Question:
Answer:
There are at least three reasons this is not so. First, Catholics do not receive our Lord in a cannibalistic form. We receive in the form, or under the appearances, of bread and wine. Think about it: the cannibal kills his victim; Jesus does not die when he is consumed in Communion. Indeed, he is not changed in the slightest. The communicant is the only person who is changed in this exchange. The cannibal eats part of his victim; in communion the entire Christ is consumed, body, blood, soul and divinity. The cannibal sheds the blood of his victim; in eucharistic Communion, Our Lord gives himself to us in a non-bloody way.
Second, if it were truly immoral in any sense for Christ to give us his flesh and blood to eat, it would be contrary to his holiness to command anyone to even symbolically eat his body and blood. Symbolically performing an immoral act would be of its very nature immoral. This simply cannot be.
And third, the expressions “to eat flesh” and “to drink blood” already carried symbolic meaning both in the Hebrew Old Testament, and in the Greek New Testament, for example, in Isaiah 9:18-20; Isaiah 49:26; Micah 3:3, and Revelation 17:6-16. In these texts and others we could cite, we find these very words: “eating flesh” and “drinking blood,” to be understood as symbolic for persecuting or assaulting someone.