A thorny problem indeed. It’s so hard for us truly to accept that the Infinite God of the Universe could fully inhabit a human body, and be both True God and True Man. I was often reminded of just how thorny a problem this is for us when I used to discuss the Christological Heresies with my adolescent religion students. The Arians, for example, could accept the human Jesus, but not his Divinity. The Docetists, on the other hand, had no problem with Christ the Son of God, but they were sure his Humanity was just a show. Finally, the Monophysites could understand that Jesus was both man and God, but insisted that he had only one, Divine, nature . . . and so on.
Two Natures
The Incarnate Second Person of the Trinity inevitably presents these and numerous other puzzles to our finite minds. Indeed, such conundrums have been with us from the earliest days of the Church to the present day. A series of councils wrestled with these issues until The Council of Chalcedon gave a definitive answer in A.D. 451. Chalcedon declared that Christ is:
made known in two natures without confusion [i.e. mixture], without change, without division, without separation, the difference of the natures being by no means removed because of the union, but the property of each nature being preserved and coalescing in one prosopon [person] and one hypostasis [subsistence]–not parted or divided into two prosopa [persons], but one and the same Son, only-begotten, divine Word, the Lord Jesus Christ.
Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68)
Image: The Tears of St. Peter, El Greco, late 16th century
Hard Sayings
As hard as it is to accept that Jesus Christ is both fully God and a true man with a human body, however, we are asked to accept an even harder teaching. Our Faith insists that the same body is truly present in the Eucharistic bread and wine offered up at every Mass. Furthermore, as Christ Himself tells us:
Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. (John 6:55-57)
Nowhere Else To Go
Many of his disciples found this teaching too hard to accept, and went away. This Sunday’s Solemnity of The Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ reminds, however, as Peter points out (John 6:68), that we have nowhere else to go. In fact, only by eating the Body and Drinking the Blood of the God-Become-Man can we share in his eternal life.
There’s the wonder. Christ has a human body, and so the Infinite God shares in our humanity. Not only that, He shares that body with us in the Eucharist. Thereby, He lets us participate in His divinity. No wonder we call it “Gospel”, that is, “Good News.” Yes, it is hard to believe, but, as today’s feast reminds us, it’s The Truth.
How often we are reminded that we are not incontrol. My laptop died, and all the alternatives are limited and very slow. I had planned a new post on current Eucharistic controversies this weekend, but it won’t be ready on time. Instead, I’m reposting a piece that was originally a talk on Eucharistic Adoration that I was asked to deliver in my then-parish a few years ago:
As Catholics, we are blessed to have some wonderful devotional practices that help us grow closer to Christ. One of the most profound of these is Eucharistic Adoration. My wife and I were recently asked to help encourage participation in Adoration in our parish, in the course of which we ourselves came to see dimensions of this great gift that we hadn’t considered before.
For one thing, we both thought immediately of scriptural connections. My lovely bride thought of the passage from First Kings (1 Kings 19:10-13) where the Lord tells the prophet Elijah to stand on the mountain, for “The Lord is about to pass by”. There’s a mighty wind, an earthquake, and a roaring fire, but God is not in any of those things; instead, Elijah encounters the Lord in a “gentle whispering”.
Just as God does not appear to Elijah in any of the grand and dramatic forms we might expect, so Jesus enters the world as a tiny baby, and continues to manifest himself to us as a simple piece of bread. Eucharistic Adoration gives us a chance to shut out all the storm and stress of our daily lives while we contemplate the infinite God embodied in that piece of bread, and hear his gentle whisper.
My own first thought was the passage from Luke’s Gospel (Luke 10:38-42) where Jesus is visiting the sisters Martha and Mary. Martha, who is “worried about many things”, is frantically bustling about the house, while Mary simply sits at the feet of Jesus, watching and listening. When Martha complains that Mary isn’t helping her, Jesus answers that Mary has chosen “the better part, and it will not be taken away from her”.
Most of us can probably identify with Martha: always “worried about many things”, and too distracted to notice the Lord. Adoration is a great opportunity to give our “inner Martha” a rest and, like Mary, choose “the better part”. After all, what is Eucharistic Adoration, if not watching and listening at the feet of Jesus?
What’s true for us as individuals also applies to us communally. However important, even necessary, all of our various activities, committees, and causes may be, they can overshadow “the one thing”, as Jesus tells Martha, “that is needful”. What better reminder that Christ is the Center than a parish putting aside twelve hours in the middle of the week to sit at the Master’s feet? It keeps us from becoming nothing but noisy gongs and clanging cymbals (1 Corinthians 13:1).
My brief comments here can’t even begin to explore the depth of meaning contained in the Eucharist. God who created us knows what we need; having given us both body and soul, he knows we need material means to understand spiritual realities. The opportunity to kneel in adoration before our Eucharistic Lord is a gift we can’t afford to pass up.
