Brendan Cronin throws the chalice against the wall at Mass

Brendan Cronin’s chalice-throwing at Mass is a remembered act of blasphemous anger, later invoked as a measure of the rage that returns when he confronts suffering he cannot accept. The book does not stage the Mass incident directly in the supplied passages; it gives the event weight through Brendan’s recollections of its force and recurrence.

The remembered outburst

While caring for Emmy Halbourg, Brendan strokes her hair, lifts her from her wheelchair, and settles her into bed. As he covers her bent legs, anger surges through him with the same intensity he had felt at Mass at St. Bette’s two Sundays earlier. He thinks that, had a sacred chalice been near, he would have hurled it against the wall again. The comparison confirms that the earlier act was not an isolated gesture: the rage that drove it remains close to the surface.

Anger and suffering

The Mass incident becomes a point of reference for Brendan’s response to Winton Tolk lying wounded on the floor of a sandwich shop. Brendan’s anger grows as he thinks of Winton’s fate and of the injustice of what has happened; without his former belief in God, he has no prayer in which to contain it. The recollection connects his rejection of faith with an intense sensitivity to suffering, rather than with indifference to it.

Significance

The chalice, an object of worship, becomes in Brendan’s memory the object he could turn against a wall in rage. That reversal gives the episode its force: his crisis is expressed not as calm doubt but as anger that breaks into a sacred setting and resurfaces when vulnerable people suffer. The later scenes do not resolve that anger; they show it continuing to shape how he responds to Emmy’s illness and Winton’s injury.