Truth is Stranger than Fiction 2006.12

Wafer Snacks Sow Mass Appeal

The Globe and Mail
Tuesday, December 27, 2005

MONTREAL: A new food craze is sweeping Canada.

Is nothing sacred in Quebec any more? The answer may lie on the grocery-store shelves of the province, next to the chips, corn puffs, and salty party pretzels.

That's where shoppers can pick up an increasingly popular snack: communion wafers and sheets of communion bread. These paper-thin morsels made from flour and water hark back to Quebec's churchgoing days and the sacred rite of receiving holy communion.

But in today's secular Quebec, the wafers and bread are packaged like peanuts and popcorn - and sold as a distinctly profane snack.

I used to love the taste of those things, but I haven't seen them for sale in Tucson.

But not everyone likes the idea:

"People are snacking on hosts and host pieces like it's candy. They're not distinguishing between the body of Christ and something you nibble on at home," said Franois Trudel, a former Catholic missionary familiar with the production of communion wafers in Quebec. "Like everything these days, we're throwing out the baby with the bathwater. We don't respect anything. Nothing is sacred."

And one of the commenters had this to say:

What if one was dropped on the street how should one know if some one has had the intention of stealing a consecrated host from Mass to perform a 'black Mass' or if it was merely a piece of 'bread' from the local store. There ought to be reverence given to the shape and form of the Host that is used in the Mass, perhaps the Church should copyright the design or something to deal with this secularisation of the sacred.