Featured image top of page: “Christ in the House of Mary and Martha” by Vermeer, 1655
You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.
The quote above is often attributed to communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky. There is no record of his actually having said it, but it’s widely repeated because it pithily sums up a terrifying truth about the relentlessness of war. In an age when a large and influential segment of the population wages political warfare on all who seem to stand in the way of their urgent drive to replace reality as it is with a vaguely envisioned utopia, we can amend that to “You may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you.”
For a long time now the Catholic bishops in the United States have dabbled in politics, mostly in a manner that we would call “virtue signaling” today: a statement about nuclear war in the 1980s, expressions of concern about capital punishment in the 1990s, some hand-wringing about immigration in more recent years. All issues with legitimate moral dimensions, it’s true, but all likewise issues on which serious Catholics can have legitimate differences of opinion. In none of them were the bishops confronting Catholics or others who were clearly advocating anything directly contrary to the moral law, or promoting an intrinsic evil. And for what it’s worth, none of them are areas in which Catholic bishops have particular competence.
Joe and Jill Biden at Mass
Over the same stretch of time there has been another issue looming, one which is indeed a matter of intrinsic evil, about which there is no room for prudential judgment, and which is very much within the competence of the episcopacy: abortion. Abortion has been unambiguously condemned as a moral evil from the very first days of the Church: “thou shalt not procure abortion, nor commit infanticide” (Didache, II.2). Now, to be fair, the bishops have been virtually unanimous that abortion is wrong. At the same time, they have been unable or unwilling to fully deploy their authority to teach, govern, and sanctify in the case of prominent prominent public figures who claim to be Catholic and. at the same time, promote abortion and other evils.
It has become increasingly difficult for them to dodge the issue. Now a man who claims to be “a devout Catholic” has become President of the United States, having promised to use the power of the U.S. government to make abortion more accessible at home and around the world, and furthermore at the expense of American taxpayers regardless of their religious or moral convictions. He is doing the same with regard to other moral evils such as same sex marriage. He has even pledged to drag the Little Sisters of the Poor throught the federal courts yet again to force them to pay for contraceptives for employees.
As it happens, we are honoring two great saints today who know what is to stand for the Truth in the face of an invasive government, St. John Fisher and St. Thomas More. St. Thomas More is more familiar to us than his contemporary St. John Fisher, partly because his magnetic personality still resonates almost five centuries later, but also in large part because of Robert Bolt’s play and film A Man For All Seasons. St. John Fisher’s story is no less compelling, however, and is in fact given greater prominence by the Church (both Saints are commemorated on the anniversary of his death, although they were not martyred on the same day). As a bishop who faced some particularly difficult choices, he is particularly relevant today.
Cardinal St. John Fisher
Who was St. John Fisher? At the time of his death he was bishop of the English See of Rochester, and he died defending the authority of the Church, its vicar the Pope, and the sanctity of marriage, against a monarch who was willing to destroy all of those things in order to get his way: King Henry VIII. In my previous post (here) on Blessed Margaret Pole, who gave her life in the same cause, I wrote of Henry VIII that he:
could serve as a sort of patron “anti-saint” for our times. He was a man possessed of great gifts . . . Henry never mastered himself, however, and so his prodigious talents were put at the service, not of his people, but of his equally prodigious cravings for women, wealth, and power. In the end he tried to swallow even the Church. In his later years his grossly obese body became a living image of his insatiable appetites.
John Fisher was no stranger to Henry’s household. Before his episcopal ordination, Fisher had been the confessor of Margaret Beaufort, Henry’s grandmother, and reportedly tutored the future Monarch himself. The bishop’s long familiarity with the king and his family did him no more good than layman Thomas More’s personal friendship with Henry did him. Fisher had championed the marriage of Catherine of Aragon, Henry’s first wife, and had resisted the king’s encroachments on the Church. At last, when he refused to take an oath recognizing the offspring of Henry’s new wife Ann Boleyn as the legitimate successors to the throne, he was put to death. He alone of the English bishops resisted to the bitter end King Henry’s usurpation of the authority of the Church and mockery of the sanctity of marriage.
Henry VIII’s bloated specter casts a longer shadow over the world today than at any time since his death almost five hundred years ago, now when a voracious state is devouring more and more of our freedoms, and casting an especially greedy eye on the free exercise of religion. It’s in this context that the American bishops, who just their annual meeting, voted last Friday to issue a document on “Eucharistic Coherence”, by which they mean the constant practice of the Church (going back to the days of the Apostles themselves) that individuals who engage in persistent and unrepentant public evil should not receive the Body and Blood of Christ in communion.
