“Do not give what is holy to dogs, and do not throw your pearls before swine,” says the Gospel, “lest they trample them underfoot and then turn to attack you” (Matthew 7:6).
The Bible verse is first and foremost a reference to those who live in a state of sin, of which pigs and dogs are symbols, but some recent events in ecclesial life have truly erased the boundary between symbol and reality.
As is now known, on April 17, the Diocese of Chur in Switzerland published the conclusion of a canonical investigation carried out following an unfortunate event that occurred in the Guthirt (“Good Shepherd”) parish in Zurich. On October 4, 2025, in the context of a Mass celebrated in conjunction with a blessing of animals, some women saw fit to break with their own hands some consecrated hosts and distribute them to their dogs.
The Chur affair is not merely a scandal—it is the visible symptom of a Church that no longer understands sin, sacrilege, or the sacred.
As reported by various outlets, the rightly scandalized complaint of the faithful reached the Bishop of Chur, Joseph Maria Bonnemain, who initially attempted to downplay the episode as “chatter” or “gossip.” After entrusting the investigation to Josef Annen, former vicar general for Zurich and Glarus, and questioning those directly involved—presumably the parish priest, the parish team, some faithful, and the dog owners—the Diocese reached the conclusion that, since the women “acted with good intentions, no canonical crime had occurred.”
The conclusion reached by the Diocese, and therefore by Bishop Bonnemain, is scandalous to say the least and is symptomatic of the serious crisis of law, and not only that, in which the Church today finds itself. The sense of sin has been so diminished as to cloud even the judgment of those who should watch over the doctrine and morality of the People of God.
As reported by the Swiss-Cath, Bonnemain allegedly “gave [Annen] the task of keeping a low profile,” that is, of not stirring up a controversy that would have been problematic for various reasons, including media-related ones. This is because today churchmen fear the judgment of men more than the judgment of God.
The poor animals, of course, bear no fault on their part for the terrible blasphemous and sacrilegious act that was carried out in the Zurich parish, not being rational creatures. Saint Thomas explains that “even if a mouse or a dog were to eat a consecrated host, the substance of the body of Christ would not cease to be under the species, as long as those species remain,” but animals could not nevertheless unite sacramentally with Christ, but only accidentally, “since [the animal] is not of a nature to use this sacrament.” Indeed, only men, insofar as they are rational and therefore capable of receiving grace, that is, of participating in divine life, can unite sacramentally with Christ. When a dog, a mouse, or a cockroach were to eat a consecrated host, the only effect would be the consumption of the sensible species of bread: nothing more (cf. Thomas Aquinas, S.Th. III, q. 80, ad 3).
Let us now try to understand the true meaning of the conclusion reached by the canonical investigation of the Diocese of Chur, Switzerland. The argument advanced in support of the conclusion, as anticipated, is as follows: “The three persons did not [give the Eucharist to the dogs] with a sacrilegious intent. Consequently, these persons cannot be accused of sacrilege, since they lacked this sacrilegious intention. For this reason, they do not incur the excommunication reserved to the Apostolic See as punishment.”
Where sin is reduced to a social offense, grace becomes unnecessary—and the sacraments lose their meaning.
First problem: identification of the canonical crime.
The reference is to canon 1382 §1: “A person who profanes the consecrated species, or takes them away or retains them for a sacrilegious purpose, incurs a latae sententiae excommunication reserved to the Apostolic See.”
First of all, we can note an incorrect identification of the crime. In fact, the canon mentioned here sanctions two different crimes. In the original Latin text this is more evident, where one reads: “Qui species consecratas abicit aut in sacrilegum finem abducit vel retinet, etc.” The particle aut indicates that these are two distinct offenses. Sacrilege as a condition for the offense to occur concerns only the second, that is, the removal or retention of the consecrated host.
As regards the first offense—the profanation—no condition of sacrilegious intent is indicated. The two offenses are grouped together because the penalty is identical, namely latae sententiae excommunication, that is to say: automatic at the very moment the act occurs, and “reserved to the Holy See,” meaning that it can be lifted only by the Pope, not by the local bishop.
