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Recently,
I heard a discussion on the radio about whether or not homemade hosts, with
eggs and sugar and so on, were acceptable. There was a priest who said that
such hosts made the Mass invalid. Well, what about all the people that day?
What happened to them? Did Christ deny them His presence? It doesn’t
seem fair.
 e humans are smart enough to send
a spacecraft to another planet from where it sends back photographs and
everything, but compared to God’s wisdom we really don’t
know much about anything at all. So instead
of arguing about a theological answer to your question, let’s look at
the issue psychologically.
Pushing Away
God’s Graces
Given the fact that God is always
pouring down His graces upon us and never ceases to draw us to Him, what,
then, would prevent us from receiving those graces? Well, we ourselves push
away those graces through our own psychology. Through
pride and spiritual
blindness—with arrogance, with
presumptuousness, with
disobedience—we essentially separate
ourselves from God’s saving grace.
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 This
soul also beheld a certain ray of love issuing from that divine fountain,
and darting towards man with a force as if to annihilate him; and she saw
that when it found impediments, then, if it were possible for God to feel
pain, He would suffer the greatest of all grief. This ray aimed only to penetrate
the soul, and it was her own fault if she were not penetrated by it, for
the ray surrounded her on all sides, seeking entrance; but the soul, blinded
by self-love, did not perceive it. |
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—Saint Catherine of Genoa
Spiritual Dialogue, First Part,
Chapter VIII |
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The Elements
of the Eucharist
Now, in regard to the Eucharist,
we know from the Gospels precisely what basic elements are needed for a proper
celebration: bread and wine. All the accounts of the Last Supper agree about
this. So bread and wine are the sine qua non of the
Mass. That’s why we can’t celebrate the
Mass with coffee and donuts. Coffee isn’t wine, and donuts are not
bread.
Hmm . . . wait
a minute here. Aren’t donuts a sort of bread? Hmm . . .
What, then, is bread, really? Well, isn’t it flour and water mixed together
and baked? Yes. And what is wine? Well, isn’t it fermented juice?
Yes.
So can elderberry wine, for example,
be used for Mass? Can donuts—which are flour and water, among other
things—be used at Mass? Thus we have to ask, “When is wine not
wine and when is bread not bread?”
The Example of
Christ
At this point, there can be only
one sane recourse. We simply need to look at what Christ Himself used for
the first Eucharist: He took bread and wine from the Last Supper, a Passover
meal. He used, therefore, grape wine and unleavened wheat bread with no
additives.
Knowing this, we come to the
psychological point of this discussion. Instead of arguing about whether
bread made with leaven and eggs, for example, is bread metaphysically
acceptable to God for our celebration of the Eucharist, we simply have to
realize that we can’t go wrong if we follow the example of Christ.
Moreover, if we try to do something different from Christ’s own example,
then we are guilty of presumption and
pride. And what better a way to push away divine
grace than with presumption and pride!
Presumption and
Pride—or Faith
So regardless of whether or not
bread other than unleavened wheat bread constitutes a metaphysical
invalidation of the Mass, we can still say for certain that presumption
and pride psychologically invalidate the
Mass for anyone falling into those
sins.
And what about those people you
asked about? Well, we can assume that those persons who rejected the example
of Christ and took up presumptuous innovations psychologically invalidated
the Mass for themselves by their own arrogance. Yet we can also assume
that all the graces God intended for anyone would have been fully available,
in one way or another, for those persons who participated faithfully in that
Mass without presumption, pride, or
disobedience.
No
advertising—no sponsor—just the simple truth . . .
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