The Sacrament Act 1547 established that communion should be given in both kinds (i.e. bread and wine), "excepte necessitie otherwise require"[1]. In response to government advice[2], the Archbishops of Canterbury and York have advised that Communion should be given in one kind only for the time being.
This struck me as slightly odd advice, so I went and looked at PubMed. There isn't a great deal of literature on the subject, but there are a few papers from the late 1980s, when there was concern regarding transmission of HIV. For example, this article from someone working at the Public Health Laboratory says "No episode of disease attributable to the shared communion cup has ever been reported. Currently available data do not provide any support for suggesting that the practice of sharing a common communion cup should be abandoned because it might spread infection." Maybe the HPA has more up-to-date research on the risks involved?
I wonder if the advice was based on the idea that there is no cost whatsoever involved in people receiving in one kind only, so even if there is no evidence of risk reduction, "it can't hurt"? It strikes me that the effort would be better spent in encouraging people who have (or have recently recovered from) flu-like symptoms to stay at home - an infectious individual is going to transmit flu more readily to the people they sit next to in the pew than they are to people via the chalice.
[1] picking out the nuances from Sixteenth-century legalese is left as an exercise for the reader.
[2] page 19 of the PDF downloadable from that page
This struck me as slightly odd advice, so I went and looked at PubMed. There isn't a great deal of literature on the subject, but there are a few papers from the late 1980s, when there was concern regarding transmission of HIV. For example, this article from someone working at the Public Health Laboratory says "No episode of disease attributable to the shared communion cup has ever been reported. Currently available data do not provide any support for suggesting that the practice of sharing a common communion cup should be abandoned because it might spread infection." Maybe the HPA has more up-to-date research on the risks involved?
I wonder if the advice was based on the idea that there is no cost whatsoever involved in people receiving in one kind only, so even if there is no evidence of risk reduction, "it can't hurt"? It strikes me that the effort would be better spent in encouraging people who have (or have recently recovered from) flu-like symptoms to stay at home - an infectious individual is going to transmit flu more readily to the people they sit next to in the pew than they are to people via the chalice.
[1] picking out the nuances from Sixteenth-century legalese is left as an exercise for the reader.
[2] page 19 of the PDF downloadable from that page
There are 39 comments on this entry. (Reply.)