Moreover, the canonical literature appears clear on this point. According to the canonist Juan Ignacio Bañares, for example, “certain intentions (obscene or superstitious) that involve contempt for the Divine Presence in the Eucharistic species, together with the external action of retaining them or carrying them away, sufficiently manifest the will to commit the offense. The element that constitutes the substance of the offense is the contempt or humiliation of the Eucharist on the part of the subject who commits the offense” (La protección penal de la Santísima Eucaristía, bien de la Iglesia y bien de los fieles, en el c. 1367 del CIC, in «Fidelium Iura», 2003, 13, p. 172).
Even more clearly, the canonist Klaus Lüdicke, emeritus professor at the University of Münster, explicitly indicates among the acts that manifest contempt for the Eucharist and entail its profanation the act of giving it to animals (cf. Muensterischer Kommentar zum Codex Iuris Canonici, 1367/3).
Indeed, some canon scholars hold that even uttering insulting words in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament exposed would constitute the crime of profanation (cf. Andrea D’Auria, L’interpretazione autentica del Can. 1367 e la problematica del dolo specifico, in «Ius Ecclesiae», 2016, 28, p. 297).
Without Communion in the hand, these profanations would scarcely be possible.
Second problem: erroneous theological framework.
The outcome of the canonical investigation in Chur suggests that, if there is no bad intention or awareness in the act, the act is not sinful. This is profoundly mistaken and has dangerous consequences: Catholic morality is not intentionalist. An act is intrinsically good or bad, regardless of the intentions and awareness of the subject.
Intention concerns merit, not gravity. If a person is forced to do good, that good act is not meritorious because it is unintentional. If a person is forced to do evil, that evil act is not culpable not because it is unintentional, but because it is forced (lack of deliberate consent). It is not intentional, and therefore not demeritorious either. The women in question did not act under compulsion: they intended to give a consecrated host to a dog—an act intrinsically evil and therefore sacrilegious. Yet, as has been said, profanation does not require sacrilegious intent.
This confusion arises from a theological-moral problem that is very widespread today, namely an erroneous understanding of the condition of “full knowledge” (in Latin: plena conscientia – English may be misleading) required for mortal sin, understood today as simple “awareness that the act performed is a sin.” Thus, if someone does not know or does not believe that the act is sinful, and performs it, he would not commit a mortal sin. But this is not the traditional meaning of the expression, and logically it could not be.
When the Church says that full knowledge is a condition for mortal sin—together with grave matter and deliberate consent—it is saying that the subject must not have obstacles at the level of consciousness (for example, drunkenness or insanity remove full knowledge, because they are obstacles to the capacity to “know,” that is, to direct the intellect toward the act being performed).
To better understand the meaning of these conditions, consider that this language has passed from ecclesiastical law into civil law. Let us not forget that the law of the Church, itself a child of Roman law, is at the origin of modern law. When civil law determines whether a defendant is “capable of understanding and willing,” it does not intend to establish whether he was aware of having violated a norm, but whether he possessed the full mental faculties to understand what he was doing and to decide freely about his actions. As the proverb says, the law admits no ignorance, but this also applies to the Law of God.
Neo-modernists, while verbally proclaiming the primacy of conscience and intention, paradoxically end up debasing it, adopting a legalistic criterion: what is not legally prosecutable or socially reproved tends to be considered morally irrelevant.
Only in one case does ignorance fully excuse sin, that is, it nullifies its gravity and mortality, namely when it is invincible, that is, when there is not the slightest possibility that the subject can properly form his conscience. This condition, however, is very rare, and today in the information and mass-media society it is almost impossible to find. This is all the more so in a context such as the parish where the incident occurred. The parish priest, in fact, has the duty to teach Catholic doctrine, and the faithful have the duty (even before the right) to request such formation: if this does not happen, there is serious fault of negligence on one and/or the other side.
