Calvin made wild claims; but he got people to believe them, even today, which is wilder. This one – the Mass banishes the remembrance of Christ’s death! — is easily disproven for anyone who bothers to read the text of the liturgy. (Or even: for anyone who walks into a Catholic church and bothers to look at the crucifix or the Stations of the Cross.) Perhaps people are lazy and just take deceivers like Calvin at their word; I don’t know. But there’s a funny little part of the Mass called the Words of Institution, at least as old as St. Cyril of Jerusalem.
Does the Mass “banish the remembrance of Christ’s death”? Part 3 of a series on John Calvin’s Institutes IV.18.
BY: Henry Matthew Alt • July 6, 2019 • Apologetics
On Twitter, Fr. Frank Pavone wrote this: “There is an immigration crisis, the 1st immigrant is the unborn child. There is a #Crisis at the border of the womb. They are not being detained or deported, they’re being #dismembered. We’re not going to be able to welcome an immigrant when we can’t welcome our own children.” No, excuse me. This is exactly why people say that those who are pro-life care only about the unborn, not about the born. Exhibit 1 is the odious Frank “Coughlin” Pavone, who pits the unborn child against the migrant child.
Yesterday my very excellent fellow Patheos blogger Mary Pezzulo asks: What Must a Christian Do For the Helpless? Her answer is that we must “conform ourselves to Christ” and what he would do. When we see the helpless, we must live in imitation of Christ; the imitation of Christ is not just for when we are feeling pious at adoration. Still less is it for when we take to our blogs and defend, neither Christ nor the helpless, but ourselves. Christ never, Mary points out, blamed the helpless for being helpless. Neither do I condemn you. 
This myth is peculiarly intractable despite the fact that it is also peculiarly easy to refute. The claim is an anachronism. If we can find an instance of the Church referring to itself as “the Catholic Church” before Constantine lived, we can disprove the claim. And so we do. To mention just one place, we find it in Ignatius of Antioch. In his Letter to the Smyrnaeans, he writes: “Wherever the bishop shall appear, there let the multitude [of the people] also be; even as, wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.” This letter was written around the year 110 A.D. 
Now, I do Catholic apologetics myself, and I love reading Catholic apologetics, and Catholic apologetics helped to bring me into the Church. So I am not at all averse to a presentation of rational reasons for a position. When I was a kid, my mother used to defuse arguments by telling me that I should become a lawyer because I love to argue. But argument worked with me when I was in the process of converting to Catholicism because an argument in favor of the faith was what I was looking for. I had already opened my mind.
