Well, sort of…

The University of Central Florida student, Webster Cook, took a consecrated host from a Catholic mass on campus and brought it home. Webster was given the host as a part of the Eucharist ceremony. According to Catholics, the host, or cracker, undergoes ‘transubstantiation’ during the Eucharist. The online Catholic Encyclopedia spills a lot of words over this doctrine, but I’ll simply print Wikipedia’s concise definition:

Transubstantiation is the change of the substance of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ occurring in the Eucharist according to the teaching of some Christian Churches, including the Roman Catholic Church, while all that is accessible to the senses remain as before.

It took until 1215, at the Fourth Lateran Council, however, for Christians to ‘formally’ establish this dogma as true by verbal and written fiat.

Anyway, Church officials immediately began characterizing Cook’s act as equivalent to a ‘kidnapping’ or ‘hostage’ situation – because hey, that’s the real body of Jesus in there! According to one news source:

Regardless of the reason, the Diocese says its main concern is to get the Eucharist back so it can be taken care of properly and with respect. Cook has been keeping the Eucharist stored in a plastic bag since last Sunday. “It is hurtful,” said Father Migeul Gonzalez with the Diocese. “Imagine if they kidnapped somebody and you make a plea for that individual to please return that loved one to the family.”

Gonzalez said intentionally abusing the Eucharist is classified as a mortal sin in the Catholic church, the most severe possible. If it’s not returned, the community of faith will have to ask for forgiveness.

A “mortal sin” is a sin so terrible that it automatically damns the person to hell if not properly confessed to and pardoned by a priest. As Sam Harris noted in The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason:

But for sheer gothic absurdity nothing surpasses the medieval concern over host desecration, the punishment of which preoccupied pious Christians for centuries…Christians began to worry that these living wafers might be subjected to all manner of mistreatment, and even physical torture, at the hands of heretics and Jews…Could there be any doubt that the Jews would seek to harm the Son of God again, knowing that his body was now readily accessible in the form of defenseless crackers? Historical accounts suggests that as many as three thousand Jews were murdered in response to a single allegation of this imaginary crime. The crime of host desecration was punished throughout Europe for centuries. (99-100)

Nowadays I would like to think that we do not consider murder or death the appropriate punishment for imaginary crimes such as Eucharist theft. However, according to another story, Cook received death threats for his actions. Whether or not the death threats had anything to do with it, Cook eventually returned the wafer to the Church:

Minutes before the Mass began, Student Senator Webster Cook returned the Holy Eucharist he was holding hostage in a Ziploc bag ever since smuggling the blessed wafer of bread out of the Catholic Mass service Sunday June 29. Carol Brinati with the Diocese of Orlando said the Catholic community was “concerned about the possible desecration of the Eucharist,” and pleaded for its safe return.

One might reasonably wonder why eating the body of Jesus is less of a desecration than putting it in a protected plastic bag.

Nevertheless, there are two separate issues here with this story that I see and each involves respect. First, there is respect for individuals. Cook was disrespectful through his actions to the people in the Church. There is no doubt about this. I would never condone intentionally disrupting any church services.

Secondly, there is respect for beliefs and ideas. The idea behind the whole issue here, that of the Eucharist, is one that does not deserve any respect from any rational, thinking person. If I believed that my corn flakes miraculously transformed into the body of Julius Caesar while eating breakfast, I would be called insane. And for good reason. However, if I believe that a cracker miraculously transforms into the body of Jesus while in Church, I am just a Catholic, and this is somehow considered either perfectly normal or an idea that must be respected. Yet, both beliefs are inherently irrational and absurd on the same level. The only difference is that we call one religion because it has achieved a sort of ’sanity’ by sheer numbers.

As Sam Harris also pointed out in The End of Faith, “It takes a certain kind of person to believe what no one else believes (72).” If one individual believes that food can be invisibly transformed into a deceased person’s body, and that drink can be invisibly transformed into that same deceased person’s blood, then we call that person mad and question his or her sanity. However, if over one billion of the world’s population believe it, then we call it a religion. “The danger of religious fatih,” Harris wrote, “is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy” (73).