MaxPC wrote: ↑Wed Mar 20, 2024 10:59 pm
Neto wrote: ↑Wed Mar 20, 2024 5:44 pm
Judas Maccabeus wrote: ↑Wed Mar 20, 2024 4:08 pm
In a Catholic Church taken over by a black holiness group (my friends and I were installing a sound system with spare parts) there was a hopper, kinda like a funnel that led to the ground below the alter. One of my friends (Also an ex-catholic) was a former alter boy, and said this was for disposing of surplus wine.
The building used for the Bible college where I graduated had previously been a Jesuit Seminary, and there was one of those special sinks behind the main chapel area. The stone tables in the prayer rooms had places where you could see that something had been broken off of them. The confessionals had been converted into telephone booths.....
Some details: The special sink that drains directly to the ground underneath the church building is called a sacrarium. Everything that proceeds is related to our belief that it is the Body and Blood of Christ under the appearance of bread and wine.
When the Precious Blood is accidentally spilled it is cleaned up with a linen cloth called a purificator; if a Host is dropped it is retrieved and put into a bowl of water to dissolve. The purificator that was used to clean up the Precious Blood is soaked in water in a similar bowl. The water from these bowls is then poured into the sacrarium.
When the priest pours about 10 ml of wine into the chalice he will also pour in an approximately similar amount of water: this represents the blood and water that flowed from Christ’s side on the Cross. Any residual Precious Blood in the chalice is consumed by the priest and the cup is thoroughly wiped dry with a purificator. This purificator is soaked in water and the water poured into sacrarium. The purificators are always soaked before being washed and ironed..
This is just a curiosity on my part, but I'm reminded of how, when our MB congregation back home decided to replace the original church house with a new, larger one, the question came up of what should be done with the old one. It had a raked floor in the meeting area, so it would have been expensive to level the floor and divide it up into classrooms. (The basement also had some serious water issues, so that was a major consideration as well. I knew that full well, because I had been the janitor while I was in HS.) Another party offered to purchase and move the building off of the property, to be used as a wedding chapel. Too much detail here already - the point is that the "winning opinion" was that they did not want the building to pass out of our control, to prevent its use as a bar or some other disgraceful purpose.
All of the church houses in Russia were confiscated when the Soviets took over everything, and some of them still stand, having been repurposed as all sorts of things, granaries, businesses, Soviet offices, bars, etc. At the basis of our belief, we do not regard physical things as being in some way "holy", but this tendency does still show up in various forms. (I remember an incident where my Dad gave me a licking, or at least a sever scolding, for 'Disrespecting the House of the Lord'. The new Sunday school wing was under construction, and he caught me climbing out of one of the windows, after having been playing and running around inside. I protested that the building hadn't been dedicated yet, so it wasn't yet "the house of the Lord', but he said it is being built for that purpose, so my "exception" didn't apply. Just for reference sake, I was 11 years old.) Anyway, so the old church house was destroyed.
So my question comes back to "things that are holy". What of the earth that has absorbed all of that "Precious Blood" (as you call it) - Is it in some way holy? I'm wondering "where it stops". At what point can you regard something that was holy as being 'common"? If a Catholic "church house" is torn down, does that earth under the sacrarium need to be treated in a certain way?
[I hope that my questions here are not disrespectful to you. You must realize that your participation here provides us, as 'anabaptists', a unique opportunity, a peak into what for us is a somewhat "foreign world".]
Congregation: Gospel Haven Mennonite Fellowship, Benton, Ohio (Holmes Co.) a split from Beachy-Amish Mennonite.
Personal heritage & general theological viewpoint: conservative Mennonite Brethren.