Missing Mass

My portlisting pal Xerxes is mocking the Catholic Church for cancelling masses.

“My Catholic friends were told they had to attend mass every week. Even during epidemics. Because the wafer and wine, as the symbolic body and blood of the sinless Christ, could not transmit germs.”

This is a grave misunderstanding of Catholic teaching, and so perhaps must be addressed.

The wafer and wine are not, as he says, the “symbolic” body and blood of Christ. They are the actual body and blood of Christ.

Nor did Catholic doctrine ever hold that this means they cannot transmit germs. That would be like saying they cannot get dirty if dropped on the floor. Great pains are traditionally taken to prevent just this.

If a virus can adhere to ordinary bread, it can adhere to the consecrated host. All the “accidents” of bread and wine remain. That means that they still weigh what they did, look as they did, and act as they did. If you drink enough communion wine, you will indeed get drunk.

Does Xerxes want to argue that God would never allow anyone to die as a result of taking communion? That makes no sense; God allows us all to die, good people as well as bad, and no matter how many times you have taken communion.

As to Xerxes’s point, that masses were not cancelled during previous plagues: this is because medical science did not know about germs until about the middle of the 19th century. Before then, the dominant assumption was that infectious diseases were spread by bad smells: the miasma theory.

On this understanding, a church full of incense should be about the safest place to be. Now we know better.

I have no sympathy with those who complain that the Church has abandoned them by shutting the doors. You could as justly complain that the church abandoned us all years ago by closing its doors when masses were not scheduled, preventing us from going in to pray at will. It was, and is, a practical necessity. This falls under the principle that “Thou shalt not put the Lord your God to the test.” Going to church and assuming it is God’s duty to protect you from the usual laws of nature is necromancy. It is claiming authority over God.

And, of course, God is everywhere. He is with the hermit in his cell. He is with the imprisoned martyr. He was with the persecuted church in Korea that had no priests for thirty years. We have our choice of online masses on the Internet every day.