This is the type of bread we had in my seminary in the late 1970’s. It looks like the exact same recipe, whole wheat, honey, salt and other unknown ingredients. Many of the seminarians called it “chewy Jesus!” That moniker did nothing for the former sublime reverence in which one might describe the reception of the Most Holy Eucharist.
I have often wondered how valid this substance was and how many valid or invalid Masses did I attend.
And speaking about crumbs! But back then, a pious young Catholic seminarian would be mocked and canceled for his Crumb theology.
When I think back on that era, it really was crummy!
As I write this, though, at 7:30 AM, I do recall how good it tasted and how great it would be with a cup of coffee, not consecrated of course.
17 comments:
The 1970's, face it, was a time of liturgical horror. The chaos in the Church predicted by so many Catholic prophets began to reach its fruition at that time. The worst thing is that too many priests and bishops are unable to get their mindset beyond that decade. I wish we could just erase the postconciliar debacle and make it all go away.
It is the theology of the Eucharist as a meal and the negation of Christ as the Sacrificial Victim, the Lamb slaughtered for our salvation.
Look at Cardinal Mahoney and how the elements are placed in front of him and how central he is as the chef the Holy Meal. Is he asking the congregation by his gesture to hold hands now and sing Kumbaya?
I have attended Divine Liturgy at a Byzantine Catholic rite once. It was strange to me to receive Communion from a spoon. The Host is indeed a cube of bread soaked in wine. Very different - which raises the question - why are there different norms within different rites, and yet they are still valid? I mean, Russian Orthodox are technically schismatic (So what? Who in their right minds wants to be subject to Francis?), yet their sacraments are valid. Just some food for thought. No pun intended.
Cardinal Mahony was a total disgrace from both a Liturgical perspective and how he handled homosexual abuse of the clergy.
Father McDonald, Father Z has a great piece on the infantilization of the Mass today. Here is the link:
https://wdtprs.com/2021/05/wdtprs-5th-sunday-after-easter-tlm-liturgical-goop-wherein-fr-z-rants/#comments
A few years ago I attended a UMC Christmas Eve service with protestant mother and sister, where the reverend held up a giant round loaf of bread and then cradled it as a baby while everyone went up and tore off a chunk with crumbs flying everywhere, and there being no birds in the church, every worshipper as trackable as Hansel and Gretel to their seat where they continued the munching and crumb making. It was inspirational. I DID keep a straight face, I think.
My wife and I attended the wedding of a dear friend’s daughter at a prominent Presbyterian church. The huge loaf of artisan bread was cracked loudly by the priestess at the moment of breaking. My wife was nearly in a panic as they began communion. “What should we do?” I recommended low crawling to the exits then sprinting to car before the Round Heads caught on. We decided to sit put and the truce remained in force.
Where did this idea of fermented crusty communion bread come from? It is clearly wrong.
I'm guessing it's the Sursum Corda.
I skimmed through Fr. Z's piece regarding "goop" and agree with his thoughts. This is emblematic of what went wrong with the mass, at least to me. How childish this looks, almost like play acting or re-enacting what the communal meal might have been like with crystal pitchers. Why H.E. bothered wearing cufflinks as they would not have existed at the time of Christ I do not know. It's no wonder the churches and seminaries and convents emptied as there was not much left to wonder about / be in awe of.
When I was in the seminary, we were baking bread to be used at Holy Mass. It was unquestionably valid (wheat flour and water only) and licit, but it was still a mess. We weren't bakers and no one really seemed to want to insist on the sacristan (me) baking the bread in the best way; it was often gummy and in every case, chewy. Of course there were loads of crumbs. It was a mess. It was not particularly pleasant to the taste, although not offensive, to me at least.
Now I can admit this: as often as I thought I could get away with it, I would "forget" to get a loaf of this bread out of the freezer to bring to the sacristy, thus necessitating recourse to the commercially made hosts. If the priest who oversaw liturgical matters was there and asked, I'd apologize and say, "oh, I forgot" or make some other excuse. It was an open secret among the seminarians, and those who served as sacristans, that we did this; but we couldn't just refuse to bake and use the "substantial" bread.
