"C" is for "communicants being denied the Body just because", and that's good enough for me.

Catholic priests take time off from fucking kids literally to fuck kid spiritually. News at 11.

And of course the really ironic thing is that Jesus made a career of saying that ritual wasn't supposed to be more important than doctrine. For that matter so did the Pharisees, though not quite to the same extent. It's amusing in a dark sort of way to see the Catholic heirarchy so firmly spiritually aligned with the guys who wanted the Romans to off their god. Not terribly surprising though. Lots of conservatives taking over all over the place and purging people who call for reforms from church positions. We're not quite back to the days of Pius IX condemning democracy, defending slavery and running the last ghetto in Europe; but he'd get a great huge clerical stiffy if he could see the direction of the church today.

::sigh:: Yeah... another sterling example of the difference between a faith and a religion. I don't know why they're being so tight on this... I mean, there are health and age exceptions to fasting. How much resemblance do they think those little plastic-y wafers have to the bread served at the Last Supper, anyway???

This is why we have Protestants. (Many of whom take communion to be a symbol and a memorial, and not a per-Mass miracle.) And this is why there's another mini-Reformation of the Catholic Church (for the record, "The" Reformation was by no means the first, just the flashiest) every 200 years or so. (The Church is strict, the Church starts backsliding, there's terrible outcry, reform, reform, reform, and we start all over again. Hey, they're human.) And this is part of why there's been an increasing amount of talk over the last decade of the likelihood of a schism that would form an American Catholic Church (Anglicans, anyone?).

Still... on the other side of things, laity actually *taking* communion in both parts (instead of just witnessing the elevation of the Host) is, well, fairly recent (bearing in mind that I'm a medievalist). There are plenty of people who only take Communion in one part (most often when they're sharing Communion with people who don't believe exactly the same way they do, but hey, I've seen it done for health reasons, too. There was a woman at Oma's rehab hospital who couldn't eat solids, and simply asked that the priest touch a wafer to her lips for her.)

The girl's mother hasn't taken communion since being diagnosed with the same illness. As far as the health risks... sheesh, we're talking about *one* communion wafer, here. I'm not trying to belittle the disease, but I look at her mother kicking up a fuss over one wafer, and then I look at, say, all those early Christians who got beheaded or fed to lions. St. Lucy, who had her eyes put out, or St. Lawrence, who was burned to death on a gridiron, and so on. I think about Quakers who were burned to death as witches by *other Christians* because they didn't practice the same flavor of religion their neighbors did. I think about the ghettos where Pakistani Christians live. Making sacrifices for one's faith is *certainly* nothing new in Catholicism. It's not an easy choice, but it's still a choice. And if she wanted to, I can only think of three times in her life when she'd "have to" take Communion-- first communion, marriage, and last rites.

Pah. When it comes down to it, as far as what *I* believe, Christ was for inclusion, not exclusion, and He made it pretty clear that what you ate or who you ate with was NOT what was important.

The problem Gris, is that the girl can't even take first communion because of health problems. I'll have to see what the Sisters think of this story.

I stumbled on this from Google and wanted to say hello