Hell is full of souls who have been damned for their immoral acts, regardless of good intentions, ignorance of the sinfulness of the act, and even regardless of the effort made to avoid sin. Indeed, if ignorance were always invincible and therefore a guarantee of salvation, as the neo-modernists effectively claim, then God would have burdened humanity with an unnecessary weight by revealing the moral law to Israel and then to the whole world. If God indeed wills the salvation of all, He would have better favored this plan of universal salvation by keeping humanity in ignorance. If, on the contrary, God has revealed the truth to the world, it is precisely because, ordinarily, ignorance does not save, but increases the risk of damnation.
Satan is “a liar and a murderer from the beginning” (Jn 8:44) precisely because he wants to keep humanity in ignorance and, through it, in sin and therefore in damnation, the eternal death of the soul. Therefore it is written that God “wants all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:3–4).
To this may be added, as further confirmation, that the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, in the authentic interpretation given in a 1999 response, determined that the verb abicere used in the canon must be interpreted in the broadest possible sense, establishing that any voluntary and gravely contemptuous action toward the consecrated species falls under the verb abicere, understanding “voluntary” in the theological sense now clarified.
Finally, with regard to ignorance, Canon 1325 establishes that “ignorance which is crass [that is, ignorance due to negligence] or supine [that is, of one who refuses to make any effort to know what it is his duty to know] or affected [that is, of one who deliberately and maliciously chooses to remain ignorant] can never be taken into account when applying the provisions of cann. 1323 and 1324,’ that is, of those canons which respectively list the possible causes of exemption from punishment and of mitigation of penalty.
The faithful were scandalized. The bishop feared controversy more than judgment before God.
Third problem: concealment of the responsibilities of the team, parish priest, and bishop
Having made these premises, it is inevitable to conclude that the outcome of the investigation is wrong—or at least to strongly doubt that it is correct. The Bishop of Chur, powerful of jurisdiction over the respective Diocese, should have showed the executive power with which he is invested, declaring (not imposing) the latae sententiae excommunication of the profaners.
The fault for the act obviously falls on the women in question, but even more so on the parish team that organized the celebration, on the parish priest, and on the bishop—in descending order; because upon them rests the duty of religious formation and the proper administration of the sacraments.
If these women take the consecrated host in their hands; calmly return to their pews without anyone telling them, if not to take it in their mouth, at least to consume it in front of the priest; even break the hosts with their own hands and feed them to dogs… clearly all this is an extreme manifestation of the total abdication of the parish priest and the bishop from their duty and evangelical mandate to form the consciences of the faithful according to Catholic doctrine. And very likely the first to be catechized are precisely those two.
Saint Thomas Aquinas observes that, in the Old Testament, the dog was considered impure because it is a symbol of anger (S.Th. I-II, q. 46, a. 5, ad 1) and of rapacity (II-II, q. 86, a. 3, ad 2): that form of violence that arises from the union of anger and avarice. The rapacious man is one who destroys his neighbor in order to take possession of his goods.
The Zurich affair, then, is not only an episode of scandal: it is the living parable of a rapacious episcopate, which instead of safeguarding doctrine and the sacraments for the salvation of souls, has reduced itself to managing power and money like any political committee. Theology has been replaced by marketing, the care of souls by the calculation of consensus. While the faithful are abandoned in ignorance, and therefore in sin, the new Pharisees shut themselves in their temple of ideologies and budgets. The word of Christ applies well to them: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you shut the kingdom of heaven in men’s faces: for you yourselves do not enter, nor do you allow those who would enter to go in” (Mt 23:13).
The dignity of the Sacrament has been sacrificed on the altar of convenience and ideology, and the result is before everyone’s eyes: profanations, superficiality, loss of the sense of the sacred.
Fourth problem: Communion in the hand.
It should not even need to be said, but it is good to recall it: these sacrileges are also direct consequences of the now widespread practice of Communion in the hand, introduced as an indult but become, through inertia and complicity, a de facto norm. A gesture born as an exception has been transformed into a rule, and even defended by neo-modernist theologians with the usual repertoire of liturgical archaeologisms and quotations torn from context—inevitably, as always, poor Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, invoked improperly to justify what he would never have approved.
