More information on Haley Waldman
Not an update per se, but more information that I didn't have previously, courtesy the Citizen-Times:

For the first time since she was diagnosed with gluten intolerance, Marjorie Bogart is able to take communion alongside everyone else....

...[N]ow Bogart can walk up to the rail, kneel and take communion because a group of Benedictine nuns in Missouri figured out a way to put wheat in a wafer that has so little gluten she would have to eat more than 200 of them in a single sitting to have an adverse effect on her....

Audra Miller, spokeswoman for the Diocese of Trenton in New Jersey...said [Haley]Waldman was offered the low-gluten wafer....

Miller said [the mother of Haley] Waldman refused the options of the low-gluten wafer...and looked for a church that would allow her daughter to use a rice wafer.


This is an interesting turn of events. Apparently there was bread that was legally considered "wheat" by the Catholic Church, and (if the Benedictine nuns can be believed) safe for Waldman to eat. But her mother turned this down.

And for more information on the Benedictine nuns, here's excerpts from an article from The Catholic Key:

These...wafers are the result of more than a decade of trial and error by the Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration to develop an altar bread that is safe for consumption by sufferers of celiac disease, yet also remain in compliance with the strict guidelines of Canon Law....

The Vatican requires that Communion hosts contain some gluten, an essential ingredient in bread, but no one had discovered how to make an edible host with a low-enough gluten level to be considered safe for celiac sufferers. That is, until a little over a year ago, when a pair of Benedictine sisters, all but defeated by years of failure, did something no one had ever done.

"It was definitely the Holy Spirit at work that night," Sister Jane Heschmeyer recalls....

"I was studying the canons and gathering information," she said. "I was in touch with the celiac association, grain specialists, the USDA, doctors, lawyers, everybody I could think of."...

Sister Jane gained a study partner in 1999. Not long after joining the postulancy, Sister Lynn Marie D'Souza happened upon Sister Jane experimenting in the kitchen and offered to help.

"She didn't have a scientific background," Sister Lynn said with as much mock hauteur as the friendly and engaging nun can muster. The young postulant, who came to Clyde with a degree in biomedical science, left the kitchen that night enthralled. She was soon assigned to the altar bread department....

"I'd been working with two different starches," [Sister Lynn] said, holding back an inevitable smile. "One of them was a mess. It ran all over the cooking plate, and it came out like lace. With the other starch I could get something that looked like a host, but it tasted terrible and it was rubbery. I was about ready to give up."

Sister Jane joined her later that night and with utter disregard for scientific methodology, said, "Why don't we just mix the two together?"....

But what they gazed upon in disbelief was a round wafer, baked evenly, with a nice texture and crispness....

Gluten content: .01 percent.

Safe enough, according to Fasano and other medical experts, for consumption by almost all celiac suffers. But would it pass the scrutiny of the church's hierarchy?

The answer came last July. The recipe had been approved by the Vatican, and subsequently by the U.S. bishops, as part of a new set of norms for celebrating the Eucharist. The U.S. Bishops' Committee on the Liturgy deemed the sisters' bread "the only true, low-gluten altar bread . approved for use at Mass in the United States," with a lower gluten level than a host developed recently in Italy and approved by the Vatican and the scientific committee of the Italian Celiac Association. The sisters also have applied to the U.S. government for a patent on their recipe.

Fasano called the sisters' accomplishment "very wonderful news," but added that celiac sufferers should still consult with their doctors before consuming the new hosts. In rare cases even .01 percent is still too much.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog