#12477 Is the Eucharist a Literal Sacrifice or Just Symbolic? Body, Blood, and Sacrifice (ENCORE) - Joe Heschmeyer

Catholic Answers Live

Catholic Answers

Religion & Spirituality, Christianity

4.8 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 27 November 2025

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“Is the Eucharist a Literal Sacrifice or a Symbolic Act?” This episode delves into the nature of the Eucharist, addressing questions like whether Jesus spoke symbolically when He said, “This is my body,” and how His command to ‘eat my flesh and drink my blood’ aligns with Jewish law. We also explore the implications of Jesus’ words, “Do this in remembrance of me,” and the teachings of the Book of Hebrews.

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Questions Covered:

02:36 – Wasn’t Jesus speaking symbolically when He said, “This is my body”?
15:15 – Wouldn’t Jesus’ command to ‘eat my flesh and drink my blood’ violate Jewish law against consuming blood?
37:25 – Didn’t Jesus say, “Do this in remembrance of me”? Doesn’t that clearly indicate the Eucharist is a memorial, not a literal sacrifice?
40:20 – Doesn’t the Book of Hebrews teach that Christ’s sacrifice was ‘once for all’? How can the Catholic Mass be a true sacrifice without re-sacrificing Christ?
49:00 – Wouldn’t Jesus’ command to ‘eat my flesh’ be cannibalism

Transcript

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0:00.0	Buying or selling your home, real estate for life can connect you with a pro-life real estate agent.
0:05.2	When Real Estate for Life receives a referral fee, they donate 65% to Catholic Answers.
0:11.5	Learn more at realestateforlife.org. Hello and welcome to Catholic Answers Live.
0:32.6	Thanks so much for being here with us.
0:34.7	Joe Heschmire, both hours today,
0:36.2	something that we've been kind of experimenting with,
0:40.2	and it has received a very positive reaction, is doing shows where we tackle every objection. And this is
0:46.5	something I think that we learned from YouTube. The kids on YouTube, they're doing good stuff these
0:52.3	days. So why not learn from them? So what we do is we'll take the next two hours and we'll do every objection to the Eucharist.
0:57.8	And I think that the emphasis of the objections to the Eucharist, I'll be honest,
1:02.4	we'll tend towards Protestant objections to the Eucharist.
1:06.6	There are more generally philosophical and cultural and kind of mythesis objections, some of which
1:12.3	Protestants share.
1:13.5	But we'll start with mostly Protestant objections to the Eucharist, but we're going to try
1:18.1	to tackle every objection to the Eucharist that we could come up with for Joe in the next
1:23.5	two hours.
1:24.2	A tremendous preparation goes into these.
1:26.6	You've had weeks and weeks and weeks to
1:29.5	prepare for this, Joe. Arguably had my whole life to prepare for this. Wow. Very good, but we also,
1:36.3	I'm being somewhat facetious because we have you traveling and we got you here in the studio and
1:42.0	we've, we had a staff meeting before this and we gave
1:46.0	you a few minutes to prepare but you wrote the book you the Eucharist is really Jesus so you should
	...

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