Comment

Vatican: Holocaust Denying Bishop Must 'Recant'

599
Throbert McGee2/04/2009 11:44:24 am PST

re: #500 BeerDrinking_VictoryMonkey

If one believes that the Host is the Body of Christ, then you can’t have little bits & pieces falling all over the place.

According to my mom and her sisters (all alumnae of pre-Vatican2 Baltimore Catholic schools), it used to be one of things “everyone knows” that if a Host was accidentally dropped on the floor during Communion, the priest was supposed to throw himself bodily on top of it, like a soldier jumping on a grenade. Of course, in this case, the reason was not to prevent the Communion wafer from exploding and sending Jesus-shrapnel into the bodies of innocent bystanders, but rather to ensure that no one would step on it.

Allegedly, the section of carpet within a 12-inch radius of where the Host had landed was supposed to be taken up and burned, lest any microscopic fragments of the wafer end up in the treads of someone’s shoes.

(Again, my mom and aunts never claimed to have seen this happen — it was just one of those things they’d heard as kids.)