Today is a state holiday in Croatia. The country is closed for the day. When you ask what the holiday is about, most people can tell you it is the Eucharist or Corpus Christi in Latin. If you prod them with further questions, the majority of them give up at once. No idea, they shrug their shoulders. A few offer a bit more, though. This is one of the most important Catholic holidays, says one. It is about Christ’s body as the temple of the spirit, says another. It is celebrated sixty days after Easter, says the third. But no-one is really sure about any of the above. If you prod them too much, they become kind of cross. Good Catholics all, they are jealous of their holy ignorance.

Addendum I (May 23, 2008)

It does not take long to learn from the World Wide Web that the Holy Eucharist commemorates the Last Supper of Jesus Christ and his apostles, considered to be the first Holy Eucharist or Holy Communion, in which Christ offered bread and wine as his flesh and blood. On the initiative of some French nun, the then Pope established this holiday in the Thirteenth Century. As for the cannibalism of the Last Supper, it evidently goes back to pagan times, when this was a way to spread around the power and charisma of a highly esteemed person. Anyhow, no-one I have talked to yesterday would even dream of using contemporary information technology to learn about something supposedly very close to their loving hearts.

Addendum II (June 2, 2011)

I am thoroughly enjoying Philipp Blom’s A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment.[1] I got it from Arnold Trampe, who guessed correctly what I would enjoy reading. Predictably, I was delighted by a passage about barbed cross-references in the Encyclopédie. For example, the entry “Eucharist” contains the reference “see: Cannibalism.”[2] The rascals!

Addendum III (June 11, 2020)

As it happens, my beloved and I met twenty-two years ago on this day, which happens to fall on this Christian holiday this year among years. This makes our anniversary so much more precious, too. To my joy, the confluence brought her wriggling toes to my mind at once (“Her Wriggling Toes,” May 26, 2020). Oh, I would love to taste of her body right now! Sadly, she is in Zagreb and I am in Motovun on our anniversary. But I will go for it as soon as we get together next time. The taste, the feel, the smell… Holy cannibalism, indeed!

Footnotes

1. New York: Basic Books, 2010.

2. Op. cit., p. 46.