Blessed Meat, Bonfires, and Blasphemy

I go to lots of churches but there’s never anyone in there when I’m poking around. I’m a sucker for iconography and medieval painting and crazy gothic interiors. Beautiful old churches – some of them so old as to have Roman foundations – are all over the place in Austria. This morning the church in Hohenberg was open for a “fleischweihe” – meat blessing. It was the first time in I can’t remember how long that I’ve been in a church with actual worshippers in it.

People bring a basket full of Easter edibles – ham and eggs and bread, for example – up to the church. They set them up front near the altar and then, there’s a short ceremony and the officiant blesses the contents of the baskets by sprinkling holy water on them and saying a prayer. The food in this basket is the basis of the meal eaten to mark the end of Lent.

I didn’t understand everything the woman (!) leading the service said, but in addition to the bits about Jesus, there was some stuff about how sharing meals binds communities together. I’m for that. There was also some stuff about how we should consider the less fortunate – specifically those poor people from the banks of the flooding Danube. All the collections from that day were going to a relief fund for flood victims. Another good thing.

Tonight, there will be bonfires on the hillsides and in the meadows. This is one of those leftover pagan traditions that’s still quite alive here in the Alps. It’s a whole welcoming spring thing. Apparently the “heathens” used to burn an effigy that symbolized winter, but the Catholics co-opted the ritual and renamed the effigy Judas. Jesus said you should love your neighbor but hey, I guess you could throw him on the fire, too. You could fill a book with the things I don’t understand about Catholicism.

I’ll let Billy Joel wrap up this post. Sing along if you know the tune:

Come out Virginia, don’t let me me wait
You Catholic girls start much too late
But sooner or later it comes down to fate
I might as well be the one…
Only the good die young.