What this document will actually say is not yet clear; a committee will work on a draft over the next few months for the bishops to vote on at their November meeting. Given the past timidity of the bishops in this regard, it’s hard to envision them getting enough of the espicopate to sign off on a really clear and decisive statement. The brief statement on the USCCB website looks a lot like the all-too-familiar fence straddling:
American Bishops (Photo by Leigh Vogel/MaxPPP)
Since the conclusion of the Spring Plenary Assembly of the U.S. bishops last week, there has been much attention on the vote taken to draft a document on the Eucharist. The question of whether or not to deny any individual or groups Holy Communion was not on the ballot. The vote by the bishops last week tasked the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Doctrine to begin the drafting of a teaching document on the Eucharist. The Eucharist is the source and summit of Christian life. The importance of nurturing an ever deeper understanding of the beauty and mystery of the Eucharist in our lives is not a new topic for the bishops. The document being drafted is not meant to be disciplinary in nature, nor is it targeted at any one individual or class of persons. It will include a section on the Church’s teaching on the responsibility of every Catholic, including bishops, to live in accordance with the truth, goodness and beauty of the Eucharist we celebrate.
Clearly, we should not get our hopes up. All the same, we should keep engouraging our bishops to do the right thing, and keep praying for them: The Holy Spirit may yet give them the strength. The possibility that the bishops may at last take a stand has impelled a large number of pro-abortion self-identified Catholics in the U.S. Congress to issue a preemptive strike in the form of a so-called “statement of principles“. There really aren’t much in the way of actual principles in the letter. The pro-abortion legislators mostly point out all the areas where they agree with the prudential policy preferences of a large number of bishops, with the implication that all of those political stances somehow outweigh the moral depravity of abortion. The statement concludes with, well, with the the usual tired, unconvincing cliches:
We believe the separation of church and state allows for our faith to inform our public duties and best serve our constituents. The Sacrament of Holy Communion is central to the life of practicing Catholics, and the weaponization of the Eucharist to Democratic lawmakers for their support of a woman’s safe and legal access to abortion is contradictory.
I examine the incoherence of the “weaponization” argument in my post “Who’s Really ‘politicizing’ the Body of Christ?”; I’ll simply point out here that this description implies that the real significance of the Eucharist is to influence political behavior, and that abortion itself is just another political issue. There is no recognition that the value the Church places on the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ has nothing to do with politics, and the dismissive reduction of the horror of abortion to the trite evasion of “a woman’s safe and legal access to abortion” is simply insulting. This letter and the public comments of some of the individual signers are saturated with the same self-idolatry that we find at the center of the gender wars: I am not bound by any truth or reality outside of my desires – if I decide that I’m a Catholic, nobody can tell me differently.
And if reality is really reducible to our individual desires, then here’s no need for bishops . . . or a Church . . . or even a Savior. This is an important moment for the American bishops. They stand to lose whatever moral authority they have left if they allow themselves to be bullied by this crowd of political grifters. The spirit of Henry VIII might be alive, but his modern day emulators at least don’t have his power to remove the heads of their adversaries. May our bishops look to the example of St. John Fisher, pray for his intercession, and trust in the Lord to sustain them as they leave aside the temptations of mere politics and take up once again the true authority handed on to them from Christ through his Apostles.
St. John Fisher, pray for all Catholic bishops and priests, and be an inspiration to them, that they may follow your lead in bravely defending Christ’s Church and his Holy Sacraments. Amen.
Featured image top of page: “Execution of Bishop John Fisher (A) and lord chancellor Thomas More (B) “. Unsigned engraving from: Theatrum Crudelitatum Haereticorum, Antwerp 1592.
We live in strange days indeed. The German bishops seem intent on dismantling the Catholic Church in their homeland. Pope Francis sent them a letter two years ago in which he suggested (I think) that they apply the brakes:
The current challenges as well as the answers we give demand a long maturation process and the cooperation of an entire people over years . . . This stimulates the emergence and continuation of processes that build us as God’s people, rather than seeking immediate results with premature and medial consequences that are fleeting because of lack of deepening and maturation or because they do not correspond to the vocation we are given.
As I said, that’s what I think it means: I admit that there are any number of other possible interpretations. The German bishops themselves, for instance, apparently took it to mean “full speed ahead!” Their persistence in what they call “The Synodal Way” has, however, provoked another letter, this time a closely reasoned, scripturally and theologically rich refutation of the abdication of apostolic authority that is taking place in Germany. You can’t explain the situation more succinctly than this:
Yet the authority of the apostles and their successors is not their own. It is a share in the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the Truth (see John 14:6). Every successor of the Apostles must resist the temptation to imitate the “senseless prophets who follow[ed] their own spirit” in Ezekiel’s time, promoting their own opinions and ideas (Ezek. 13:3). Every successor of the Apostles must also resist the temptation to imitate the prophets and priests of Jeremiah’s time, who adjusted their teaching according to the preferences of the people (Jer. 5:30–31).
Yet the authority of the apostles and their successors is not their own. It is a share in the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ . . .
“Priest Offering Mass”, Simone Martini, early 14th Century
The only problem is that this letter does not come from Rome, but from Denver, Colorado, where it was promulgated by Archbishop Aquila, who has absolutely no authority over brother bishops across the Atlantic Ocean. The appropriate authority in Rome is instead occupied with rejecting the proffered resignation of Cardinal Marx of Munich, one of the chief perpetrators of The Synodal Way.
Another thing distracting the authorities in Rome from the misbehavior north of the Alps, if we are to believe the rumors, is the urgent need to suppress Pope Benedict XVI’s Apostolic Letter Summorum Pontificorum, which freed the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) from restrictions widely imposed in the aftermath of Vatican II.
I intend to discuss the TLM and more traditional expressions of liturgy in greater length soon, but today I’m reposting a revised version of a piece I wrote a few years ago. At the time Cardinal Sarah, then head of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, made a strong appeal to bishops and priests to reintroduce the practice of saying the Mass ad orientem (facing the altar). Sadly, his suggestion was quickly squelched. It was a good idea nonetheless (a great idea, really), and in the post below I explain why, with the help of Captain Picard, the Starship Enterprise, and some extraterrestrials from the far side of the galaxy. So, let’s boldly go . . .
Darmok and Jalod at Tanagra
Just about everybody knows something about Star Trek, especially now that there have been half a dozen (?) different television series and who knows how many movies. I’ve made profitable use of Star Trek material in my classroom and on my blogs on many occasions (almost all from the original series and The Next Generation – some other time we can talk about why it’s limited to those two). One of my all-time favorite episodes is “Darmok”, from the 5th season of Star Trek The Next Generation.
In “Darmok” the (mostly human) crew of the starship Enterprise encounters an alien race called Tamarians, with whom humans have previously had several frustratingly unsuccessful attempts at communication. It seems that the Earthling’s Universal Translators (ah, the wonders of science fiction!) are able to discover the meaning of the Tamarians’ words, but can’t figure out how the words combine to express meaning. What is one to make, for instance, of utterances such as “Shaka, when the walls fell”, or “The river Tamarc, in winter”? The aliens seem to be talking in metaphors and allusions drawn from stories known to them and to nobody else.
Troi and Data explain how the Tamarian language works
Jean-Luc Picard, captain of the Starship Enterprise experiences the same frustration as his predecessors in his attempts to communicate with the commander of a Tamarian ship, a frustration clearly shared by his alien counterpart. Once it becomes clear that their efforts are going nowhere, the Tamarian captain holds up two daggers and declares “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra!”, at which point both he and Picard are transported (more sci-fi wizardry) down to the surface of a planet below. Picard soon learns that the captain is not challenging him to a duel as he at first supposes, but what he does intend, or what he means by his insistent repetition of “Darmok and Jalod at Tanagra!” remains a mystery.
Eventually, after the two captains together encounter a deadly creature (which mortally wounds Picard’s Tamarian counterpart), Picard puts the puzzle together. Darmok and Jalod were two heroes, perhaps rivals or enemies, who together fought a beast on an island called Tanagra, and formed a bond of friendship. The alien captain had hoped that, by putting himself and Picard in a similar situation, they might likewise achieve through shared experience what they couldn’t find through mere words. Understanding too late his counterpart’s intent, Picard is able at least to comfort the dying Tamarian by recounting to him the ancient epic of Gil-Gamesh.
Captain Picard informs the Tamarians of the death of their captain
We Are Formed by Experience
The Tamarians, as is the way with Star Trek aliens, are really humans in disguise (literally, of course, but figuratively as well). In this particular story the creators of the television show have put their finger on something that goes to the very heart of what it is to be human: we are formed by our experiences, not only as individuals but as peoples. The “aliens” they have created here view the world only through the lens of the stories that have been passed down about the history of their people, and in their everyday experiences they consciously relive the experiences of their forebears. Their only way to communicate abstractions is through the concrete: people, places, and events.
Tamarian Captain and Captain Picard
Now, we Earth-dwellers may not look very much like the Children of Tama at first. We have a wealth of language that communicates abstractions and ideas . . . and yet we are more Tamarian than we might appear at first glance. Notice how easily, for example, the name of the Nazi’s hand-picked Norwegian puppet Vidkun Quisling has become the common noun “quisling”, a synonym for “traitor” . . . or how easily we use a metaphorical term such as “puppet”, as I did just now. Often, we quickly forget that the expressions we are using are metaphors at all. I remember for instance during the 1992 presidential campaign in the U.S. when former (and future) California governor Jerry Brown was asked about the “anointed front-runner” Bill Clinton. Brown asked whether he was running for president, or running for pope. Some allusions are even more deeply buried: how many people even know when they use the word “mentor” they are alluding to Homer’s Odyssey, where the goddess Athena, in the guise of a wise old man named Mentor, accompanies Odysseus’s son Telemachus to guide the inexperienced young man on his journey and, to speak metaphorically, “show him the ropes”.