Thus, what was introduced as a sign of pseudo-adoration has become an act of nonchalance, and the hand that should tremble before the Mystery behaves as if it were handling an ordinary object. In fact, the familiarity that this practice has introduced—a true enemy of all spirituality—has contributed to spreading among clergy and faithful doubts or disbelief in the Real Presence of the Eucharist and a horizontal conception of the relationship with Christ.
Man, in fact, being a sensitive creature, is also educated by gestures and the senses: it is not the same thing to be fed by someone and to eat by oneself. The first gesture conveys a condition of subordination, dependence, and unmerited grace; the second a condition of equality, claim, and unconditional grace.
The dignity of the Sacrament has been sacrificed on the altar of convenience and ideology, and the result is before everyone’s eyes: profanations, superficiality, loss of the sense of the sacred. It is not a liturgical detail—it is the symptom of a spiritual disease that corrodes the Church from within. Without the horrendous practice of Communion in the hand (already sacrilegious in itself) there would not even be all these profanations, which differ from the first only by greater visibility.
The Chur affair, read in this key, no longer appears as a simple error of canonical assessment, but as the symptom of a broader crisis in the intelligibility of sin.
Fifth problem: the pharisaical mentality of the neo-modernists.
How many times have we heard neo-modernists accuse traditionalists of a pharisaical attitude or mentality, when in truth it is they who resemble the ancient accusers of Christ. I have already addressed this topic elsewhere.
Ancient Pharisaism, in fact, did not consist simply in an excess of zeal for the Law, but in a limited understanding of it confined to the public sphere and therefore formalistic and externalized: justice was measured by visible conformity to codified prescriptions, while the interiority of the act and its relation to truth were obscured.
In an analogous way, neo-modernists, while verbally proclaiming the primacy of conscience and intention, paradoxically end up debasing it, adopting a legalistic criterion: what is not legally prosecutable or socially reproved tends to be considered morally irrelevant.
From this also derives the accusation, as frequent as it is improper, directed at Catholics attached to Tradition of being “Pharisees.” It arises precisely from the preliminary confusion between doctrine and law. Full and coherent adherence to doctrine—which concerns the truth about being and human action—is interpreted as mere external observance of norms, that is, as legalism.
But this identification is possible only on condition that doctrine has already been reduced to a set of positive precepts, losing sight of its metaphysical and theological root. In other words, one accuses of Pharisaism those who reject precisely that reduction of morality to law which constitutes the true pharisaical trait.
When the implicit criterion becomes the exact confusion and overlap between sin and crime, one witnesses a double distortion that today is evident to all: on the one hand, “sins” are artificially coined in areas already regulated by civil law (consider the construction of categories such as so-called “ecological sins”); on the other hand, entire sectors of human action, such as sexuality, are emptied of moral relevance because they are removed from the legal discipline of the State. If they are private matters and harm no one, then they are not sins: this is the underlying perverse logic.
The result is a moralism that takes as its parameter not divine and natural law, but the dominant normative framework. In this perspective one can also understand more recent phenomena such as the insistence on absolute obedience to civil provisions in emergency contexts (do we recall Bergoglio’s “acts of love”?). The criterion is always and only external, public, verifiable: exactly as in pharisaical logic.
The decisive point, however, remains the initial one: not all sins are canonical crimes, because the moral life of man structurally exceeds the public dimension, although all canonical crimes are also sins (either because they are disobedience to legitimate authority or because they are against divine law).
Moral life, in fact, primarily concerns the relationship of the soul with God, who is judge of hearts and not only of external acts. When this principle is obscured, sin tends to be reinterpreted as a social fact, and salvation as integration into the community. But in this way the very sense of redemption is lost, which does not consist in conforming to a juridical order, but in the conversion of man to truth and to the good.
The Chur affair, read in this key, no longer appears as a simple error of canonical assessment, but as the symptom of a broader crisis in the intelligibility of sin. Where sin is reduced to crime, grace becomes superfluous; and where grace is superfluous, the sacraments also lose their meaning. It is in this outcome that one recognizes, beyond formal declarations, the persistence of an authentically pharisaical mentality of neo-modernist authorities.
And the consecrated Hosts can be calmly thrown to the dogs.
