By Matt Gagliano
Welcome back, everyone! I don’t know about the rest of you, but I for one am so relieved to finally be back in Binghamton. Winter break was nice, but after over a month, I was kind of getting sick of doing literally nothing all day, because realistically, what is there left to do after the holidays are over? You just sit at home, thinking about how great Christmas was for several weeks, waiting for the semester to start. Luckily for me, while I was sitting at home thinking about how great Christmas was for several weeks, my mind started to wander, and I was struck with a very intriguing thought. I was raised by a Catholic family, which means for most of my childhood, I went to church on Sunday mornings, and anyone who’s been to a Catholic mass before knows that towards the end they have everyone receive the Eucharist, basically a small circle that has the taste of cardboard, and the texture of cardboard, and disintegrates in your mouth much like cardboard would when it gets wet. Come to think of it, can anyone confirm that these things aren’t actually cardboard? Anyway, before all of the church goers get in line to choke down the Eucharist, the priest holds them up like baby Simba and recites a quote from Jesus himself: “Take this, all of you, and eat of it, this is my body, which will be given up for you.” Kinky. Regardless, it’s that line right there that got the incredibly fucked up gears in my brain turning like a werewolf during a full moon. If those little circles are in fact the body of Christ, and not cardboard, how large would Jesus have to have been to provide Catholics around the world with one every Sunday for 2022 years?
First things first, in case it’s unclear, the reason that I’m doing the math over 2022 years is because it is current year, the year of our Lord, 2022. The reason I say “the year of our Lord,” is because it has been 2022 years since people were like “yo, this Jesus guy kinda seems like the son of god to me,” or some shit like that. I wasn’t there, so I don’t know exactly what they said, but I’m sure it was along those lines. According to Wikipedia, the first written account of the Eucharist being consumed was in 55 A.D., however just because this was the first time it was recorded, does not mean that this was the first time that it happened. Therefore, I’m just going to assume that as soon as Ol’ Jeezy Boy died, they immediately started cutting his body into tiny circles for consumption – to preserve freshness, you know? Maybe that’s why they taste so much like cardboard, I would assume human flesh gets a little stale after 2000 years. Anyway, now that we know how long Catholics have been eating the dead body of their savior, we can figure out how many masses have taken place since then. There are 52 weeks in a year, and therefore 52 Sundays in a year. Now, I’m well aware that most churches have mass on more days than just Sundays, but most people who go to church do so on Sunday, so I’m only going to take Sunday masses into account. After all, to figure this out, I’m going to have to do a hell of a lot of estimating, so hopefully it all evens out. If you have a problem with that, feel free to send me a strongly worded email at editor@binghamtonreview.com, I really do love receiving emails from all of my “fans.” Typically, churches have 2 or 3 masses on a given Sunday, so I’m just going to go with 3 to even out the masses that I ignored on other days. Also because all of those people who sent me an email without reading the rest of the article look like idiots now, and there’s nothing I enjoy more than making idiots look like idiots (mmm, I’m already getting the warm, fuzzy feelings in my… uh, nevermind). Anyway, 52 Sundays times 3 masses gives us 156 masses in a year, which over 2022 years results in 315,432 masses since the death of Jesus Christ.
If you looked at that number and thought it seemed a little low, you’d be correct. That number only takes into account the number of masses for a single church. According to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA), as of 2018 there are 223,777 Catholic churches in the world. Multiplying this number by the number of masses in a year for a single church gives us 70,586,426,664 total masses. Big number, right? Wait until we factor in the average number of people that receive the Eucharist in a given mass. I think it’s safe to say at this point that Mr. Christ was one beefy boy (in more ways than one 😉), but we should probably do the math, just to be sure. Using the statistics from CARA, and doing way more math than anyone should for a topic as stupid as this, we can determine that on average, each mass has 81 people in attendance. I’d walk you through the exact process, but I don’t want to put you to sleep, that’s what Pipe Dream articles are for. So, if all 81 people want to taste the sweet, sweet flesh of Jesus (who wouldn’t 😉), then there have been approximately 5,717,500,559,784 Jesus Disks consumed since his death. After a quick Google search, I found that you can buy 1000 communion wafers on Amazon. Why Amazon can sell the flesh of a dead person online, but when I do it it’s “illegal” and “creepy that I would even try to do that,” I have no idea, but the product description says that they weigh 9.4 ounces all together. From this we can determine that each Christ Frisbee weighs .0094 ounces, or about 0.0005875 pounds. Finally, we almost have the answer. Multiplying that with the total number of Eucharists consumed since his death gives us the undeniable fact that Jesus would have to have weighed about 3,359,031,578 pounds to supply the Catholic world with his “delicious” god meat for 2022 years, making him the second heaviest person to ever live, right behind your mom.