It’s a Mystery to Me
There’s even more going on here than the use of language. The Tamarian captain understands that actions, that experiences, can communicate in ways that words cannot, which is of course as true of human beings as much as it is of fictional extraterrestrials. This is a large part of why so many religions rely on ritual and formal rites: the actions communicate to us much more deeply than mere words, because we are actually living out what they want to convey. In fact, the true meaning of the term “mystery” (from the Greek μυστήριον) is not something unknowable, but something that can only be known experientially, through doing. Traditional Christianity tells us that God uses these mysteries as a means not only of imparting His Grace, but of revealing himself to us. Once we understand that, we can more easily see why μυστήριον translates into Latin as sacramentum, because sacraments involve not only knowing or thinking, but acting.
Most religions rely, to some degree or other, on mystery. At the very core of Christianity we find the Profoundest Mystery, the Supreme Sacrament: The Infinite God become Man in order to experience our humanity, and to invite us, in turn, to share in His Divinity. We live out this mystery concretely when we receive the Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist, the “Summit and Source of the Christian Life.” While Catholic Christianity includes countless lesser ways of living out spiritual realities as well, such as the other Sacraments, sacramentals, devotions, and so on, the Eucharist, and the Sacrifice of the Mass in which we receive it, is the most important thing we do.
Turning Toward The Lord
Cardinal Robert Sarah, (CNS photo/Paul Haring)
It can be helpful, I think, to bear these considerations in mind when we look at the suggestion made by Cardinal Sarah, head of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, that priests start re-introducing the practice of saying the Mass ad orientem, “toward the rising sun”, which is to say facing the altar rather than the congregation. The Cardinal made the suggestion in a talk delivered at a liturgical conference in London a few years ago (full text here). Cardinal Sarah asked his fellow shepherds in the episcopate to support him in this matter, saying:
I very humbly and fraternally would like to appeal also to my brother bishops: please lead your priests and people towards the Lord in this way, particularly at large celebrations in your dioceses and in your cathedral. Please form your seminarians in the reality that we are not called to the priesthood to be at the centre of liturgical worship ourselves, but to lead Christ’s faithful to him as fellow worshippers united in the one same act of adoration.
Implicit in the part of the quote I have put in bold type above is the idea that what we do and what the priest does during the Mass is a part of the message.
I first came across a similar suggestion in regard to ad orientem worship some years ago in an article by Fr. Joseph Fessio called “The Mass of Vatican II”. In his essay Fr. Fessio explains what the documents of Vatican II actually say about the Mass; for instance, that it should remain mostly in Latin, and that Gregorian Chant “should be given pride of place in liturgical services”, and various other directives that appear not to have much influenced the post-conciliar revision of the liturgy. Fr. Fessio points out that one thing that was done does not appear, anywhere, in the Council’s documents, just as it had never been part of the tradition of the Church over the previous 18 centuries: turning the priest at Mass around to face the congregation, rather than having him face the altar, the liturgical East, along with the people he is leading in prayer. In defending the traditional practice Fr. Fessio more explicitly makes some of the same points that Cardinal Sarah does in his London talk:
It’s true that when the priest faces the people for the celebration of the Eucharistic Sacrifice, there may be a sense of greater unity as a community. But there is also a danger of the priest being the performer and you being the spectator – precisely what the Council did not want: priest performers and congregational spectators. But there is something more problematic. You can see it, perhaps, by contrasting Mass facing the people with Mass facing East or facing the Lord. I don’t say Mass “with my back to the people” anymore than Patton went through Germany with his “back to the soldiers.” Patton led the Third Army across Germany and they followed him to achieve a goal. The Mass is part of the Pilgrim Church on the way to our goal, our heavenly homeland. This world is not our heavenly homeland. We don’t sit around in a circle and look at each other. We want to look with each other and with the priest towards the rising sun, the rays of grace, where the Son will come again in glory on the clouds.
The Medium is the Message
Marshall McLuhan famously said of television that “the medium is the message”. The same can be said of all media, including sacred media. How we celebrate the Mass sends a message. The symbolic “message” of the ad orientem Mass is clear: that all of us together, priest and people, are making an offering to God; we all face our Lord together. When priest and people face each other, who is offering what to whom? The message seems to be that we are there to see each other, not to turn to Our Lord. The little cartoon to the left (which, I confess, I stole from Fr. Z’s blog) gives a good illustration of the problem. Cardinal Sarah himself recently made the same point in a talk deliveredto the bishops of Sri Lanka,
In recent decades in some countries the Sacred Liturgy has become too anthropocentric; man not Almighty God has often become its focus.
But that’s not how it’s supposed to be. Instead,
In every Catholic liturgy, the Church, made up of both minister and faithful, gives her complete focus – body, heart and mind – to God who is the centre of our lives and the origin of every blessing and grace.
