The Eucharist Becomes Official

On This Day in History: November 11, 1215

How many times do you have to take communion before you’ve consumed an entire Jesus? How many Jesuses have been consumed since people started the practice? I’m sure some math whiz could figure it out, but we need to begin at the beginning.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: November 11, 1215--

Christianity is weird. It has zombies and embraces the symbol of its savior’s torture. And the dude who speared Jesus to death? They made him a saint. Like, the fuck? Imagine explaining that shit to Jesus. Pope: “Hey, JC. Remember the soldier who coup-de-grâced your ass? We thought that was awesome so we gave him the highest honor we could.” JC: “The fuck is wrong with you?”

Anyway, right after Jesus got sent off to meet his dad/himself people didn’t automatically go “Hey let’s start pretending to eat the guy.” At least, not officially. That didn’t happen until November 11, 1215, at the Fourth Council of the Lateran in Rome.

Prior to that, it all started at the Last Supper with Christ telling his pals this bread is me this wine is me so down the hatch with that shit, and apparently they didn’t think that was weird. It’s called the Eucharist and it caught on as a ritual among Christians so that a dozen centuries later the Church figured they should formalize some rules around it, affirming it as official dogma.

The Eucharist was cemented under Pope Innocent III, and if I know anything about popes, I doubt he or any of the others who took that name were all that innocent. Anyway, it was a big ecumenical council with a ton of patriarchs and bishops and abbots and shit. The council decided a lot of stuff, including stamping out heresy, calling for yet another crusade against those infidels in the Middle East, plus a bunch of other housekeeping bullshit. But a big one was about transubstantiation—that’s where it became official Church doctrine to accept that some wafer and cheap wine are for-real transformed into the body and blood of Christ by a priest during the Mass, so be a good Christian and go cannibal on the Lord.

How does it work? The answer is simple, and one often used among various religions to explain myriad phenomena: God did it; “the bread being changed (transubstantiation) by divine power into the body, and the wine into the blood,” they said.

A few hundred years later Martin Luther was all “Are you fucking kidding me?” about the Eucharist, and Protestants created their own version that was more a “memorial,” going through the motions with no magical transformations into flesh and blood. Alas, the ensuing disagreements between Protestants and Catholics over the right way to pray to Jesus would lead to centuries of rending and spilling of literal flesh and blood.

Those who cannot remember the past need a history teacher who says “fuck” a lot. Get both volumes of On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down. The holidays are coming and they make great gifts.