Pope Benedict XVI changed the practice of allowing Holy Communion to be taken in the hands during papal masses. When I heard this, I quickly judged the Pope to be a cranky reactionary who wanted to return to the way things used to be. Then I heard his reasons. Some tourists were taking communion in their hands and putting them in their pockets as a kind of souvenir from Rome. The hosts were being desecrated, and so the Pope took appropriate action. How horrible to treat the Body of Jesus, the most sacred substance on earth, as a souvenir or as a kind of rabbit’s foot.
Our society has lost its sense of the sacred. A woman’s womb, the sacred place where God knits together a new work of his art is now invaded recklessly by abortionists. A woman’s body, sacred to the Lord, is treated as an object of sexual pleasure. And even the Body and Blood of Christ at Mass is often treated in a nonchalant manner and desecrated.
Jesus charged his disciples to protect what is sacred (Matthew 7:6, 12-14).
“Do not give what is holy to dogs, or throw your pearls before swine, lest they trample them underfoot, and turn and tear you to pieces.”
A dog can’t distinguish between a seventy-five-dollar steak and a cheap piece of hamburger meat. A pig can’t distinguish between a handful of rocks and a handful of expensive pearls. And so, our secular society cannot distinguish between bread sent from heaven, and a cheap piece of bread from the grocery store. Jesus says that if we become careless with the sacred gifts of God, the dogs and swine will turn on us and tear us to pieces.
In sending his only Son to earth, God began to reclaim creation for himself. He began a process of destroying the works of the devil and reclaiming what the devil had stolen from him. Jesus, the Holy One of God, gathers a new people around himself that, joined to him, become the sacred dwelling place of God on earth. And the sacred system established by Jesus under the guardianship of our priests has become the presence of heaven on earth.
Just as the people of his day so abhorred the sacred presence of God, revealed in Jesus Christ, that they tried to rid the world of him, so the people of our day to not recognize or honor that fact that God himself dwells on earth both in the presence of his chosen people, and his presence in the sacraments (sacred-ments) Rather than compromise our holiness and adapt to the world’s standards, we resolve even more to be “holy as the heavenly Father is holy.”
Jesus continued to say,
“Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road broad that leads to destruction, and those who enter through it are many. How narrow the gate and constricted the road that leads to life. And those who find it are few.”
Doesn’t “many” mean the majority, and “few” mean the minority? Though all are called to surrender to Jesus and opt for a holy life, few people respond to it. If the gate to life were wide, there would be little cost to enter it, indicating that what Jesus offers us is cheap. Would the Son of God die on a cross to win a prize that is cheap?
Immersed in a secular culture that debunks all that is holy, we must take extra measures to protect our own holiness and that of all that is sacred.
