Remember these folks in your prayers. If they can make it to the monastery to purchase communion wafers, they can also linger for a while in the chapel and attend Mass.
Catholic Ping
Please freepmail me if you want on/off this list
Posted on 12/27/2005 1:24:24 PM PST by rasblue
MONTREAL -- 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.
"They melt in your mouth, and they're not fattening, so it's better than junk food," said Françoise Laporte, a white-haired grandmother of 71 who buys packages of Host Pieces at her local IGA in east-end Montreal. "I'm Catholic. This reminds us of mass."
For older Quebeckers, the snacks offer up a form of nostalgia. Surprisingly, however, they're also finding favour with a younger generation that has rarely, if ever, set foot inside a church.
"My son can eat a whole bag while he's watching TV," Paul Saumure, a manager at another IGA store, said of his 22-year-old. "He's had more of them outside of church than he ever did inside one."
The snacks have been available in stores for years, but the erstwhile holy items are enjoying a second life as a health food. Gaston Bonneau, one of the two major commercial producers in Quebec, says his business started with just himself and his wife in the mid-1980s. Now it's grown to 16 employees and he plans to automate production.
He says his wafers and sheets of "host cuttings" aren't sacred - after all, they haven't been consecrated by a priest or minister in a religious service. Still, the unmistakably sacred imagery seems to strike a chord.
"It's one of those rare items that's still around from the old days . . . everyone had them at some point," he said from his office in Quebec City.
But nostalgia can get you only so far. Contemporary concerns about eating a healthier diet help, he said.
"When you eat chips there's all the fat and salt. You eat a bag of host cuttings and there's none," Mr. Bonneau said. "You might have high blood pressure or a cholesterol problem. It's not exactly crunchy granola stuff, but it is natural."
The conversion of a communion wafer into a munchie-style snack is not entirely surprising in a province that has turned its back on religious practise. Quebec has gone from being one of the most devout enclaves in North America to one of the most secular. In Montreal, churches are being refitted as condominiums and religious statuettes are sold as home decor items in antique shops.
In Quebec filmmaker Denys Arcand's award-winning Les Invasions Barbares, a Catholic priest shows off a basement full of religious items in hopes of luring the interest of an auctioneer, only to be told they're worthless.
Still, not everyone is comfortable watching a symbol of Quebec's religious heritage morph into a snack food. After all, holy communion is one of the most essential Christian sacraments that for believers symbolizes spiritual union with the body of Christ.
"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 François 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."
Traditionally, communion wafers were made by religious communities. The unleavened bread left over after the wafers were cut out was sold by monasteries to their parishioners.
A handful of Quebec monasteries still produce hosts and sell the leftover unblessed bread. A visitor can gain entry past the thick stone walls of the Carmelite monastery in Montreal's Plateau Mont Royal district and, for $5, buy a plain brown bag of wafer bread from an elderly nun.
The transaction takes place in hushed tones. The image of Carmelite nun St. Thérèse of Lisieux gazes out from a large photo on the wall.
There are no cash registers, no lineups and no lottery tickets are for sale. It may be the same combination of bread and water, but it feels like a long way from the Twinkies aisle.
Remember these folks in your prayers. If they can make it to the monastery to purchase communion wafers, they can also linger for a while in the chapel and attend Mass.
Catholic Ping
Please freepmail me if you want on/off this list
We went there recently and were somewhat disgusted they have a LIGHT SHOW in the Montreal Notredame cathedral now for like 20$ a person.
It's a piece of bread.
The Catholic faith in Quebec was certainly pervasive, but it must not have been very deep for it to have disappeared so thoroughly. I am reminded of our many "Catholic" politicians here in the US who have made Abortion Rights their #1 cause. It seems to me they must have spent a lot of time in their youth building up the kind of resentment against God that they currently display.
Isn't the the punchline to a really off-color Methodist joke?
These recipies all seem like they would be invalid matter. But what do you expect from a group that wants one of the four sins that cry out to heaven for vengeance to be treated as normal.
It's stories like this that makes me shudder, that really clueless fundamentalist Christians are indistinguishable from the muslim kind.
It's not really a big deal. When I was an altar boy in the 60's, and had to do early Mass, I didn't have time for breakfast. The priest let us eat handfuls of unconsecrated wafers just to get something in our stomachs.
Exactly. They're not hosts until a priest performs the sacrament.
Plastic cheese? Now there is sacrilege!
Good one!
Just a type of bread until it is consecrated, so it is no big deal.
AND
I've heard they drink wine too. Do they have no shame?>>>>
And BINGO was his name-o!
I give up. How do you construe this article to involve fundamentalists, especially clueless ones?
Sacre bleu!!! And next thing you know, those secular descendents of Frogs will be using (gasp!) water! The very same Eau that is used for Holy Water! Quelle debasement!
Nobody anywhere in the world should be allowed to use l'Eau since it is the same thing as Holy Water, except it isn't blessed... and it isn't used in church ceremonies... and... and... ummmmmmm, nevermind.
Geez, get a life! Or at least grow some thicker skin and quit being offended by all things. It's amazing to what lengths some people will go to be offended. It's just flour and water.
And fer yer info, I was an altar boy and I happen to like the taste of the wafers. If I was in Sous-Frogland, I'd buy a bag of 'em fer a snack. Doesn't mean I'm being sacriligious, any more than drinking H2O does.
Oh, and by the way, The Globe and Mail got it right with their headline "Wafers sold as snacks showing mass appeal" where you obviously didn't with yours: "Sacred Host Sold as Snacks in Quebec". You might try sticking with the verbatim headline when you post, instead of letting your bias creep in. We have enough of that kind of thing with the LSM now.
You gotta stop thinking of it as cheese and think of it as it's own, well... food is probably not the proper term here. Sort of like, "I like hamburgers but I also like Big Macs" or "I like pizza but some Pizza Hut also sounds pretty good right now."
:-D
This in particular is a non-problem. Unconsecrated bread is just unconsecrated bread, similar to matzoh or oplatke.
Much more serious is the total, god-awful depressing secularization of the entire Quebec society. It was spiritual sui-genocide or geno-suicide. They went from being one of the most devout Catholic cultures on earth, to being as cold and sterile as Sweden, almost overnight.
Plus of course now they have a birthrate so low it virtually guarantees their extinction. So crazy: they get all militant about preserving the rights of their Francophone culture, but they neglect to do the one thing needful for their future: produce another generation of Quebecois.
I researched and wrote an article about it 20 years ago, but I cannot say I understand it. If anybody could point me to a good article or book on the subject, I'd be interested.
I spent the better part of a year about 40 miles north of Montreal in the late 1980s. There are many, many churches and almost all were boarded up. I attended a little Anglican church in St. Sauver and, I swear, I was the only person there younger than 60.
It's only bread until it is consecrated into the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ during the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.
Just bread on the shelves. (But it is a little screwy.)
NOT CONSECRATED! Therefore, it is just a cracker.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.