Filth in the holy water. So what?

There may be faecal bacteria in fonts and springs, but this does not alter its spiritual value. The real contamination lies elsewhere

A young man fills holy water in a bottle at a water tap in Lourdes, France. Photograph: Carsten Koall/Getty Images

An Austrian study into water from a number of holy wells and baptismal fonts discovered all kinds of unhealthy bacteria. This may be a complete non-story scientifically but it has zipped round the world because it makes perfect cultural sense. It says that the sacred is full of shit, and science proves it.

It doesn't seem a very convincing line of research to me – people may go in for the odd bit of lip-wetting, but they actually don't drink from holy water stoups, or from wells and waters in European forests. There is very little standing water anywhere in Europe that I would drink without chemical purification. And of course it's all full of harmful bacteria. Everything is, to a first approximation. But holy water isn't meant to be safe. It is meant to heal.

The clearest example is of course found outside Europe, in the sacred Ganges, where not just human waste but corpses, partly burned, float down the river in which tens of thousands immerse themselves, and drink, and take home bottled samples from, to venerate and cultivate what must be an extraordinary variety of dangerous micro-organisms. Nothing in Europe can compare to that.

But the sacredness of the Ganges is not diminished in the least by its filth. In fact the two must go together, for it is one function of the sacred to suspend the ordinary rules of probability. This isn't the same as breaking the laws of nature. What the sacred or the supernatural promises is that we will be lucky and do things which are not impossible, but which we don't think we can really get away with, or be nicer, better and more fortunate than we deserve.

This doesn't need to be worked out at all. It works as emotion, or confidence, without intellect. I know this because I am someone whom water affects profoundly, on a level far below conscious thought. To sit and wait by the side of a lake or a river is something absolutely necessary for my soul: in fact it is the feelings and the apprehensions that water gives me which I use as a guide to what other people might mean by their souls. Yet this is only an extreme case of a very widespread and possibly universal trait. The association of water and life is natural and it saturates many religions. Thousands of miles from the holy rivers of Hinduism, the Bible is full of living waters.

These feelings, and this imagery are not in themselves enough to make water sacred. Sacredness has at least three functions: what is sacred must heal; it must offer a glimpse, or an apprehension of a more rightly ordered world; it must be powerful and potentially dangerous. But it must also bring communities together. The sacred always brings with it the possibility of blasphemy, because it is always possible to deny it. My worship of water – even the grubby concrete reservoirs of the English Midlands – can't make it sacred because it is not something I can share or ritualise with others.

Conversely, the discovery of bacteria in a baptismal font can't diminish its sacred properties at all. Believers see it is as place of purity, not hygiene. Hygiene is sterile, but purity sustains life.

What really threatens the sacredness of the holy wells and the holy water of Austria has nothing to do with science at all. It is the loss of the authority that verified them as sacred. The real story here is the huge withdrawal of popular support, and hence legitimacy and power, from the Catholic church there in the face of a succession of scandals involving sexual abuse and the misuse of power in the hierarchy. What has polluted the holy wells of Austria is the behaviour of the Catholic church there. That's far more poisonous than bacteria.