Inspired by this thread, in particular this comment:
What is the protocol if, by some error or accident, a consecrated host can’t be accounted for (that is, it’s not consumed by a communicant but can’t be located and disposed of properly)? Does the priest or the congregation have to explicitly ask for forgiveness?
Been a lot of years since my altar boy days, but our priest used to have to eat them. Felt sorry for him.
Why is it offensive to throw away a wafer that is the body of Christ, but it is okay to eat it and turn it into fecal waste? Just curious…
The consequences if a lost host cannot be located? None at all.
Thanks. But what if the host can’t be found? I’m thinking of a situation where the priest know he consecrated N hosts, knows he distributed (N-1) hosts, and can’t account for that one un-distributed host. If he can’t find it, he can’t eat it.
Say someone is bringing consecrated hosts to the hospital for patients who wish to receive communion. On the way there, he stops for a coffee and his car, containing the hosts, is stolen. The car isn’t recovered and (presumably) the thief does not return the hosts to the nearest Catholic church. Is there some protocol regarding the lost hosts? Would the person simply mention at his next confession that his oversight led to the inappropriate disposal of hosts, do penance, and be absolved?
I don’t recall a priest ever counting hosts or keeping track of how many hosts he distributed. For your second example, the hosts wouldn’t be consecrated until the priest is already at the hospital. I can’t think of a way one would know they lost a consecrated host, and not know where it could be found.
Used to have to eat what? Not lost hosts, by definition; were you referring to wafers which fell on the ground or something?
The hosts are consecrated during the Catholic mass near the end of the ceremony. There is between 1-10 minutes between when the hosts are blessed and consumption. Think of praying before a meal and eating; there is not much time in between. The priest either counts or estimates the congregation; he eats any excess hosts. There are never any consecrated hosts just lying around. It has been transformed from mere bread to ‘the Body of Christ’. No priest would leave it unattended for even a few seconds.
This is why practicing Catholics are so upset about the ‘stolen Eucharist’. It really is ‘the Body of Christ’. If you don’t believe, fine. I don’t believe either. I just think that if it was an Amazonian tribe that believed in the ‘Flying Spaghetti Monster’ that an actual noodely appendage would have been treated with more respect.
As a tangent to the OP, I do recall that when my sister was younger, she dropped the host. I received communion before her and was in my seat before she was. She told me that a woman leaped from her seat, crossed herself, and swallowed the wafer.
SSG Schwartz
I used to think they were cinammon lozenges when I were a lad. I was disappointed at my first holy communion.
So let’s say the priest, muttering “body of Christ”, puts the host on someone’s tongue. That person has committed some sin that he/she was too embarrassed earlier to confess. The person is so upset by this that as soon as the host hits his/her tongue, the person vomits on the floor. Who digs the host out of the pile and eats it? The Priest? The woman in the front row?
I don’t remember it exactly , but the Catholic church does actually have a recommended procedure for this scenario. IIRC it involves blessing the bag you pick the vomit up in, and burying it. I suppose one of the advantages of being a 2000 year old instution is that you’ve encountered most scenarios before, and figured out a way to deal with them.
Thanks, Bill. I’m greatly relieved.
Well, if you’re acquainted with how digestion works, you’ll know that the overwhelming majority of a piece of bread becomes part of the body of the eater.
It is okay, because the body is holy. In the United Methodist Church, the consecrated bread (or wafers, whatever, we’re flexible on that) and the juice must either go into a body or into the earth. My church doesn’t have a sacrarium, so if needed, the communion steward digs a small hole in the ground and puts the bread and juice in there.
I’d heard that just as transubstantiation imparts the Holy Spirit into the wafer to become a holy piece of bread, digestion strips the Holy Spirit out of the wafer and passes it into your blood. The unholy part gets passed along your intestines.
Communion is:
A) A formal ceremony which bonds a population together,
B) A magical process whereby an inanimate, immaterial ‘spirit’ is infused into a little, edible piece of styrofoam to make those believe they’ve actually consumed and “communed” a piece of a ghost.
Yes, I have been baptized a Catholic. I went to CCD [sub]it was worthless[/sub]. I am going to Hell for this. I happily subscribe to “A” more than I do “B”. I do appreciate the pomp and circumstance for the bonding of the faithful as one crowd, but I digress and that is one whole 'nuther thread right there.
Tripler
Kinda quoth Spock: “What does God need with a wafer?”
Is this the official stance of the church, or are you just saying that because there is no god and nothing will actually happen, aside from some huffing and puffing from the church officials?
Unless Q.E.D. was being serious, no one has really answered the question in the O.P. What if someone, after receiving the host, spit it into his hand, yelled, “PSYCHE!” and sprinted out the door? Would the RCC send their albino assassins after them? Host desecration was once used to justify Jewish massacres, so at some point the church took the issue of lost wafers pretty seriously.
Was that before or after Kirk asked his question about a starship?
Well, there is a precedent.
Yeah, I’m slogging through that thread right now-- didn’t see it when I posted that reply, but I don’t think that issuing death threats is the standard way to deal with these things as declared by some convention in 1142. The question is whether there is some sort of ritual that a priest can do to remotely extract the jesus essence or turn it back into a cracker or whatever, if a host is lost and can’t be returned. Does the Pope have to dispatch his Swiss Guard to recover it at all costs? Or do they just not worry about it? That last one would be the sane answer, but that other thread gives me the impression that it is probably not how it is actually handled.