Opinion | Miracles at Mass

The June 14 Politics & the Nation article “Was it a Communion miracle? Conn. parish investigates.” discussed the possibly miraculous reported multiplication of Communion hosts in a Connecticut church. That brought me back to my first (disappointing) encounter with the miraculous.

As a very young boy in a Catholic family, suddenly informed by his parents that he was to become an altar boy, I had somehow formed my own assumptions about God and the Catholic Mass. My 10-year-old mind had decided that the Mass rituals indeed involved a miracle — that the golden chalice held skyward by the priest had started out empty but became filled with hosts when he brought it back down. To my young mind, this would certainly explain why grown-ups behaved so seriously and reverently in church. I held on to this notion until one morning I noticed the priest (backstage, as it were, just before Mass) casually shaking an ordinary box of wafers into that golden receptacle, which he then placed behind the magical small door at the center of the altar.

Then and there, my young mind decided it was all a simple trick. For good or for ill, I still feel that way to this day.

Leonard C. Bruno, Chevy Chase

The June 14 article concerning the supposed miracle at a Catholic parish in Thomaston, Conn., asserted that “Catholicism … teaches that Jesus was God in human form.” This wording implied that Jesus was not truly human, a position promoted by a number of early heretics and condemned by several ecumenical councils in the first centuries of the church. In fact, the Catholic Church teaches that Jesus is both true God and true man; that He is one person with two natures, one divine and the other human (Catechism of the Catholic Church, Questions 464-469). This, which is beyond human understanding, is the central mystery of the Catholic faith.

Charles Roswell, Columbia

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