A desecration.

In Lynn, Massachusetts, just north of Boston, the Eucharist has been stolen:

"It is gravely sacrilegious," said [Rev. James] Gaudreau, after learning that the thieves made off with communion hosts. "We believe (the hosts) are the body and blood of Christ," Gaudreau said.

The hosts were locked inside the tabernacle located on the first floor of the church...

    Gaudreau, piecing together a trail of broken wood, said that the thief ... punched a hole through a wooden cross located on a door to a small room behind the alter. Although valuable gold chalices are kept in a cabinet in the room, only the keys to the tabernacle were removed.

Gaudreau found the keys lying on the altar at the base of the tabernacle Wednesday. The hosts were the only items missing from the church.

A visibly disturbed Gaudreau said he would not speculate as to why only the hosts were stolen, but added, "I have ideas."

Indeed.  There are exactly four reasons why someone might steal the Host from a church:

1. merely as a form of vandalism---wanton destruction
2. to hold it for ransom
3. to send a message
4. in order to abuse it or desecrate it (this includes consuming it)

Vandalism?  Nothing else was damaged.   

Ransom?  Not likely, but the idea has probably occured to folks in the wake of last year's eBay incident, in which some devout Catholics bid hundreds of dollars for a single blessed Host in an attempt to secure it and protect it from desecration by some other bidder.  (eBay has since added Eucharistic hosts to their list of banned items.) 

A message?  Perhaps.  What would it be?  I know what is most important to you, and I hereby demonstrate my contempt for it?  Or you have denied me this thing, but I shall take it from you by force? 

The last possibility is desecration or abuse.  This desecration is evidently not to be a public desecration.  This is a hidden, secret one.  The difference matters.

Were this a public desecration, we might conclude that the perpetrator believes the Host is nothing more than a bit of bread with a lot of kooky superstitious associations attached to it, useful (precisely because of those associations) for making a political statement.  Such desecration would be similar to burning a flag.  This kind of desecration of the Eucharist has happened before.  For example, ACT UP New York boasts this incident on its website:

December 10, 1989: ACT UP and WHAM! (Women's Health Action and Mobilization) co-sponsor our first "Stop the Church" demonstration. 4,500 protesters gather outside St. Patrick's Cathedral [in New York City] to decry the Church's opposition to safer sex education, violent homophobia, and attempts to block access to safe and legal abortions. 111 people are arrested. The news media choose to focus on, and distort, a single Catholic demonstrator's personal protest involving a communion wafer.

That's a public desecration-as-protest (in case you're wondering, it involved spitting it on the ground).   Quite probably the demonstrator does not believe that the Host is special in any real way.  All that is necessary is for him to be aware that it is special to someone else.

A private desecration, on the other hand, is meaningless as protest.  A person who obtains a host for a secret desecration believes it has power, believes that the desecration accomplishes something.  Who knows what that is?  Maybe he (or she), believes it is God, like we do.   Maybe he wishes to hold God in his hands and crush him, knowing it is not likely that a wafer will fight back.  Maybe he fears it is God and hates that fear, intends to prove to himself that it is only bread.  Maybe he is trying to purge his mind of irrational beliefs, and thinks that by desecrating a host he can finally rid himself of its power over him.  Maybe he thinks, in his own twisted superstition, that performing certain actions upon, or in the presence of, a blessed Host will help him obtain what he wants. 

I don't know.  All of these sound crazy to me.  But why risk jail, break and enter, to steal something that is to you only a bit of stale bread?

Bettnet (h/t) wonders why this isn't classified as a hate crime, instead of petty larceny.  I dislike any sort of legislation that smacks of thoughtcrime---let theft be theft, let assault be assault---but theft of an object whose worth is only in its holiness certainly seems to fit the definition.

Comments

[Valerie]

I was listening to St. Joseph radio last week. The topic was gangs, and the speaker as detailing how Satanic cults are a form gang. A caller from Cincinnati called in stating that a local church had been desecrated and the Eucharist had been stolen. Apparently the Satanists use consecrated hosts in their rituals, something that completely stunned me and gave me the creeps.