I was listening to an audio by Cardinal DiNardo, Archbishop of Galveston/Houston. He's a fabulous speaker intelligent and educated, and fascinating to listen to. (I had the privilege of meeting him, in fact.)
In this talk, Cardinal DiNardo mentioned that the very first Christian creed was only three words--"Iesus Christos Kyrios", Jesus Christ is Lord.
Yet from that we get the much longer Nicene Creed, which can be somewhat legalistic, in case you haven't noticed. (This is also true of the Apostles Creed.)
To make a long story short, much of the content of the Nicene Creed exists to clarify points of conflict--was Jesus God and not man, man and not God, sort of man and sort of God? These were hotly-contested issues in the early church, and statement such as "fully God and fully man" were used as definitive statements of doctrine.
So all this stuff gets spelled out--baptism, resurrection, and a lot of other points.
But you'll notice that one thing is left out, and it's something that's central to the Catholic faith: the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist.
Why is that?
Some might say that it's because the Catholic Church invented it as a doctrine in the Middle Ages.
(Brian Currie, in his book "Born Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic" has a good summation of all this in Chapter 2.)
But upon reading the early Church Fathers, the great believers who thrashed out doctrine in the first four centuries of the Church, I came upon a realization.
The Real Presence was not included in the Creed because at the time the Creed was developed, *no one ever seriously questioned whether Jesus was truly present in the Eucharist*. It was a given.
Not until much later did people start to question it, and for them it's been all downhill ever since.
So the Real Presence is an essential part of the faith; don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
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