That’s the beauty of the traditional ad orientem celebration of the Mass: we don’t merely read or hear but experience for ourselves the Truth that God is the center of our lives, and we all turn to Him together in our worship .
It’s Greek to Me
Which brings me to one of my few real quibbles with “Darmok”. In the final scene of the episode we see Captain Picard reading a book when his first officer, Commander Riker, enters the room. Riker looks at the book curiously, and says, “Greek, sir?” (did I mention that Captain Picard is the consummate Renaissance man? Starship captain, interstellar warrior, student of Latin and Greek, etc.), which leads to this exchange:
PICARD: Oh, the Homeric Hymns. One of the root metaphors of our own culture.
RIKER: For the next time we encounter the Tamarians?
PICARD: More familiarity with our own mythology might help us to relate to theirs. The Tamarian was willing to risk all of us just for the hope of communication, connection. Now the door is open between our peoples. That commitment meant more to him than his own life. Thank you, Number One.
Now, the Homeric Hymns is not a bad place to start, as far as it goes, but if Picard really wants to get at the “root” of what it is to be human, I have a better suggestion for him, one that goes like this:
An unusual and unfamiliar expression, “Eucharistic Coherence”, has been showing up on a lot of Catholic websites lately. I’ve written about the abuse of language on more than one occasion in the recent past (here and here, for instance), but this term is not itself abusive, rather it’s intended to expose and correct abuse. It refers to the coherence that ought to exist between the way Catholics profess and live out their faith in public on the one hand, and their worthiness to receive the Body and Blood of Our Lord in Communion on the other. To put it more plainly, it’s a fancy way of saying that public figures who actively promote abortion and other egregious violations of the moral law are not “devout Catholics”, despite their self-professed devotion to Mother Church, and ought not receive communion.
Devout Catholics?
Seems pretty simple, doesn’t it? And yet it’s not. Here’s the short version of the story: given the exuberance with which certain nominally Catholic politicians in the United States promote the killing of the unborn, the dismantling of the family as an institution, and other unlovely manifestations of the Culture of Death, the U.S. Catholic Bishops are preparing to discuss Eucharistic Coherence (i.e., what to do about the scandal caused by said politicians) at their annual meeting later this month. You will no doubt be surprised to hear that a group of 68 American bishops (I could name names, but you probably know them already) have written to Archbishop Gomez, head of the Bishops Conference, asking him to halt the discussion. It seems these bishops are gravely concerned that applying the standard that St. Paul first sets in his First Letter to the Corinthians, that one must be in communion to receive communion (see 1 Corinthians 11:27), would be to “weaponize” or “politicize” the Eucharist.
As they say, never a dull moment, eh? Some interesting commentary on the situation has been published in just the last few days (you can find a sampling here, here, and here). Of course, this issue did not just arise within the last year, it’s been going on for decades. Given it’s current prominence, however, it seemed a good time to republish a piece I first wrote six years ago, originally called “Is The Catholic Church A Political Animal”, in which I raise the question: who is really “politicizing” the Eucharist?
You’re going to find politics wherever people gather, or so someone once told me when I had objected to using the secular political terms “liberal” and “conservative” to describe different factions within the Catholic Church. And he was right, if by “politics” we mean the small-p wrangling that unavoidably accompanies any human enterprise requiring two or more people. But that is a very different thing from Politics, of the partisan variety. The Church is not a political party, and does not work like a political party. Nor should it.
That may seem an obvious point to you and to me, but it’s not at all obvious to everybody. It’s a distinction lost on a large number of people outside of the Church for instance, for many of whom politics has taken the place of religion, and so has become the lens through which they interpret everything. Many such people have come to dominate the secular media in the developed world, with the result that the mass media projects the secular political model onto the Church, with bad guys called conservatives working to thwart the good guys, the liberals (sometimes referred to as progressives), who are fighting to bring about a kinder, better Catholic Church More In Step With The Times. This is the only model of the inner-workings of the Church most people (including most Catholics) see in print, on television, or online, unless they intentionally seek out those Catholic outlets which reject this distorted interpretation. Sadly, many self-described “Catholic” entities embrace the false political model of the hierarchical Church.
U.S. Catholic Bishops (NCR Online photo)
That is not to say that there isn’t a wide range of legitimate differences of opinion within the Church; there is and always has been. Unlike a political party, however, where major policy planks can change overnight with a vote of the membership (and why not? They’re only opinions), there are many things in the Church which are grounded in Divine Revelation, and are therefore not up for negotiation. This vital distinction was expressed very clearly by then prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI) in 2004. Senator John Kerry, the nominee of the Democratic Party for President of the United States, was widely criticized for receiving communion and touting his Catholic bona fides despite his open advocacy for legal abortion and other positions contrary to Catholic moral teaching. Accordingly, Cardinal Ratzinger wrote a letter (later published by the Holy See under the title “Worthiness to Receive Holy Communion: General Principles”) to Kerry’s ordinary, then Archbishop of Washington, D.C. Theodore McCarrick, which shows very clearly how the Church is different from a political party. Cardinal Ratzinger writes:
Not all moral issues have the same moral weight as abortion and euthanasia. For example, if a Catholic were to be at odds with the Holy Father on the application of capital punishment or on the decision to wage war, he would not for that reason be considered unworthy to present himself to receive Holy Communion. While the Church exhorts civil authorities to seek peace, not war, and to exercise discretion and mercy in imposing punishment on criminals, it may still be permissible to take up arms to repel an aggressor or to have recourse to capital punishment. There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not however with regard to abortion and euthanasia.
