Local Roman Catholics are among those are calling for YouTube to yank a series of videos on its site showing a Canadian teenager destroying Communion hosts. RNS has a story.
TFP, a conservative Catholic group headquartered in North Codorus Township, and other groups are urging supporters to petition YouTube officials to remove what the Catholics consider sacrilegious videos.
According to RNS, the Quebec teenager named Dominique has posted more than 40 videos featuring him desecrating the host, the circular wafer that Catholics ingest during the Eucharist service. The clips show the wafers being burned, hammered, placed in a blender, fed to animals and flushed down a toilet.
On its Web site, the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property, also known as TFP, says it collected 18,201 signatures on a protest petition in a week this summer, and is "sickened" by the recurrence of the video postings.
From RNS:
The short clips were shut down for a few hours in early October, but soon returned.YouTube, which is owned by Google, has "age-gated" Dominique's videos. The videos have been marked as not appropriate for everyone, and restricted, ostensibly, to viewers over age 18. ...
Dominique, in response to a series of videos that Catholics have put on YouTube to counter his videos, said he's not attacking the religion, but satirizing the concept of transubstantiation -- the Catholic belief that the wafer and wine at Communion become the literal body and blood of Christ.
"I'm attacking the belief that this thing, this cracker, is someone that can feel pain," he said, calling the host "just an object you can eat."
In celebrating Communion, Catholics, as well as Orthodox Christians and some Anglicans, believe that the consecrated bread and wine themselves become the body and blood of Christ. They speak of Christ's "real presence" in the Eucharist.
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