In Menton, yesterday, the BH pointed out a humble but curious architectural feature of the monumental church of St Michel, whose mass dominates the old town. Seen from below, it is clear that there is a toilet, replete with waste pipe, tacked high up onto the side of the building.
I'm sure that this convenience is much appreciated (even though some of the children coming out of mass yesterday, overdessed in their Sunday best and desperate for a pee, actually relieved themselves on the parvis, or esplanade in front of the church).
However, this brings to mind an ancient controversy which racked the church. Catholic dogma insists on transubstantiation, or the direct and real passage of the sacramental bread and wine, at the moment of the elevation, into the flesh and blood of the Saviour. This mystery of Real Presence is different from the belief of such Protestants who still celebrate mass, where the host is cautiously consubstantiated, both bread and flesh at the same time. In other words you are actually eating bread, but in the divine offstage flesh is simultaneously happening.
Some literal minded theologians, aware of the very real, and dogmatically crucial experience of consuming the flesh and blood of Christ, then went a stage further and said that if He was being eaten, then He had to be digested too... with all the excretory consequences that entailed. These 'fundamentalists', in both senses of the word, went by the name of Stercorians (from stercus, the Latin for crap).
Mindful of this, was the outlet pipe first flushed with holy water?
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