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The Day Of A Catholic Church Service

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Last Sunday, while attending my weekly Catholic Church service, I strived to analyze the ritualized service. I realized that a service itself is not just comprised of one ritual, but of multiple rituals that are guided by the purpose of ultimately salvaging one’s soul at any given moment by offering one’s time to God. Thus, I sought out to better understand one of the rituals present individually, which is the most important one (though they are all important) present in the service. Such ritual is the blessing of the bread and wine, and the reception of such blessed elements by the people in attendance. I chose to analyze this ritual, referred to as the miracle of Transubstantiation, for it indeed fulfills the goal of the Eucharist as a whole: providing salvation to the souls of the audience, which accentuates the importance of the ritual itself. Moreover, I chose this ritual because it carries a huge misconception, which is that the blessed bread and wine are symbolic of Jesus’s Flesh and Blood. As I learned in a Religion and Ethics class, Catholics believe that, while the priest blesses the elements of the ritual, the Holy Spirit descends upon the bread and wine, converting both the bread and wine to the actual Body and Blood of Jesus, which propels the bread and wine to lose their symbolic meanings. Such occurrence is called the miracle of Transubstantiation, and it is essential to the ritual, for it allows the individuals present to be salvaged by actually receiving

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