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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1806 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 23, 2026

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Speaking of dumb folk-Catholicism, I was somewhat recently coerced into watching The Nun, which a friend of mine (a lapsed Roman Catholic) described as the scariest horror movie he’d ever seen. I, in contrast, thought it had one of the dumbest plots I’ve ever seen.

Basically, a demon appeared in a convent and started possessing the nuns. It turns out the convent structure was once a castle owned by a satanist, before the Knights Templar killed him and sealed the demon in a hole in the ground. They used a vial containing (dramatic pause) the blood of Christ (second dramatic pause) to seal him in and stop him from escaping. A priest and a nun were sent by the Vatican to figure out what was going on, and once they learned all this, they spent the rest of the movie trying to find the vial, instead of just consecrating new wine, which Roman Catholics believe is also the blood of Christ. The whole thing could have been over in 10 minutes if the priest had just celebrated Mass.

They could have just said it's the sweat of Christ and it would have made it work, but by reaching for something that felt more meaningful they basically broke it in a way any Catholic would notice. I wonder if anyone raised the objection during production.

Though I think people who like it don't really care because those movies seem to mostly hit for people who aren't Catholics, but like the demon/witches/exorcisms aesthetics. My wife's like that, she doesn't believe in Christianity but she really wants to believe that stuff like what the Warrens did was real. Because even to atheists, fighting primordial evil is cool, even if wasting time on being lied to in church by hypocritical clergy, being brainwashed to ignore science and hate gays is not (which is what they identify Christianity with).

Some of these religious horror movies try to make it intellectually palatable to believe in the specific Catholic evil, and the power of Catholic rites against it, without believing in the Christian God by making it more of a matter of generic, form changing evil vs a nebulous "force of belief" in general. The last and horrible The Exorcist movie is like that; white voodoo witch doctor rites are powerful against demons too, as long as the person performing it believes. And if it some cases it takes the dramatic form of Catholic demons and Catholic exorcism, then it's just a matter of it being what the character believes.

Anyway, The Nun had nice set designs that made my time watching it not wasted, but otherwise it's not the strongest in that genre by any means.

Obviously an actual vial of Jesus blood is more potent than metaphysical/metaphorical wine-blood. Otherwise Catholic-run hospitals could produce infinite blood for transfusions.

Jesus may not match your blood type.

Not in Catholic teachings: despite keeping the attributes of bread and wine, the Eucharist is transsubstantiated into the flesh and blood of Christ in a litteral, not metaphorical way. Keeping their bread and wine attributes is probably the reason why Catholic run hospitals aren't transfusing communion wine into people, but a Catholic still has to believe that it is The Litteral Blood of Christ.

This is the tradcath equivalent of Transwomen are Women.

When you're an actual religion I think you've got more room to have religious views than when you're trying to ostensibly hijack science. Catholics believe it's literally metaphorically literally the Blood of CHrist and that's okay.

Imagine a religion teaching that everything has secret traits that are more important than the mundane ones and not only unobservable, but must be accepted as true in order to be a good person.

If anything, "Transwomen are Women" is the transubstantiation of progressivism.

Indeed, the primary schism in trans-affirming circles boils down to "trans women aren't really women, but we should treat them as if they are to spare their feelings" (i.e. consubstantiation) and "no, trans women are literally women, with all that that implies" (i.e. transubstantiation). The more things change, the more they stay the same.

And the frustrating thing is, sometimes consubstantiation is the motte and transubstantiation is the bailey. Catholics rarely pretend to be Protestants in order to make their beliefs seem more palatable to the godless.

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