Here are 8 reasons why the Holy Eucharist, the consumption of a Man's flesh and...

[Michie]

...blood, is not cannibalism


The Eucharist & Cannibalism


Perhaps the most disconcerting Catholic doctrine is the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. Many people today have the same reaction as those disciples who heard Jesus preach it for the first time in Capernaum and were scandalized, “This saying is hard, and who can hear it?” (Jn. 6:61). John says that after, many of His disciples stopped following Him altogether.


What is obviously so “hard” about this saying is that it suggests cannibalism. If Catholics believe the Eucharist really is the body and blood of Christ, then they believe they are eating human flesh and drinking human blood. The Romans accused Christians of cannibalism and that the charge has been made against Catholics in various ways ever since.

But while Holy Communion does involve eating human flesh and blood, it is not true that it is cannibalistic. How so?

The Eucharist is life. Cannibals eat what is dead. The Aztecs, the most notorious cannibalistic society in history, ate the beating hearts of victims, but they were still eating something doomed to die, and in the act of eating, it did die. By contrast, Christ, is alive. He rose on the third day, and is present in the Eucharist as fully alive (indeed, He is Life itself). Our reception of the Eucharist doesn’t destroy or change that in any way.


The Eucharist is the whole body and blood of Jesus Christ. Cannibals only take a part of their victims. But even the smallest particle of the Eucharist contains the entire body and blood of Christ. The familiar characteristics of space and matter don’t apply: consuming a larger Host does not mean you get more of Christ’s body and blood, nor does consuming a small Host mean you get less. Even receiving from the Precious Cup is unnecessary: by “concomitance,” when a communicant receives the Host, he also receives the Precious Blood.

The Eucharist is the glorified body of Jesus Christ. Concomitance is possible because Christ’s living and eternal body is forever reunited with His blood; hence, receiving the former entails receiving the latter. Christ’s risen body is not a resuscitated corpse like that of Lazarus, but an utterly transformed “spiritual body” (I Cor. 15:44) far different from the spatio-temporal “body of our lowness.” (Phil. 3:21) Therefore, when a Catholic receives the Eucharist, he is receiving not just flesh but glorified flesh, a resurrected and transfigured “super body” that foreshadows the new reality of a new Heaven and a new earth. Cannibalistic practices don’t do that.

Continued- http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/the-eucharist-a-cannibalism.html