We rode down to Naples with with my parents and stopped in to see my brother, hard at work on some furniture for a church in Fairport. He showed us this maquette that he proposed for the church’s tabernacle. That’s the little house where they keep the consecrated hosts and the blessed wine in the gold chalice. It is one of the high points of mass when the priest reaches in there but our group of lapsed catholics couldn’t remember if they keep things in there over night or just during the service. We speculated that the priest blesses a certain number of hosts and they pass out so many at communion and then he might store the leftover consecrated hosts in there. I’m pretty sure the priest finishes the wine at the service.
I’m making a distinction between the consecrated (“body of Christ”) hosts and the unblessed ones. We used to eat the unblessed ones out of the bag before serving mass in the priest’s dressing room. I know they have another name for that room and I don’t think it’s the sacristy but all those details are fuzzy now. Back in the day the nuns made the hosts and packaged them in clear plastic bags. One at a time they were incredibly dry. They had the ability to suck every bit of moisture from your mouth making it difficult to even swallow but in a handful they were sort of tasty. The “consecrated” hosts were something only the priest could touch and even he could only touch them with certain fingers.
We used to make our own hosts at home when we played mass. We rolled white bread with a glass until it was flat as can be and then we’d stamp out the hosts with the rim of the glass. Our family ate Bond bread, not Wonder, and that made a good host.
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