Comment 31 by Tyler Durden :

Comment 25 by katy Cordeth :

Jesus is made of bread (and wine).

White bread, presumably. None of that nasty unleavened brown-people bread.

It is curious that the RCC would approve the use of ‘low gluten’ hosts for those individuals suffering with coeliac disease.

Communion wafers - Coeliac UK

Wheat, a cereal that contains gluten, is the only substance authorised by the Roman Catholic Church to make Eucharistic bread so there are special ‘low gluten’ hosts that have been approved for use by individuals with coeliac disease when taking Communion. These products contain Codex wheat starch. This is a specially processed wheat starch which has a level of gluten within the Codex standard. It was first introduced as a basis for staple gluten-free substitute products like flour and bread to improve the quality and texture of these products.

I attended a wedding here in Ireland last summer and this was my first time to notice this change (no pun intended) in communion wafers.

I have an idea as to how this whole transubstantiation business could be put to bed once and for all. A quick Wikipedia search informs me that:

The sacramental bread, known as prosphorá or a πρόσφορον (prósphoron, offering) may be made out of only four ingredients: fine (white) wheat flour, pure water, yeast, and salt.

The recipe doesn't stipulate what kind of salt must be used, so I suggest that in place of the traditional sodium chloride, some host wafers (Jesencrackers?) should be made using using crystals of one of the cyanide salts. The resultant product would satisfy the requirements of what is acceptable at the Eucharist and could then be offered (with his full knowledge, of course) to Pope Ratzinger* at his own next Holy Communion.

One of three things would happen. Either he'd refuse to eat the thing, in which case we'd know that the Bishop of Rome himself doesn't really believe in transubstantiation. Or he'd eat it and drop down dead, proving the whole business to be a sham. Or he'd eat the oblation, suffer no ill effects at all, and in one fell swoop prove to the entire world that not only is God real, but that Catholicism is the only path to Him. This could be repeated as often as necessary, even under laboratory conditions, until everyone on Earth, RD included, has no choice but to accept it as truth.

Come on your Holiness, there are about seven billion souls in imminent danger. Accept the challenge or all these people will have to spend eternity immersed up to their necks in a fiery lake of poop. What have you got to lose?

*Or indeed to any Catholic priest or high-ranking apologist for Catholicism (but not the rank and file as many of these would no doubt be dim enough to actually eat the thing).