Respect for the Eucharist begins
with how it is 'handled'
Mishandling the Host appears to be the gravest problem in the New Mass
By New Catholic
November 5, 2017
[Inspired by recent debates on the matter, we repost this item from Sept. 28, 2011.
Translation problems? Mass celebrated towards the people? Altar girls? Postures?
No, the greatest and gravest problem of the liturgy of the Latin Church - that is, of the "Ordinary form", or Mass of Paul VI - is one that transcends all this, even it is related to all of them: it is the way the Body of Christ is treated.
That must be the very first issued tackled by an eventual true "reform of the reform", one that is set not by fleeting example, but by hard law.
(1) Any human being who has ever had any experience with any edible object based on a milled product knows that crumbling is a natural part of the process of consuming it: loaves, wafers, cookies, biscuits, crackers, tortillas, nachos - it does not matter, fragmentation takes place.
(2) Catholics believe that the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ are truly present in each of the Consecrated Species, and completely in every single and minute fragment of it.
Because of (1) and (2), the Church was traditionally extremely careful regarding the distribution of Holy Communion. That meant
reducing to the minimal imaginable level the possibility that any Fragment of the Body of Christ, even the smallest one, might be profaned or lost - which meant only the celebrant himself touched the Body of Christ, that all Fragments could be held under control on the Altar, and that all gestures in the distribution of Holy Communion by the Priest (or Deacon) to the servers and faithful would mean that no Fragment could ever go unaccounted. (And that same process also took place with the distribution under both Species in the East, in a slightly different evolution, but with the same end result: consecrated hands distributing Holy Communion in such a way to make any loss or spillage unlikely and under strict control.)
What the liturgical innovations following the Council did was to inculcate Catholics with the notion that the Fragments of the Body of Christ do not matter - and it would be absurd to limit that only to the abhorrent practice of Communion in the hand; no, it is not just a matter of respect, but of Belief that God Himself is entirely present in each single Fragment of the Consecrated species; and Communion in the hand is only one aspect of this.
In fact, all that permission for distribution by people other than those with consecrated hands that are not purified before and after the Distribution of Holy Communion, the use of all kinds of "vessels", and all related matters - happening thousands upon thousands of times every single day around the world - also necessarily lead to abuse. Or, rather, they ARE the abuse.
All other problems with the New Mass are intimately related with this gravest of problems. If the Sacred Liturgy is the "summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed" (SC, 10), the handling of the Body of Christ by the non-ordained is the pit from which all and every single liturgical abuse ontologically flow. Because if God present in the Most Holy Sacrament is treated as "crumbs" and "dust", then reality vanishes and all that remains, in appearance, are empty and ridiculous symbolisms - and no wonder people do not respect these, change them at will, and expect them to adapt to one's own preferences.
Serendipitously, on the same day, Aldo Maria Valli chose to write about a little-publicized Eucharistic miracle in our day.S ince I first read about this Eucharistic miracle shortly after Jorge Bergoglio was elected pope, I had always wondered why 1) he appeared never to have publicly spoken about it while he was still Archbishop of Buenos Aires but more, 2) why he has never referred to it since he became pope.
The facts seem to me quite convincing enough – and I was impressed that Bergoglio himself had been instrumental in the final efforts to obtain definitive and corroborated scientific confirmation that the piece of ‘living flesh’ into which a discarded host had once again demonstrated the Trans-substantiation we Catholics believe takes place everytime Bread and Wine are consecrated at Mass, in the way other Eucharistic miracles through the centuries. Though spotty in places, Valli's summary presents the known facts about the Eucharistic miracle of Buenos Aires.
That Eucharistic miracle in Buenos Aires
Translated from
November 5, 2017
While there is increasingly insistent talk about an ‘ecumenical Mass’ said to be under study by a Vatican commission
[the Vatican denied this yesterday from two fronts], and while there are Catholics who now maintain that the center of the Eucharistic Sacrifice is
not the Consecration of the bread and wine but listening to the Word of God, I wish to call attention to a Eucharistic miracle that Pope Francis knows well because it took place in Buenos Aires just before and during his episcopate in the Argentine capital.
Even if
[inexplicably to me!] the Church of Buenos Aires has never seemed to desire publicizing it, the story is rather clear.
In the Santa Maria parish, which is in central Buenos Aires, at #286 Avenida La Plata, in the neighborhood called Almagro, on Friday, May 1, 1992 (in the very month and year when Bergoglio was named auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires), two fragments from consecrated hosts were found on the corporal of the tabernacle
[The corporal is the white linen cloth on which are placed the vessels containing the bread and wine during Mass]. Following SOP in such cases, the parish priest ordered that the fragments be placed in a vessel with water where they would dissolve, and to put this vessel in the tabernacle.
But one week later, the pieces had not dissolved. Rather they now had a blood-red color. Two days later, during Sunday Mass, the priest noted some drops of blood on the paten
[the saucer-like vessel that holds the bread to be consecrated].
[One assumes the vessel containing the host fragments meant to be dissolved continued to be kept within the tabernacle.]
Two years later, on Sunday, July 24, 1994, when the priest celebrating Mass (it was for children that Sunday) took out the ciborium from the tabernacle before giving Communion, he noted a drop of blood on one of the interior walls of the tabernacle.
Fast forward to August 15, 1996, Feast of the Assumption. At 7 pm., after Mass, Fr. Alejandro Pezet was approached by one of his parishioners who brought him a host he had found on the floor in a corner of the Church, obviously profaned.
Again, the priest placed the particle in a vessel filled with water so it could dissolve and kept the vessel in the tabernacle. A few days later, on August 26, he found that the host had transformed itself into a solid piece that resembled a fragment of bloody meat.
The priest informed Archbishop Antonio Quarracino, who passed it on to his auxiliary Bergoglio. A professional photographer was called to photograph everything, and a report was made and sent to Rome.
Already in 1992, some hematologists had established that the blood in the earlier episode was human blood. This time, Bergoglio himself authorized an even more thorough investigation from a laboratory in Buenos Aires whose technicians were not informed about the source of the ‘specimens’ sent to them for analysis. Their conclusion:
the tissue, along with the red and white blood corpuscles, was from a human heart and was still alive with the cells active.
In 1999, Bergoglio requested a new analysis and asked a Bolivian hematologist, Dr. Ricardo Castanon Gomez, to take a tiny fragment of what seemed to be human flesh (still kept in the tabernacle) and to send it to a forensic genetics laboratory in San Francisco, which reported in 2000 that the sample did contain human DNA.
A similar sampling was sent to Prof. John Walker of the Unviersity of Sydney in Australia, who said that the sample he analyzed were human muscle cells and blood cells that were all intact. Moreover, as Walker would write Castanon, the tissue was inflamed as from someone who had undergone trauma.
Samples were also sent to a heart disease specialist in New York, Dr. Frederic Zugive of Columbia University, who wrote in his report on March 26, 2005:
“The material analyzed is a fragment of heart muscle from the left ventricular wall near the valves. This muscle is responsible for heart contractions. As you know, the left ventricle pumps blood to all parts of the body. The cardiac muscle examined was inflamed and contained a large number of white blood cells. It means that it came from a living heart, since white blood cells die outside the body. Morever, these white corpuscles had penetrated the tissue which indicates that the heart was under great stress, as if its owner had been struck hard through the chest.”
The origin of the samples was not made known to any of the investigators. Zugibe was stunned when told later that the material had been kept in distilled water for many years. And even more so when Dr. Castanon revealed to him that the ‘heart muscle’ had originated from a consecrated host.
“How and why a consecrated host could become the body and blood of a living person,” said the scientist, who has also done studies on the Holy Shroud of Turin, “is an inexplicable mystery for science, something that is not within its competence”.
The Buenos Aires ‘samples’ were further compared in a blind study with those from the Eucharistic miracle of Lanciano
[In the 8th century, an Italian monk who had doubts about the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist found, when he said the words of consecration at Mass, the bread change into living flesh and the wine change into blood which coagulated into five globules. The specimens from the miracle are kept in a silver ostensorium venerated at the Church of San Francesco in Lanciano, northern Italy, where they are treated as relics and visited by pilgrims.vThe Catholic Church officially claims the miracle as authentic.] The analysts, not knowing the origin of the samples being compared, concluded that they all belonged to the same person, with type AB blood, and whose DNA was identical to that found on the Shroud of Turin as well as the Sudarium of Oviedo.
[This is a piece of linen cloth, 34 by 21 inches, thought to have been used to cover the head of Jesus immediately after the crucifixion (See John 20:7). It has been kept in the Cathedral of Oviedo, northern Spain, since 1113. Modern overlay techniques show that the Sudarium conforms exactly to the image of the face of Jesus in the Shroud of Turin, and of course, that the blood type in both is AB. A full and fascinating account of theSudarium of Oviedo may be read here: https://www.shroud.com/guscin.htm]
It must be noted that Jorge Mario Bergoglio, both as auxiliary bishop and then as archbishop, followed the procedures required by the document “Norms for proceeding to discern presumed apparitions and revelations” issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1978. It is also known that he went several times to the church of Santa Maria, including for Eucharistic Adoration. [Did he kneel at Eucharistic Adoration?]
In the church of Santa Maria, the faithful are periodically reminded of the facts we have narrated, and the parishioners say “We pray that in the entire community of the Church, the Eucharistic significance of our faith may grow”.
[I do not get the impression that the miraculous ‘fragment’ has ever been put on public display, and if I were one of the church parishioners, of course, I too would like to see this evidence of Trans-substantiation made concretely real.
But the fact that it even happened at all in our time is miracle enough for me. Something that cannot be equaled by even a thousand Medjugorges sprouting everywhere with the claim that Our Lady appears every day with messages sounding like endlessly recycled bad homilies!
So my big question is why the Church – in Rome as well as in Buenos Aires – has never ‘publicized’ the Eucharistic Miracle of Almagro as I like to think of it. Perhaps because the institutional Church has always preferred to ‘go slow’ about pronouncing herself on apparitions and other private revelations, but if she can rely on expert physicians and expert theologians to decide on a miracle of healing through the intercession of a candidate saint, should not the theologians pronounce on the many independent scientific analyses already made about the Eucharistic miracle in Almagro?
My other question is whether we are to read anything in the coincidence of the first Almagro miracle taking place at around the same time Bergoglio was named a bishop. Was it a sign that he was destined for greater things? (My first thought, of course, is: what was Joseph Ratzinger doing on May 1, 1992, other than celebrating the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker?) Why has Bergoglio been subsequently ‘reticent’ – uncharacteristically – about this whole subject? I don’t believe he has mentioned it once as pope.
Could it be he himself does not believe in Trans-substantiation, taking the cue from Luther et al, and does not like the implications of the Almagro miracle at all? That’s, of course, an extreme view from someone who truly believes Bergoglio is really anti-Catholic.
However, I do need a quick google course on the Eucharistic miracles before Almagro to get a better fix on the subject.]
