In March 2020 the COVID pandemic closed shops and pubs and restaurants, libraries, cinemas, gyms and theatres, and churches across Europe. As everyone learnt to shop online and technologically baffled academics tried to teach via Zoom, many churches also started to broadcast their services, in variously adapted forms, so that people could listen along at home, but, though the prayers and sermons continued, the singing stopped and, crucially for many believers, the sharing of the Eucharist became impossible. For Catholics in particular it became imperative to find creative ways in which the faithful could receive the consecrated Host, the Body of Christ. In Chalons-en-Champagne, France, the ‘drive through Mass’ became the unlikely solution at the height of lockdown. Priests, having performed the Elevation and Consecration of the Host in a newly choreographed ceremony in a large car park, protected by masks and with their hands sanitised, delivered wafers through the car windows of attendees.

In England, the churches cautiously reopened as summer began, but government guidelines allowed only a single cantor – no choirs or congregational singing – and clergy had to find ways to administer the Eucharist that observed social distancing and appropriate hygienic practices. Communion was administered in one kind – wafers only – and, as the communicant inevitably had to remove his/her mask to receive the wafer, the priest had to be masked and silent. No ‘The Body of Christ’ whispered to each participant. Priests and worshippers sanitised their hands before Communion, and members of the congregation followed one-way systems around churches to avoid close contact with others in narrow aisles. It was all a rather sad inversion of what the Eucharist is meant to be: rather than bringing the community together into one body – ‘Though we are many, we are one body, because we all share in one bread’ – the participants in a COVID Communion were reminded that they must keep their bodies separate from the bodies of others, that it might bring them disease if they share one bread. For the devout who believe in the Real Presence, it was perhaps particularly distressing to see hand sanitising before receiving the Host, not out of reverence for the Body of Christ, but because it was a material health hazard.