It would be blasphemous to think that Holy Communion could spread viruses, but people were free to choose whether they want to receive it, the Church of Cyprus said on Wednesday.
In a statement on Wednesday, the Holy Synod argued that receiving Holy Communion from the same spoon as hundreds of others was safe for believers.
“It would be blasphemous to think that the body and blood of the Christ could transmit any disease or virus,” it said.
Well maybe so but it isn’t the body and blood of Jesus so……………..
“Christianity’s centuries-old experience has no single incident of such transmission to display.”
As if he could possibly know that.
Comments
10 responses to “Careful of the blasphemy”
How about a regular old spoon? Can a nondivine communal spoon spread a virus?
So no one got plague from communion during the years it was wiping out so many people? Good to know. I’m glad they know that.
Is the blood of Christ 100% ethanol?
Seems to me that the body and blood of any animal would be a good vehicle for spreading viruses.
Did I just blaspheme? Oh well.
The RCC did alter their schtick a tad – it’s now Body of Christ, virus of Satan…
Now that’s got me wondering – did Jesus never get the sniffles?
Is the spoon sacred? Even around half a century ago, when I was going to church (United), they had trays of little glasses (a bit smaller than shot glasses), each one containing a sip of “wine.” You’d go up, take a cube of bread from a plate for the “body,” and take a shot of “blood,” putting the empty glass in a conveniently-placed tray on the way back to your pew. Is the Catholic church stymied by the prospect of doing some dishes? Makes one wonder how often (if at all) that spoon is washed.
Richard Smith, that is the way my church did, too. Only we didn’t “go up”. We sat in our pews as ushers handed around the trays of individual grape juice shot cups and plates of dry crumbs of wafers. Then we replaced the plastic cup in the tray, and the church threw them all away at the end of the service. (That was in the 1970s, before recycling was known to be the one and only thing we needed to do to save the world; in my town, it was thought we only needed to save the whales, and since there were no whales in Oklahoma, no one actually had to worry.)
A spoon? That’s one I haven’t heard of before. I’ve seen little plastic cups, with a mini-wafer under the lid. They were the size of ‘creamers’ from bad restaurants.
It has been claimed that gold’s anti-bacterial properties, plus alcohol, plus the powerful polyphenols in red wine, made communion surprisingly safe.
It’s my understanding that the RC doctrine states that the eucharist retains the “accidents” of bread and wine, while possessing the “essence” of the body and blood of Jesus. But perhaps the Orthodox doctrine transubstantiates anti-virals.