Health News

Intinction Risk Study - by Anne LaGrange Loving

In 1995, I performed a laboratory study on the microbial risks of intinction that was published in the Journal of Environmental Health (July-August 1995 issue). When I searched the literature for articles about the hygiene hazards associated with Holy Communion, I found that several religious and scientific articles stated that intinction is a "completely safe" alternative to sipping from the common communion cup.

However, I was unable to find any scientific study that investigated the microbial risks of intinction.

As a parishioner in a church where many members use intinction, I was able to observe that the fingers of the parishioners and ministers often dip into the wine during the process of intinction. Knowing that hands may harbor many pathogenic microbes, I was concerned.

I set up a carefully controlled laboratory investigation using volunteer parishioners and priests, communion wine, a communion chalice, and communion wafers. Participants were instructed not to wash their hands prior to the start of each series of tests, as parishioners typically would have been sitting in a Eucharist service for at least 30 minutes before the administration of the sacraments. During this time, fingertips may touch many potentially contaminating surfaces.

In addition, participants all shook or grasped the hands of between 2 and 10 people just prior to the start of the testing, to simulate the exchange of microbial organisms that occurs when parishioners offer each other the "Peace of the Lord."

During the simulated Eucharist services, samples were taken of participants' fingertips, the wine, the wafers before and after being dipped into the wine, and of the "dregs" of the wine that remained at the end. Bacterial cultures were performed on all of these samples.

The findings revealed that bacteria are indeed transferred into the wine when a person's fingertips are submerged, and these same microbes can then be absorbed onto the wafer of a subsequent participant, in a sponge-like fashion. Not surprisingly, some individuals in the study had small amounts of fecal and other potentially dangerous bacteria on their fingertips, and some of these were recovered from the chalice samplings.

However, the statistics in this study showed that although intinction is by no means completely microbe-free, it does seem to reduce the risk over that of sipping from a common communion cup.

Having completed this investigation, I realized that my findings could be added to the large pool of previous studies that all showed the same thing: Holy Communion is like any other activity in which humans have close contact — microbes are exchanged.