Question:
Answer:
Being ritually unclean was not a moral judgment in the Old Law. Rather, this condition referred to various phenomena that generate a sense of awe or fear or reverence for God and his works but which also so disturb the imagination as to distract it potentially from the practical business of carrying out divine worship. The emission of human seed, the life blood, various strange deformities, and diseases—all of these were indications of the solemn presence of the power of God, and contact with them caused an impression that needed to be lessened in order to worship God in relatively greater tranquility.
The new covenant in worship established by the Savior does not have essentially any of these prohibitions, but it remains true that the tradition of the Church has maintained at various times and to varying degrees abstinence from sexual contact or from food and drink in connection with the fulfillment of the duties of divine worship. The Church has even in its present law that someone who has shed human blood or mutilated himself is impeded from being ordained for public worship.
So the sense that certain visible and human phenomena have a bearing on our dispositions for worship is still in force. This is much clearer in the practice of the Eastern Churches than it is in the severely limited discipline of the current Roman rite.