Storm in a Cup

And he took the cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them: and they all drank of it.

--Mark 14:23

In the 19 centuries since that first Communion, Christians have worked out many ways of administering the sacramental cup. Roman Catholics reserve the wine for the priest. Baptists and many other Protestant groups deliver grape juice in tiny paper cups to church members in their pews. But the Anglicans, Episcopalians, Orthodox and most Lutherans use a common chalice, held by the server to the lips of each kneeling communicant.

Unsanitary! has been a recurrent cry against this practice ever since the discovery of bacteria. Last week it was heard again, this time in official tones. The Kansas State Board of Health, which has had a regulation since 1912 against the use of common drinking cups, put the Communion cup in the same category--"a potential source for the transmission of communicable disease." Episcopalian Evan Wright, director of the board's Food and Drug Division, was irate at the abandonment in his local church of the alternative method known as "intinction"--dipping the wafer into the wine. He did not threaten to have communicating priests arrested, but he said that he was not able to take Communion in the traditional form: "It is a very serious matter with me. I may even have to change my church."

Kansas' Episcopal Bishop Goodrich R. Fenner disdained to make any hygienic defense of the common chalice,* relied instead on church tradition. "I am not going to take any notice of the Board of Health," he announced, backed up by Kansas' Lutheran and Orthodox churches. "Our first loyalty is to the church." As for Director Wright, the bishop said: "Christianity can beat a sanitarian."

*Such as experiments indicating that the bactericidal property of silver, from which most chalices are made, plus the practice of turning the cup between communicants and wiping its drinking edge with a clean cloth (called a "purificator"), make the common Communion cup "not an important vector of infectious disease."

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