Mulligan's mock Mass takes even more literally than does the
Catholic church itself the mystery of transubstantiation at
the heart of the ceremony. Encountering "A little
trouble about those white corpuscles," he asks
the "old chap" upstairs to inject some more
electricity into his magical cup, and announces that this
extra quantum of energy has done the trick: "That will
do nicely. Switch off the current, will you?"
The Mass reenacts biblical accounts of the Last Supper, in
which Jesus symbolically gave his body and blood to his
disciples as nourishment. Unlike other Christian churches,
Catholicism interprets this symbolic action quite literally.
When the priest consecrates the wafer and the wine, they
become miraculously transformed into the body and blood of
Christ—an ontologically different substance into which they
are “transubstantiated.”
As Mulligan holds aloft the chalice
containing (or about to contain) God's blood, he acknowledges
that some of the flecks of shaving foam are experiencing
difficulty in their effort to become “white corpuscles,”
the antigen-destroying part of the holy substance. Blood is
not simply red stuff, but a compound of parts that exercise
discrete functions. When medical students discuss miracles,
they like to get their facts straight.
And if transubstantiation means converting one form of
matter into another, then according to modern physics some
energy must have been introduced into the system. The Almighty
presumably assists his ministers by tapping some power source
such as electrical "current."
