Tagged: Dimitri Soudas
A plague on all their holier-than-thou houses
Screenshot: coincidental tweets.
Contrarian has fully recovered from the fleeting (and uncharacteristic) sympathy we felt for Prime Minister Harper over the Case of the (Allegedly) Missing Host. We hereby revert to our customary stance: a plague on all their holier-than-thou houses.
Let’s review: A Catholic vicar general complained that the Prime Minister has committed not just sin but scandal by failing to consume the host during holy communion at Romeo LeBlanc’s funeral. When the press dutifully reported this, PM spokesman Dimitri Soudas (he of the misattributed Ignatieff non-quote) insisted Harper had indeed consumed the host, whereupon more protectors of the faith piled on to condemn the Prime Minister, a non-member of the One True Church, for partaking of the Eucharist in the first place.
Harper, who takes care to conceal his Evangelical Christian beliefs (except when writing memos to Preston Manning recommending US-style religious wedge polities), seemed caught in a double bind: Damned if he didn’t; damned if he did.
So how does he wriggle out of this sanctimonious trap?
With even greater sanctimony, of course, directed at… the media. Reporting this loony-toon debate was “a low moment in journalism,” he said. Oh yeah. A bunch of antediluvian Christianists get into a doctrinal dog fight, and it’s all the media’s fault. In the land of theocrats, the only remedy for excessive sanctimony is even greater sanctimony.
2, 4, 6, 8 – Did he or didn’t he transubstantiate?
On the rare occasions when circumstances force contrarian to participate in religious rites, our unfamiliarity with the rules often begets panic. Thus contrarian sympathizes with Prime Minister Harper’s apparent befuddlement when Monsignor André Richard, Bishop of the Diocese of Moncton, offered him the communion wafer during Romeo LeBlanc’s funeral.
What’s a Protestant pol to do? As a non-Catholic, Harper is ineligible to receive communion. But having taken the wafer, which, upon consecration for the Eucharist, becomes the body and blood of Christ, he can’t just ditch it. A YouTube video appears to show Harper slipping the host into his suit jacket pocket.
This has Monsignor Brian Henneberry, vicar general and chancellor in the Diocese of Saint John, in holy dudgeon.
If Harper accepted the host but did not consume it, “it’s worse than a faux pas, it’s a scandal from the Catholic point of view,” he told the Saint John Telegraph-Journal.
A thread on the Religious Forum website is headed, “The PM has kidnapped Jesus!!!!”
“Absurd,” says Harper spokesman Dimitri Soudas. “The priest offered the host to the prime minister, the prime minister accepted the host and he consumed it.”
On close inspection, the video is open to either interpretation. Contrarian feels the PM’s momentary stupefaction, and urges Canadians of all creeds (and non-creeds) to cut him some slack.
