Reason 24

24. Because Protestants themselves have said “the new Catholic Eucharistic Prayers have abandoned the false perspective of sacrifice to God.” (La Croix 12/10/69).


Maybe some Protestants, back in the late 1960s, who had very little actual encounter with the text of the revised liturgy would have said this. I have never heard it from a Protestant my entire life; in fact, I have heard the opposite, that the Catholic Church refuses to surrender the concept of a sacrifice. Third person hearsay (a quote from some Protestant in a Catholic daily newspaper repeated in a pamphlet) does not carry a lot of weight. For all we know, the first part of this quote was “We hope that . . .” and it ended with “ . . . but it does not seem likely.”

Furthermore, as shown in previous posts, the Eucharistic Prayers clearly have not abandoned the idea of sacrifice. The terms sacrifice, offer, and oblation still make a regular appearance in the text. The concept is there and, when properly celebrated, the New Mass makes as clear a pronouncement in this area as does the traditional Mass. This is in the end an argument hardly worth noticing.