A poisoned chalice?

Jenni Murray, who is the editor of Woman’s Hour on BBC Radio 4, once told listeners how she was put off religion by what she was told by a vicar during Holy Communion.

As she waited her turn to be passed the chalice containing the wine, from which every communicant would take a sip, she noticed that the man in front of her in the queue was coughing and was clearly unwell. She did not fancy being passed the chalice that he had just sipped wine from, and she said so.

However, it was what the vicar said that was the real turn-off. According to him, it was impossible to catch anything from a communion chalice, not because he always wiped the rim before passing it on, but because it had been blessed by a priest and was therefore miraculously free of germs.

Christianity asks its adherents to believe all sorts of highly unlikely things – Virgins births, rising from the dead and so on – but the ability of a vicar’s prayer to sanitise silverware was clearly one belief too many for Jenni!