I had this Catholic friend for awhile who was a teacher at my school. One day I heard her telling her students that Peter was the first Pope. I’m like, “What?!? Does the art teacher at a public school really need to be talking about this in class?”
But later, as I was walking to the first RCIA class in the fall of 2006, thinking about the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and how, if the Catholics were right about their Eucharist, then how did the Body of our Lord come to be in that bread? I mean, what was the mechanism through which this could possibly happen?
So I’m thinking about all this, wondering about it, and I am walking to the church because I’m not completely sure where the RCIA classroom is. I’m also a little freaked out about what I'm thinking of doing. Just coming onto the campus of a Catholic church seemed weird to me. I was afraid that someone might talk to me and find out I wasn’t Catholic. I was afraid that no one would talk to me, and I’d be able to use that as an excuse to turn my back on the journey.
In anticipation of these fears, I’d already made plans to meet with another co-worker of mine, one of the secretaries, the one who had told me the year before that I had to believe in the Real Presence if I wanted to be Catholic. This co-worker was a sacristan at a mass held the same time as RCIA, and said she could direct me to the right room for RCIA if I came to the church to find her first.
As I walked into the narthex, the outer entrance area, I could peer through one of the open inner doors, down the center aisle toward the altar and the crucifix. I felt like a stranger.
However, my eyes fell momentarily on the altar as the sacristans prepared it for mass. In my mind’s eye I could imagine a priest, vested, standing behind the altar which was itself holding various cups, and plates, ready there, I assumed, to hold communion bread and wine. In my mind's eye, I imagined the priest holding his hands over “the stuff” on the altar. Suddenly, in my spirit, I knew that there was something the priest did that turned that bread into the Body of Christ, and it was something he did that turned the wine into the Blood of Christ.
Although I didn’t know what it was exactly the priest did at the altar, I knew he did something. . . and I wondered, “How did the priest get this power?”
He gets it from Peter, the first Pope, of course.
Who got it from Jesus.
