Fellow altar boy chiming in here. I’ve never seen this. Are you talking about the water mixed with the wine during the Mass? That’s not the same thing as the holy water to which the OP refers.
I believe a Pope once blessed the Tiber River due to the large number of plague victims being dumped into it.
Yeah, I was an altar boy too, and I’ve never seen that either. I have poured holy water down the sacrarium, usually after a mass where the congregation was blessed with an aspergillum. It was too much hassle to transfer the leftover holy water back to whatever vessel we got it from in the first place.
I have seen priests just eat a bunch of leftover hosts, usually when a mass was held in a different location and there were only a few left. They didn’t want to deal with the issues involved in transferring the consecrated hosts back to the church.
I used mine to bless my BoH.
Unless I am misunderstanding you here, you are either not talking about Roman Catholicism or you are mistaken - the Eucharist is NOT dumped into the sacrarium:
from the Vatican’s *Redemptionis Sacramentum: *
eta : sacred species is the bread and wine, btw
It’s not dumped in: To the extent possible, the Eucharist is to be consumed. But when, for instance, you’re washing out the cups used for the wine, or the purificators (napkins) used to wipe off the cups, it’s inevitable that there will be traces of it left which cannot be consumed. That’s what the sacrarium is for.
no argument here on that point here; I guess ‘the remnants of the Eucharist’ is what threw me, I thought you meant the leftovers, which are eaten/drank by the priest, as you imply.
And what about the indigestible contents of the host? So, a part of the body of Christ is turned into …
The simple answer to the question is - as much as your faith allows.
if your requirement, say when facing demons, requires freshly sanctified water, then nothing else will do - if you simply trying to test for possession - perhaps diluted, setting in the trunk of the car for ‘god’ knows how long water may do the trick.
It really depends on the task at hand.
- From the Book of Winchester.
I think I read somewhere that because of all the Eucharist wine being drunk after Mass, a lot of priests ended up becoming alcoholics – true?
Oh, and I thought this joke might be appropriate:
A priest was was working the confessional one day. A small boy came in and said,
“Father, I talked back to my mother this morning.”
The priest handed him a cup and said “Here, drink some of this holy water.”
The next person came in, an old man and said, “Father, I was out drinking last night and I told my wife I was just watching sports with my friends.”
Again, the priest handed him a cup and said, “Here, drink some holy water.”
Next, a woman comes in, and she’s giggling hysterically.
“Father, I peed in the holy water.”
If I recall my Catholic schooling correctly, once the host no longer retains the physical form of bread it is no longer considered to be the body of Christ.
As the host must be made from nothing more than wheat flour and water, there is nothing indigestible about it to begin with. Regarding the attempt at absurdist reduction, once the host is no longer bread, it is no longer the Body of Christ, whether that occurs at the bottom of the sacrarium or within the duodenum.
As to holy water, it is a sacramental, meaning an object employed for symbolic purposes and, outside of fiction, it has no inherent properties, at all. It is blessed for use in baptisms simply to show respect for the sacrament of Baptism and is used in blessings with the same intention.
Ooh, Jesus melts in your mouth!
Nah, he sticks to the roof of your mouth and must be scraped off with your tongue.
So, it becomes holy steam? Does this mean I can have a holy steam bath?
You can contrive all kinds of edge scenarios. What happens when someone has communion and immediately vomits? regurgitates? spits it out? Is the priest supposed to pick it up and consume it? The short answer to all those is that things are what they are while they are doing what you intended them to be and cease to be it when they are no longer serving that purpose.
You can bless the lake for whatever reason. That means that while you are there, whatever amount of water you use for whatever it was is holy, the rest is not. Once you are done, then none of it is holy water. It may not stand to scientific scrutiny but it makes sense and is simply to understand and observe.
Ditto for all the post consumption issues. Once consumed, it is whatever the body makes of it. There is no holy GI contents and holy shit or holy sweat.
As for that maximum 2:1 dilution ratio that maintains holiness, is that diluted mix then just regular holy water? You can then dilute it 2:1 again and still be holy. Or is it then diluted holy water that needs to be separately stored, labeled and used? Again, not an issue. Holy water is such by intention more than by science. If you need it to be holy then it is, if you don’t it isn’t.
Or at least that was the common sense rule they thought us at Catholic Seminary.
Have you read Angela’s Ashes? They called in a priest.
Homeopathic Holy Water?
When I was a kid I sneezed once after I had returned to my seat after communion, and got fragments of the host on my hands. I licked them off. I didn’t look too hard for other fragments that might have ended up on the floor, since I didn’t want cause a crisis.
Well, that was pretty much the official teaching we got. Handle the obvious, forget about the rest.