This crucial difference between particular moral issues can be obscured by applying secular political terms to church “politics”. Political parties often change even basic positions, and this is sometimes a good thing: consider that, when I was a child, many prominent leaders in the Democratic Party in the United States were unapologetic White Supremacists and segregationists. Such a position would be unthinkable today, and yet nobody doubts that the Democratic Party is still the Democratic Party.
“There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not however with regard to abortion and euthanasia.”
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Emeritus XVI)
The political analogy can create the impression that proposed changes in the Church are benign or even desirable changes of the same sort, but nothing is further from the truth. The difference between abortion and euthanasia on the one hand and war and capital punishment on the other is that the Church has always taught that the first two are intrinsically evil, i.e., never permissible; this teaching is part of the deposit of faith and cannot change, and to publicly oppose it is to separate oneself from the Church (hence the unworthiness to receive communion). In the case of war and capital punishment, the Church has taught that they may be morally licit under some circumstances, a teaching that likewise cannot change. While there are certain moral principles that bind a Catholic here (e.g., the Just War Doctrine), the actual application of these principles belongs to the prudential judgment of individual Catholic decision makers. It is in the application of prudential judgment that legitimate differences of opinion may arise.
Many so-called “progressives” in the Church today, however, are not advocating simply the more progessive application of unchanging principles in prudential situations, but are pushing for changing more foundational things like the teaching on marriage, the meaning of priesthood, sexual morality, etc. The Catholic Church, however, unlike a poltical party, can’t change its teachings and still remain the Catholic Church. One can usually make a case for being either a conservative or a liberal in political matters, but when it comes to Church Doctrine, we can only be Catholic . . . or Not.
Featured image top of page: “The Last Supper” by Juan de Juanes, 1562
Babies need to be touched. They need human touch not just for their general emotional well-being, but in some very specific, measurable ways. There is good evidence that sufficient physical contact with another human being is necessary for proper brain development [see here and here, for instance].
Touching other human beings is essential for human flourishing.
Less publicity has been given to the fact that contact, including physical contact, with other human beings continues to be important as we grow older. One study shows that Professional basketball teams “whose players touch each other more often win more games.” Another demonstrates that “those who had more hugs had a better immune response to the cold virus”. I could go on, but you get the idea: touching other human beings is essential for human flourishing.
It’s often the way that modern science breathlessly discovers what people have known all along. The Church has always known that we’re both spiritual and physical, and need each other not just to “be there”, but literally to be there: that’s why the Church is an ecclesia, from the Greek ἐκκλησία, an assembly of the people. We need to believe and worship in the company of other people. We need physical means like the sacraments to fully experience God’s grace. We need the Second Person of the Holy Trinity to become man so that we can look on the Face of our Creator (St. Paul calls him “the image of the invisible God”, Colossians 1:15). We need the Eucharist.
We need the Eucharist. The Second Person of the Trinity did not simply become man: He suffered as man, died, and was resurrected as man, so that He could share his Divine Life with us. The primary, tangible means with which he does that in this world is through the Holy Eucharist. Every Mass is not just a recollection, but a re-presentation, as in a making present again, of the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. As Fr. William Sanders puts it:
However, this memorial is not simply a recollection of past history in chronological time, but rather a liturgical proclamation of living history, of an event that continues to live and touch our lives now . . .
Likewise, in the Eucharistic Host we come into direct contact with the Verum Corpus, the true body and blood of the crucified and risen Lord. That’s why the early martyrs told their Roman persecutors, “The Christian cannot live without the Eucharist”, that’s why St. Tarcisius gave his life protecting the consecrated Body and Blood of Christ.
With that in mind, I’d like to turn to the delicate topic of the curious events of this past year. We learned a whole lot about the information media, the political establishment, and, yes, the Church hierarchy. I don’t have much to say about the first two except to point out, as I have previously, that they are not our friends; they are not concerned for the flourishing of any of us as individuals, and surely not for our corporate well-being as the Church.
