Every World Youth Day, it seems, there are reports of abuse of the sacred host. The massive outdoor liturgies employ hundreds of volunteer ministers of Communion with varying degrees of training and diligence. Hundreds of thousands attend the Masses with little to no top-down discretion over who receives the Eucharist and how. For every horror like the WYD host that ended up on Ebay, surely there are many hundreds or thousands of examples of dropped or pocketed hosts, reception of Communion by non-believers, and other failures to do justice, in the little ways that please him, to God’s presence.
One report from the just-concluded WYD in Portugal, for instance, tells of consecrated hosts being stored in plastic tubs under a tent. Some intrepid pilgrims kept vigil before those Tupperware tabernacles before reporting the situation to organizers.
Now, I hope that this is all a misunderstanding. It’s easy to imagine extra unconsecrated hosts being kept in such tubs and false rumor leading people to believe they were consecrated. But what if it’s true? Is it really a big deal?
After God gave the Ten Commandments to Moses, he did something he else: he told Moses how to store them. He was very explicit, in fact, giving detailed orders for the construction of the Ark of the Covenant (Exod. 25:9-22).
Those tablets were the holiest thing on Earth. They signified God’s unique presence and, moreover, his personal investment in mankind and the world—and especially his Chosen People. And so they needed special handling.
But why? we might ask. After all, you can’t hurt God. He would not be diminished in any way if his commandments were slung in a pack as the Israelites wandered through the wilderness, or tossed on a pile of hay at night. And besides, the distance between the reverence due to God and our ability to show reverence is infinite. That means that a golden ark and a holy tent are no closer to what God truly deserves than any other, less fancy way of treating his presence.
Well, I can think of two reasons why.
The first reason is that although it’s true that meager mortal efforts can’t come anywhere close to reverencing God’s presence with the splendor it deserves—not even the mighty angelic hosts who praise God continuously in heaven are giving him, strictly speaking, his full due—nonetheless, it pleases him to receive that reverence. Like the father who gives his son sixpence to buy him a gift, to borrow C.S. Lewis’s famous analogy, God does not disdain our earnest offerings: even when they’re small and even when they’re merely a re-gifting of what he gave us. The economy of worship is not by-the-books; it’s heavily rigged in our favor.
The second reason is that, although it’s true that we can’t hurt God no matter how badly we treat his holy things, we can hurt ourselves. Giving God his due is only one part of worship. The other is training our own bodies, minds, and souls to have the right orientation toward him, which is good for us. The Catechism says that worship “sets man free from turning in on himself, from the slavery of sin, and from the idolatry of the world.” In this sense, the fancy ark with its golden cherubs and strict handling instructions wasn’t for God’s sake but for the Hebrews’ sake.
We don’t have contents of the ark anymore (or do we?), but we have something better, the thing that they prefigured: the holy Eucharist. In it, God is truly present in the full incarnate form that, so much more than the old Law, signifies his personal investment in mankind and the world—and especially his chosen spiritual family, the Church.
And we must give that Eucharist no-less-reverent handling today than the Hebrews gave its type, all those centuries ago. Accordingly, Church law gives detailed instructions on the manner and materials used to reserve, transport, and expose the Blessed Sacrament.
The Church in the U.S. is presently in a middle of a “eucharistic revival,” on which enormous resources have been spent, all aimed at restoring Catholics’ plummeting credence in the Real Presence. But I fear that all the clever and expensive religious-ed programming in the world won’t even balance out, much less override, the harms done to young persons’ eucharistic faith if the Church doesn’t bother to act like we really believe it. God doesn’t need us to treat the Eucharist reverently and it doesn’t harm him when we don’t. But it harms us.