Vatican outlaws gluten-free bread for Holy Communion

[Eugene]

Source: BBC

Vatican outlaws gluten-free bread for Holy Communion

8 July 2017 Europe

Bread used to celebrate the Eucharist during Roman Catholic masses must not be gluten-free - although it may be made from genetically modified organisms, the Vatican has ruled.

In a letter to bishops, Cardinal Robert Sarah said the bread can be low-gluten.

But he said there must be enough protein in the wheat to make it without additives.

The new rules are needed because the bread is now sold in supermarkets and on the internet, the cardinal said.

Roman Catholics believe bread and wine served at the Eucharist are converted into the body and blood of Christ through a process known as transubstantiation.

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Read more: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-40545023

[Warpy]

1. Why? Is Jebus allergic to everything but wheat?

Somebody needs to tell Rome that people with celiac can't have just a little bit. Gluten destroys tissue in the small intestine with celiac.

As for additives, what the hell are they talking about? You can make an unleavened cracker out of rice flour or masa.

Somebody in Rome is badly confused.

[Mariana]

4. Catholics with celiac are SOL.

They just don't get to eat Jesus's flesh. That sucks for them, but if I'm not mistaken, Catholics aren't required to eat Jesus's flesh in order to go to heaven. At least they aren't being condemned to hell because they have a disease

If I were Catholic, I'd be in a similar situation. I can't drink Jesus's blood, because I'm allergic to wine. Jesus's blood would give me hives, or worse. Too bad.

[struggle4progress]

5. The intent to commune suffices.

[AtheistCrusader]

9. Not bothering with any of it suffices just as well.

[Thomas Hurt]

2. Thou shalt not forsake the Holy Gluten...

[Bretton Garcia]

11. Maybe the gluten is ... Jesus himself!

The Church's reasoning might be this:
transubstaniation being such a complex and obscure issue, it might turn out ultimately that it was specifically the gluten that was Jesus.

So we just can't risk taking it out.

[customerserviceguy]

3. Maybe its because

gluten free bread, just isn't bread.

I had some gluten free pizza crust a few years ago, and it was awful. My heart goes out to those with celiac disease who truly need to avoid gluten, but there are so many people who have needlessly jumped on the gluten free bandwagon in the last half dozen years, for no reason other than somebody labeled a food item as having gluten, and they want to avoid it for some irrational reason.

Human beings created agriculture, which centered on wheat, and that wheat had gluten in it. I'm sorry to see that some have evolved to not be able to tolerate gluten, but the vast majority of humans will have no problem with it. It's just a food fetish for most who demand gluten free products.

[muriel_volestrangler]

6. If you're talking about the quality of the bread, I guess you've never taken communion

What's usually handed out is not 'bread' by any normal definition. It's a paste of flour and water, that I presume has been baked in some fashion (as opposed to just dried, though I wouldn't rule that out). It's generally called a 'wafer'. It turns into a blob of mush in your mouth.

There are breads made without wheat, such as corn tortillas, which are far more like wheat bread than communion wafers are.

[customerserviceguy]

8. I certainly have tasted the communion wafer

as I grew up Catholic, and fortunately, recovered from it over thirty years ago.

I do remember a drunken session after a Knights of Columbus meeting in 1984, where my friend Norm was moving to Arizona, and I got a lot of laughs by breaking off a piece of a tortilla chip from the Mexican-themed bar where we were having his going-away party, and telling him, "The next time you have Communion, it's going to look like THIS!"

Your point is well taken, any breadlike product could be used. The doctrine of transubstantiation is probably not limited to wheat-based substances. Please allow me my point that non-gluten products that are usually made with gluten-containing wheat, like pizza crust (that's what makes the dough stretch when it is tossed in the traditional fashion, rather than rolled out by a machine) are just not the same, and in the minds of many of us, just not as good.

[Voltaire2]

7. Gluten is required in order to magically transform

the wafer into the body of christ. This is a well known fact.

[Igel]

10. Or perhaps because

the chemical modifications necessary to make wheat gluten-free are trivial compared to those involving genetic modification.

From time to time my church used matzoh made of barley for Passover. Stil, barley contains gluten, even if it was peasant bread in 30 AD. If it can't rise, which involves the result of leaven in gluten-containing dough, it can't produce "real" matzoh. Hard to produced tamales that show the effect of chametz. And really, urad-based "bread" can't suffice, either. It misses the meaning entirely.

At the same time, I've used corn tortillas in a pinch during unleavened bread. Cultural equivalence, if nothing else, even if it does miss the implications of Paul's metaphor about a little "leavening leavening the whole lump" and the references the Christ made to leavening and the Pharisees. I'd never use papadums or corn tortillas, for passover, though. I'd make chapati or wheat tortillas. Not that there's a huge difference between them.

Oddly, the 2D surface of a loaf of bread seldom is necessarily seen to be leavened, an easy out if that's all the deeper one's thinking goes. "Goes to respect to diverse traditions, your honor."

[Bretton Garcia]

12. Many might prefer to have Jesus on a piece of toast, or a tortilla

There have been several famous cases where the devout have read the brown patterns in a piece of toast, or a flour tortilla, as Jesus.