Viaticum is a term used – especially in the

Catholic Church The Catholic Church (), also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the List of Christian denominations by number of members, largest Christian church, with 1.27 to 1.41 billion baptized Catholics Catholic Church by country, worldwid ...

– for the

Eucharist The Eucharist ( ; from , ), also called Holy Communion, the Blessed Sacrament or the Lord's Supper, is a Christianity, Christian Rite (Christianity), rite, considered a sacrament in most churches and an Ordinance (Christianity), ordinance in ...

(also called Holy Communion), administered, with or without Anointing of the Sick (also called Extreme Unction), to a person who is dying; viaticum is thus a part of the Last Rites.

Usage

The word ''viaticum'' is a Latin word meaning "provision for a journey", from ''via,'' or "way". For Communion as Viaticum, the Eucharist is given in the usual form, with the added words "May the Lord Jesus Christ protect you and lead you to eternal life". The Eucharist is seen as the ideal spiritual food to strengthen a dying person for the journey from this world to life after death. Alternatively, ''viaticum'' can refer to an ancient Roman provision or allowance for traveling, originally of transportation and supplies, later of money, made to officials on public missions; mostly simply, the word, a haplology of ''viā tēcum'' ("with you on the way"), indicates money or necessities for any journey. ''Viaticum'' can also refer to the enlistment bonus received by a Roman legionary, auxiliary soldier or seaman in the Roman Imperial Navy.

Practice

The desire to have the bread and wine consecrated in the Eucharist available for the sick and dying led to the reservation of the Blessed Sacrament, a practice which has endured from the earliest days of the

Christian Church In ecclesiology, the Christian Church is what different Christian denominations conceive of as being the true body of Christians or the original institution established by Jesus Christ. "Christian Church" has also been used in academia as a syn ...

. Saint Justin Martyr, writing less than fifty years after the death of Saint John the Apostle, mentions that "the deacons communicate each of those present, and carry away to the absent the consecrated Bread, and wine and water". (Just. M. Apol. I. cap. lxv.) If the dying person cannot take solid food, the Eucharist may be administered via the

wine Wine is an alcoholic drink made from Fermentation in winemaking, fermented fruit. Yeast in winemaking, Yeast consumes the sugar in the fruit and converts it to ethanol and carbon dioxide, releasing heat in the process. Wine is most often made f ...

alone, since Catholicism holds that Christ exists in his entirety (body, blood, soul, and divinity) in both the consecrated solid and liquid elements. The sacrament of Extreme Unction is often administered immediately before giving Viaticum if a

priest A priest is a religious leader authorized to perform the sacred rituals of a religion, especially as a mediatory agent between humans and one or more deity, deities. They also have the authority or power to administer religious rites; in parti ...

is available to do so. Unlike the Anointing of the Sick, Viaticum may be administered by a priest,

deacon A deacon is a member of the diaconate, an office in Christian churches that is generally associated with service of some kind, but which varies among theological and denominational traditions. Major Christian denominations, such as the Cathol ...

or by an extraordinary minister, using the

reserved Reserved is a Polish apparel retailer headquartered in Gdańsk, Poland. It was founded in 1999 and remains the flagship brand of the LPP (company), LPP group, which has more than 2,200 retail stores located in over 38 countries and also owns su ...

Blessed Sacrament.

Relation to pre-Christian funerary practice

Late Antiquity Late antiquity marks the period that comes after the end of classical antiquity and stretches into the onset of the Early Middle Ages. Late antiquity as a period was popularized by Peter Brown (historian), Peter Brown in 1971, and this periodiza ...

and the

Early Mediaeval The Early Middle Ages (or early medieval period), sometimes controversially referred to as the Dark Ages, is typically regarded by historians as lasting from the late 5th to the 10th century. They marked the start of the Middle Ages of Europ ...

period in the West, the host was sometimes placed in the mouth of a person already dead. Some claim this could relate to a traditional practice that scholars have compared to the pre-Christian custom of Charon's obol, a small coin placed in the mouth of the dead for passage to the afterlife and sometimes also called a ''viaticum'' in Latin literary sources.A. Rush, ''Death and Burial in Christian Antiquity'' (Washington, D.C. 1941), pp. 93–94; Gregory Grabka, “Christian Viaticum: A Study of Its Cultural Background,” ''Traditio'' 9 (1953), 1–43; Frederick S. Paxton, ''Christianizing Death: The Creation of a Ritual Process in Early Medieval Europe'' (

Cornell University Press The Cornell University Press is the university press of Cornell University, an Ivy League university in Ithaca, New York. It is currently housed in Sage House, the former residence of Henry William Sage. It was first established in 1869, maki ...

1990), pp. 32–3
online
G.J.C. Snoek, ''Medieval Piety from Relics to the Eucharist: A Process of Mutual Interaction'' (Leiden 1995), ''passim'', but especially pp. 102–10
online
and 122–12
online
Paul Binski, ''Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation'' (Cornell University Press 1996), p. 3
online
J. Patout Burns, “Death and Burial in Christian Africa: The Literary Evidence,” paper delivered to the North American Patristics Society, May 1997

/ref>

References

Bibliography

* Rubin, Miri, ''Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture'', Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. * Snoek, C. J. K., ''Medieval Piety from Relics to the Eucharist: A Process of Mutual Interaction'', Leiden: Brill, 1995. {{CatholicMass Eucharistic devotions Christianity and death