Wuhan Coronavirus: Could Catholic Indifference Kill People?
Sometimes a church that’s two thousand years old and has a global congregation of 1.2 billion can be so entrenched in its ways that it defies common sense.
I’m talking about Catholicism, of course.
With the Wuhan coronavirus raging in China and quickly moving around the world, Catholic leaders seem indifferent to the role they could play in spreading the outbreak by not ordering all churches everywhere to immediately - and forever - cease the unsanitary practice of offering a shared communion cup to churchgoers.
I’m not in the mood for a theological debate about the curious practice. It’s not safe. And it needs to stop.
There are three suspected cases of the Wuhan virus in Virginia and hundreds of cases of the ordinary flu.
Yet I went to mass yesterday at Virginia Beach’s Star of the Sea and watched in disbelief as parishioners young and old shared the communion chalice, with just a swipe of a cloth napkin and a rotation of the cup between germy lips.
Ugh.
Would these same people share a drink with strangers at a 7-Eleven? Do hospitals disinfect operating rooms with napkins? Or do clergy and the faithful believe stained glass windows offer some magical protection against pathogens?
Let’s be honest. The tradition of the common communion cup - which varies from diocese to diocese and is also found in some Episcopal and Lutheran churches - is unhealthy.
Yes, the Bible tells us that Jesus shared a cup with 12 of his friends. But he also wore sandals and traveled by donkey. That doesn’t mean we have to ditch our shoes, cars and knowledge of communicable diseases to follow Him.
Frankly, it shouldn’t take the specter of a pandemic to wake the clergy. A simple understanding of how pathogens work should.
The CDC reports that the common flu kills about 36,000 Americans every year and causes about 200,000 hospitalizations. There are 70 million Catholics in the country. American bishops ought to be doing everything possible to protect them. A good start would be to warn worshippers against unsafe practices such as shaking hands and drinking after each other.
So far this year, more than 7,000 confirmed cases of the flu have been recorded in the US. Now 48 states are reporting “high levels” of influenza activity.
Yet priests continue to pass around chalices.
During the SARs scare in 2003 American bishops reluctantly ordered use of the common cup to be suspended. But as soon as that epidemic evaporated so did Catholic common sense.
As a matter of fact, this unhygienic practice is relatively recent. The early church reportedly used a shared chalice for communion but stopped it in the 13th century. It wasn’t until Vatican II in 1970 that common communion cups were again offered to lay people.
Whenever the issue of safety is raised, defenders of the shared cup stubbornly insist that no cases of illness have been directly traced to communion. Ridiculous. How many people know exactly where they became infected with flu germs? And if the cup sharing custom is harmless, why has the church banned it during major outbreaks of disease?
It’s not enough for many of us to shake our heads when offered the cup. If others share germs, they endanger the entire community. This is a public health issue.
Writing for the National Catholic Reporter in 2018, Jesuit Fr. Thomas Acker, who holds a PhD in biology from Stanford, argued against sharing a cup.
In the United States it is not our custom to share cups, utensils or straws. Consider the reaction of guests if you were the host of a party, put only one large cup of wine on the table and told the guests that they should pass this cup of wine around and share. A congregation drinking from the same cup is a time bomb waiting to happen.
A time bomb.
Anyone else hear ticking?
