What do I do when someone drops the host from his mouth?

[Booter]

I was the EMHC at Mass this evening and, when a man came to recieve on his tongue, the host fell to the ground. I quickly grabbed the host, but instead of giving it to him, I made the mistake of putting the host back with the other hosts, thinking I would consume it later. The problem was that, when Communion was over, I didn’t know which host I dropped. I don’t know if I cleaned the host well enough to be consumed by another person because the host was at least partially in the guy’s mouth. My priest said I should have consumed the host and I agree with him. I kind of panicked though, and now one of the hosts in the tabernacle was at least partially in a guy’s mouth and on the ground, and won’t be consumed until the next morning. The priest said don’t worry, because it was a mistake, but I still feel bad about it.

 

[Michelle_Arnold]

There’s nothing you can do about it now, so listen to your priest’s advice about the incident being an innocent mistake and let go of your worry.

For the future though, your priest was incorrect about what you should have done with the host once you retrieved it. You had no obligation to consume a host that had been in someone else’s mouth. What you should have done was pick up the host, in a cloth if you had one, and set it aside. (You may wish to carry a clean handkerchief in your pocket for just such an emergency when acting as an EMHC.) After Mass, the host could be dissolved in water, thereby removing the Real Presence, and then the water poured into a sacrarium or into the ground.

Since neither you nor your priest knew what to do in an instance such as this, it indicates a severe lack of training in your parish in the matter of handling the sacred species. I recommend that your priest ask for training guidelines from the diocese and, after having read them himself, give the parish’s EMHCs a refresher course – with an emphasis on how to handle accidents such as the one you experienced.