Another story from my seminary days:
In my final year, when we actually practiced offering Mass (not a real Mass, just practice), the priest instructor modeled the fraction in this way. First, he used a really large celebrant's host -- about the size of a small plate for food -- and hoisted it at least head-high. And he made a great show of breaking it in half, and then pulling the two halves well apart, before bringing them down to the paten. He used a commercially made host that was scored by the manufacturer, intending to be broken into many smaller pieces to distribute. These hosts are widely available, and they make a lot of crumbs; so the very visible effect was a spray of crumbs all over. Of course, this was not a real Mass, so it was truly, only breadcrumbs.
I'm not certain when, but if not in that very moment, but shortly thereafter, it came to me: this way of thinking meant that the "sign value" of the Eucharist was superior to the reality of the Eucharist itself (the point our genial host made above).
It's one thing to recognize that all possible spills of particles cannot be avoided entirely, only minimized to some reasonable degree. Even the most diligent priest accepts this. It's quite another thing to conduct yourself in a deliberate way that you know will create a problem that is unnecessary and scandalous. I don't mean to imply anything about the priest instructing us, because I chose not to confront him or our main instructor about this conundrum. I prefer to think that he simply didn't connect the dots (you can be well educated and still be somewhat dim). I can guess at an argument: that when you're dealing with "particles," they don't really look like bread, so, they really aren't the Eucharist any longer; and at a certain point, that is true. But it is an astonishing case of MISSING THE POINT: it's one thing if you can't help something; but this is a problem the priest chose to create: a spray of particles from the Eucharist, needlessly distracting and perhaps scandalizing people, and for what?
I might mention, besides the question of all those crumbs, this way of doing it looked over-dramatic and was off-putting. The same instructor told us that when we kiss the altar, and I now quote: "really smooch the altar." Yuck.
Fear not, friends, that regime is long gone from the seminary.
Father Fox of course meant "super-substantial" vs "super-duper-substantial" bread.
“Fear not, friends, that regime is long gone from the seminary.”
We live in hope!
Father Fox,
It must have been a painful time to have been in the seminary. I can admit that I thought I had a vocation but I simply could not go through what you went through. I appreciate very much that there were men like you and Father McDonald who “took one for the team” and persisted.
A decade or two ago, I went to a Mass that had the “chewy Jesus!” you referred to! It reminded me of play-dough and I thought to myself "why are they doing this?" I remember at the time researching their recipe, and I learned that it was the only home made bread approved by the diocese. I think they wanted to discourage home made bread. I also read decades before I was born parishes used to make their own hosts using a device similar pizzelle iron. Finally I recall a priest on EWTN telling tales of when a parish gave him raisin bread to use for Eucharist. The good news is that I have been attended Mass for many decades and have only encountered home made bread once.
The Eastern custom is to use leavened bread, the Western custom unleavened bread. To use leavened bread in a Mass of the Latin rite would be valid but illicit. Bread made other than from wheat flour would constitute invalid matter, and adding other substances could render it invalid (it depends on what is added, and in what quantity).
Eastern rite Churches have been using intinction with a spoon for over a millennium, and cutting up the bread into 'croutons' (proskomedia) is part of the Liturgy of Preparation. It goes without saying that the Byzantines have too much respect for the Body of Christ and their own Eucharistic tradition to tamper with it.
In the West, the so-called 'experts' would appear to have had nothing but contempt for their own liturgical traditions. It took them a mere three years to effectively destroy the Roman Rite which had evolved over 2000 years. Their own subjective creativity was far more 'meaningful'. Mahony's pantomime parody of the Mass is a striking example of this astonishing hubris, not to mention his 1997 vision of a new 'Americanized' liturgy which is a lot of things, Catholic not being one of them.
John Nolan,
It is very apparent from this photograph that Mahony views the Mass as a re-enactment of the Last Supper. As I pointed out in another thread, the current crop of American cardinals are not know for their intellectual or liturgical prowess. Many are empty cassocks, very sad to say. We do have some excellent Archbishops like Cordileone and Sample, but Pope Francis would never advance such orthodox and liturgically conservative men to the Cardinalate. The only chance they would have under Francis is if they paid fealty to the Global Warming religion or espoused the cause of illegal aliens.
When I was in high school and they used this kind of bread, we thought they were oatmeal cookies. We thought the priests and nuns were just trying to be hip, which they were not. That bishop looks like he is caught back in the 70's.
Re Mahony and priests, bishops like him, why oh WHY did they just not simply leave the Church (as thousands of others did...in their era), just walk away, as younger men, once it became painfully obvious that a lot of traditional Catholic beliefs and practises were nonsense to them....?
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