Gluten in bread used for the Eucharist
What kind of bread and wine must be used for the Eucharist, otherwise known as Holy Communion or the Mass?
In this country the wine is usually a sweetish red wine, but not fortified. The bread is made from wheat and not highly baked, and these days usually presented as individual thin round pieces, sometimes called wafers, though I dislike the term, since it might seem to distinguish it from bread. In the Eastern churches leavened bread is used.
By the time worshippers receive Holy Communion, what is it that they receive? Some Christians think it is bread, used as a symbol for the spiritual presence of Christ; others say it is bread with which the real presence of Christ is joined.
At the Catholic end of the spectrum, which I take to be the traditional teaching, communicants do not receive bread but the body of Christ, which the bread has become by something that the “Church most aptly calls Transubstantiation”, as the Council of Trent put it.
I haven’t come across any other philosophy that describes the sacrament as satisfactorily as transubstantiation does, but I was interested to hear what the difficulties were that people raised in response to a new document from the Vatican that repeated a ban on gluten-free bread being used in the Mass.
This was presented in some papers as bad news for coeliacs, who have a reaction against gluten. But the document specifically allows low-gluten bread, which may have gluten levels of less that 200 parts per million. The criterion that the document uses is that the bread should hold together as real bread.
So what does this mean at the time of receiving Communion? A bafflingly confused understanding of the Vatican document was presented in a headline in The Times that said: “Body of Christ was not gluten free, says Pope.” Neither the Pope, nor anyone else, said anything of the sort.
Another kind of confusion was expressed by a newspaper columnist who wrote that, since communicants received not bread but the body of Christ substantially, there need be no worry about gluten.
The philosophy behind transubstantiation holds that, while the bread is turned into the substance of the (living) body of Christ, the accidents of the bread remain as they were. These accidents include appearance, smell, taste, weight, size and even location. By experiencing these with the senses, the communicant knows he is receiving the sacrament that brings him the body of Christ.
Another consideration is what happens when the accidents of bread break down and change. A few minutes after receiving the sacrament, there will be no sign of the accidents of bread in the communicant’s stomach. There will no longer be the sacramental presence of Christ. Instead, the constituents of bread will have their natural effects, of nourishment for most people, but more harmful effects for someone with coeliac disease.
The spiritual effects will be quite different. The good Christian eating the sacrament receives the body of Christ, and where the body is, there also is the living blood, soul and divinity of Christ, with whom are inseparably present the persons of God the Father and the Holy Spirit. Jesus Christ is closer to the communicant than he was to the Disciples when they gathered round him during his earthly life.
It is a strange thing to eat anyone – an astonishing notion. Usually it can’t be done, as cannibalism is not eating someone, only their dead flesh. Eating most food turns it into us. Eating Christ turns us into him.