I’ve seen people taking Communion many times, but I’ve never had the temerity to ask.
I presume that the taste and texture are not what’s running through the (communicants?) mind at that transfigurative moment, but anyway, I’ve thought of it.
Imagine a bland ice cream cone. It’s like that.
Melt-ish. They used to stick to the roof of my mouth.
No. Or at least, none that I’ve ever had did.
On the other hand, if you are really asking about “official Catholic communion wafers” so to speak, I may never have had any.
(I’ve taken Communion at a moderately wide selection of United Methodist churches, plus a few others who practice Open Communion–never at a Catholic service).
I’ve had a wide variety of bread, crackers, matzoh (sometimes stale).
Yeah. At any rate, it isn’t necessary to chew them in order to swallow them, and I think that is the point the OP is trying to get at. Bread is highly processed, and the wafer is quite thin, so your saliva does a pretty good job of pre-digetsting it.
Yep. They were about like a little slip of rice paper once they got wet in your mouth. It somehow marred the symbolism to have to pry the “body of christ” off the roof of your mouth with your tongue. The traditional wafer is made out of nothing but wheat flour and water.
Nuns teaching Catechism used to tell their students to NEVER chew the Host. Something about defiling The Body of Christ if your teeth touched it. If it stuck to the roof of your mouth, you were supposed to pry it loose with your tongue (NEVER FINGERS!).
You can chew now. Students preparing to make their First Communion are just told to NOT walk away from the altar chewing like a cow on her cud.
It’s made of a very highly refined white flour, so there isn’t much substance to it. It reminds me of a thin wafer of styrofoam.
“Melt” is technically something that reaches a high enough temperature whereupon the solid substance transforms to a liquid state. The Communion wafer dissolves in your saliva.
If you have a dry mouth, that would cause it to stick to the roof of your mouth, or even your tongue. Saints supposedly could hold an undissolved Host in their mouths for hours. Actually, I think they probably wiped their mouths dry before receiving the Host, and then did some crafty mouth-breathing.
~VOW
Another complaint about them sticking to the root of your mouth. They are my least favorite host. I dislike shared cup too.
Now I am a member of the Friends church, and we have a different understanding of communion. No wafers, no shared cup.
By the time Sister Mary Whatshername got through with my first grade class (this would have been about 1953), we were all convinced that if you let the wafer touch your teeth, it didn’t matter what you did later in life — grow up to be Pope, even — YOU WERE GOING TO HELL.
About the only thing worse would be to let the wafer fall off your tongue onto the floor. I never saw it happen, but the impression was that everything had to stop while the priest brought out the Holy HazMat Kit and resanctified the area. Or something like that. What happened to the perpetrator was never explained, probably because it was too gruesome for our tender minds.
If you were a kid gagging on a half-dissolved wafer, trying desperately to move it around with your tongue, Jesus would forgive you for thinking about the corporal features of the Eucharist.
I never saw it fall out of someone’s mouth, but I have seen the service come to a dead stop when the priest dropped a consecrated host. The priest and the server had their backs to us, so I didn’t really get a good look at what they did, but it did take longer than a simple “oops!” and picking up the dirty wafer.
It’s my understanding (granted, I’ve never been a Minister of the Eucharist, so forgive any errors) that a Consecrated Host which is dropped onto the floor must be eaten.
I’ve also heard that a Consecrated Host can be dissolved in water and then the water must be disposed of on “undisturbed ground” (whatever that is).
The plumbing of the sink where the Chalice and the Paten are washed, must not flow into the sewer or septic system. It must also drain to “undisturbed ground.”
~VOW
I was at Mass once when an altar boy dropped the Host. Father Joe whacked him upside the head with the back of his hand. The altar boy picked the wafer up and I didn’t see what was done with it from that point. I would have loved to see a Holy HazMat Kit!
If you want to experience it for yourself, there are non-religous possibilities.
If you happen to know anyone of Polish, Slovak or Lithuanian ancestry, around Christmas you can ask politely inquire about getting a small sample of opłatek or kalėdaitis. It’s the same recipe as the communion wafer, but unconsecrated, of course. My family shared the opłatek on New Year’s Eve.
Or you can order this candy UFO, which is made of the same stuff. http://www.oryans.com/satelitewafers.html
I sneezed once after taking my seat after receiving Communion, before I had finished swallowing the host. A few tiny flecks hit the back of the seat in front of me. Fortunately no one saw and I was able to gather them up with my finger and swallow them. What might have happened if one of the nuns had seen this was too terrible to contemplate. I was, however, haunted by the possibility that I had missed a fragment . . . who knows what would have been the consequences?
Then there was the time one of the other kids upchucked just after taking Communion. As I recall this resulted in a cleanup effort on the scale of Chernobyl.
I’m an Assisting Minister, so I’m handing out the wafers Sunday. I’m not proud of how bland and stale they are.
One family has started baking big round loaves of bread for the early service… Mmm. Much more like what Jesus would munch on.
This thread is making me realize I should do random favors for my friends who grew up Catholic. They really were scared into submission, weren’t they? Maybe the wafers were MADE to stick to the roof of their mouths, just so there’d be yet another way to screw up their souls (“And bring shame on their poor parents!”).
On the positive side, our church has boring wafers… but the Port that comes with it is some of the best I’ve ever had. Seriously.
Yes, but not in your hand.
The trick is not to let the wafer adhere to the roof of your mouth.
More like paper, I’d say. (That’s why it kills me when people dismiss them as “crackers”. It’s not a CRACKER. Crackers have flavor)
I don’t think so.
Dropping a host happened fairly often, actually, back when people kneeled at the altar rail, stuck out their tongue, and the priest put the host onto their tongue. That’s why they had an altar boy carrying a platen (a sort of small plate at the end of a handle) that the altar boy held under the person’s chin, to catch the host if the priest dropped it or if it fell off the tongue of the person.
I was an altar boy once when a host fell, missed the platen, and dropped onto the floor. Everybody went silent and acted real shocked, but the priest just got a corporal cloth (napkin) from the altar, dropped it over the host on the floor (so nobody would step on it, I think), and then continued serving communion.
Later, after Mass was over, he simply picked up the host and took it back into the sacristy and disposed of it, leaving us altar boys to wash & dry the floor where it had fallen. No special ceremony, sprinkling of holy water, nothing. The priest didn’t seem to think it anything serious at all. Perhaps there would have been more ceremony if the church hadn’t been full of a few hundred kids who had to be inside classrooms in the parochial school in a couple of minutes. (And Mother Superior/Principal was very stringent about punctuality!)
See the movie Angela’s Ashes.
There are a LOT of religious references in the movie, and most are hilarious, since they are from a young boy’s POV.
EVERYONE makes such a big fuss over Frank’s First Holy Communion. That was back in the days that a person had to fast from midnight to the actual Mass. The kid was so excited, so nervous. After Church, the family goes to his grandmother’s house for a fancy meal. He manages to throw up in Grandma’s back yard. Grandma INSISTS he return to the Church AT ONCE, and ask the priest how they are supposed to clean up his vomit, since (as his grandmother hysterically points out) she now has the problem of the regurgitation containing the Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ in her back yard.
Frank ducks into a confessional, and poses the question to the priest. The priest replies, “Just clean it up with a bit of water.”
He runs back to Grandma’s and passes along the word. Grandma then wants to know, “Regular water or holy water?”
Frank runs right back, hits the same confessional, and asks the priest, “Regular water or holy water?” The priest emits a strangled snort, and then says, “Regular water.”
~VOW