Kadath has a nice writeup:
Short version: College student is handed a consecrated wafer during Mass and pockets it rather than eating it, with the goal of taking it back to his seat to show a curious friend.
There are dueling accounts of what happened after that–the student says a Church representative grabbed him, and that’s when he decided to take the wafer home. Church officials of course deny this, and have gone on record calling it a “hate crime.”
Then the student started getting death threats.
Though I’ve wavered between agnosticism and atheism since early in my teenage years, I grew up Catholic. By and large, my experience with the church and its members was positive. However, any organization of sufficient size is bound to have idiots with authority somewhere, and given enough of those for enough time, one of them will make a scene and shame the entire organization.
I can’t help but wonder what would have happened had this student gone to the church I attended weekly as a child. Would there have been a similar backlash? Would he have been harassed at all? For the sake of the members of that church, I hope not, but I can’t rule out the possibility.
Regardless, the attempts by the parish to indict the student in his university’s student court go too far. The responsibility for the commotion at the church service lies with the woman who grabbed him. There was no crime here on his part, and given his stated intentions, I’m not positive that his actions even qualify as a sin. The death threats, though worrisome for him, are easy enough to discount as being from the lunatic fringe. The legal action actually poses a nonzero chance of getting him expelled. The chance of that happening is very small, but the fact that it isn’t zero is dismaying.
Your opinion on this here is pretty much the same as mine. I mean, I don’t think the people at Holy Rosary would have grabbed the student like that, either, but I also agree with you that “any organization of sufficient size is bound to have idiots with authority somewhere, and given enough of those for enough time, one of them will make a scene and shame the entire organization”.
Frankly, what frustrates me the most about the Catholic Church is not its fundamentalist wing or the old elite in the Vatican, but the fact that otherwise intelligent, reasonable people — like the adults we knew as kids at Holy Rosary — continue to believe in a Church whose beliefs are illogical and downright silly at times. In other words, the woman grabbed the student because she felt the wafer was “holy”, and that silly belief in itself saddens me. I, too, am dismayed by the fact that, though unlikely, there’s technically a chance of him getting expelled… all over some small misunderstanding due to silly beliefs.
Be careful here. That the wafer is holy is not a silly belief–it is the central belief of the Catholic church–yes, a mystical belief–the Christ continues to be present in this world in the Holy Eucharist, and that the bread is no longer bread, but the Body of Christ. The Body deserves reverence.
I don’t dispute that you believe it to be holy. You have every right to believe what you want.
The student in this case wasn’t even trying to be disrespectful or irreverent; his intention was benign. He got upset and stubborn when someone physically grabbed him, but I can’t fault him for that.
Regardless of the intentions, failure to immediately eat the wafer is a problem only to people who share the belief that it is holy. I would have no issue if he were excommunicated, or forever banned from that particular church; it’d be a religious solution to a religious problem. Attempting to expel him from college is another issue entirely; if that attempt succeeds, it sets a very bad precendent. It would mean that anyone breaking any precept of any religion could be brought to task by members of that religion; this would unfairly persecute people who were in the minority in their beliefs in their community.