Eastern Catholic and Orthodox Churches
The Eastern Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches use leavened bread for the Eucharist. Thus, the sacramental bread symbolizes the Resurrected Christ. The sacramental bread, known as prosphorá or a πρόσφορον (prósphoron, offering) may be made out of only four ingredients: fine (white) wheat flour, pure water, yeast, and salt.
Sometimes holy water will be either sprinkled into the dough or on the kneading trough at the beginning of the process.
The baking may only be performed by a believing Orthodox Christian in good standing — having preferably been recently to Confession, and is accompanied by prayer and fasting. Before baking, each loaf is formed by placing two disks of dough, one on top of the other, and stamping it with a special liturgical seal. The prosphora should be fresh and not stale or moldy when presented at the altar for use in the Divine Liturgy. Often several prosphora will be baked and offered by the faithful, and the priest chooses the best one for the Lamb (Host) that will be consecrated. The remaining loaves are blessed and offered back to the congregation after the end of the Divine Liturgy (Eucharist); this bread is called the Antidoron (Greek: αντίδωρον, antídōron), i.e. a "gift returned", or "in place of the Gifts".
Read more about this topic: Sacramental Bread
Famous quotes containing the words eastern, catholic, orthodox and/or churches:
“Should the German people lay down their arms, the Soviets ... would occupy all eastern and south-eastern Europe together with the greater part of the Reich. Over all this territory, which with the Soviet Union included, would be of enormous extent, an iron curtain would at once descend.”
—Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945)
“In fact what America expects of its citizens and what the Catholic Church expects of the faithful are sometimes so different that they lead to an enormous ker-KLUNK between democracy and theology.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“The gloomy theology of the orthodox—the Calvinists—I do not, I cannot believe. Many of the notions—nay, most of the notions—which orthodox people have of the divinity of the Bible, I disbelieve. I am so nearly infidel in all my views, that too, in spite of my wishes, that none but the most liberal doctrines can command my assent.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“He asked if I would sell my Christmas trees;
My woods the young fir balsams like a place
Where houses all are churches and have spires.
I hadn’t thought of them as Christmas trees.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)