“The Martyrdom of St. Tarcisius”, Anthony Troncet, 1908
The Church hierarchy, well . . . that’s a touchier topic. I hardly need to say how many of us were dismayed a year ago by the response of the institutional Church to the Covid situation. I recall that at that time someone posted a map on a social media platform (which I will not name because I reject it and all its works and empty promises) showing all the dioceses of the United States. As each diocese shut down public masses, it’s area on the map went black. In less than a week the entire United States went dark. There was not a single diocese offering believers within its boundaries access to the mass. “The Christian cannot live without the Eucharist”.
Now, I don’t intend to launch a rant against the bishops. I understand that their position was difficult. While the science showed fairly early on that Covid 19 is not really a serious threat for most of us (not that you’d know it from government policies then or now), that was not yet clear at the time of the shut-downs. Also, the Corona Virus really is a deadly threat for the oldest segment of the population, and a disproportionate number of priests fall into that category. The desire to protect priests and people was and remains the best argument for limiting access to gatherings in our churches; whether or not shutting down whole dioceses was the best or most appropriate way to offer that protection is another matter, which I’ll touch on below.
Much less defensible was the near total surrender of ecclesiastical autonomy to the dictates of secular governments. Please let me know if it happened anywhere, but I don’t know of a single instance of a bishop saying to his state governor: “We’ll be happy to cooperate with your Covid mitigation efforts, but we will determine for ourselves how to do that in our own institutions.” More to the point, I don’t know of a single bishop (and again, I’d love to hear about it if it happened) who said “You have no authority to determine whether or not the Church of Jesus Christ is an essential service.” The Government rarely gives something back once it has taken it.
What exactly compelled them to bow to the dictates of Caesar and deny millions of Christians access to the Body of Christ, the Verum Corpus for which St. Tarcisius died, on Easter Sunday, the holiest day of the year? Remember, “The Christian cannot live without the Eucharist”. Was it for the tax exemption? “What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul?” But for a tax exemption? In any case, the signs of the times indicate that the tax exemption will soon be gone no matter what we do. Are they afraid the government will lock us out of our churches? We’ve been in the catacombs before.
But honestly, I don’t think it needed, or needs, to come to that. I know of individual priests who quietly provided private masses, or offered parking lot masses, or other outdoor masses. I have to say that the cathedral church in my diocese did find some imaginative ways to continue to offer in-person confession (remember the human touch?), with appropriate social distancing, throughout the shut-down. Sadly, there are some places where confession is still not being offered at all. I’m sure that most of us would have been very pleased to see that same determination and imagination applied throughout the Covid crisis to making the sacraments, and especially the True Body of Christ, available to all Catholics. After all, “The Christian cannot live without the Eucharist.”
I’m not going through this simply to air year-old complaints. I’m looking to the future. It’s going to happen again. Whether because of Covid-19 or some other reasonably plausible threat, they’ll try to shut us down again. How can they not? It was just too easy for them to do it the first time. What can we do to protect our access to the Eucharist the next time the Powers and Principalities of this world try to take it away from us?
This is where we circle back to where we started, with babies and the need for the human touch. There’s one more study I wanted to mention. An article in Scientific American reminds us that “Strong emotional bonds between mothers and infants increase children’s willingness to explore the world”. Well, it turns out that the power of the mother’s touch survives infancy:
The more secure we are in our attachment to Mom, the more likely we are to try new things and take risks. Now researchers are discovering that this effect continues into adulthood. A mere reminder of Mom’s touch or the sound of her voice on the phone is enough to change people’s minds and moods, affecting their decision making in measurable ways.
Now, the Church is our spiritual mother, isn’t she? Recall that Pope John XXIII published an encyclical in 1961 referring to the Church as Mater et Magistra, Mother and Teacher. We Catholics know we have three mothers: our natural mother, Mother Mary, and Mother Church. We may not be babies anymore, but we still need our mother to nourish us. “The Christian cannot live without the Eucharist.”
“L’Innocence”, William-Adolphe Bougerou, 1893
Many of last year’s complaints and criticisms, however valid, put the bishops on the defensive. That’s never a good way to get what you want. Maybe we should try, instead, to appeal to the Church as a child appeals to her mother. “Or what man of you” Jesus says to his disciples, “if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent?” (Matthew 7:9-10) Think of a child, not throwing a tantrum, but instead lovingly asking “please, please I love you mommy!” A smiling but insistent child. What mother won’t give in eventually, if the child is asking for something good?
Will it work? Who knows? We do know that can’t allow a repeat of the great shut-down of 2020. Scientific American tells us that simply talking to our mother can help us try new things and take risks. Well, mom likes to feel the love sometimes, too. We need to help her be ready for the next time push comes to shove. As often and as widely as possible we ought to (respectfully and helpfully) suggest achievable ways in which the Church can render unto Caesar what is really his (and no more), but at the same time preserve and provide for her spiritual children what is theirs. We need to keep reminding her, lovingly but insistently, that the Christian cannot live without the Eucharist. Finally, let’s to ask Mother Mary to pray along with us that Mater Ecclesia finds the courage to be a Mother Bear. Her children are depending on her.
