Tag Archives: Eucharist

Why Our Sacraments Don’t Connect

Twice Removed:

 

Why Our Sacraments Often Don’t Connect With Real Life

 

By Joseph Martos

(Published in National Catholic Reporter vol. 52, no. 9, 2016)

We are told that in baptism we receive new life in Christ, yet baptized babies don’t seem to be any different from unbaptized ones.

We are told that the Eucharist is the source and summit of the Christian life, yet we often don’t get much out of the mass, and it is rarely a peak moment in our week.

Why is this?

For years I have been sifting through twenty centuries of church history and Catholic theology, and I have made some important discoveries.

Early Christianity

The first is that in the first two centuries of Christianity, theology was based in experience. Words that were later taken to refer to things that are outside the realm of experience were originally attempts to talk about things that the followers of Jesus were experiencing.

For example, when Paul wrote about justification by faith, he was not talking about getting right with God by believing in Christ, but about getting your life straightened out by trusting that what Jesus taught is true. When the Book of Acts talks about being saved through baptism, it does not mean washing away sin by going through a ritual, but it means being rescued from selfishness by being immersed in a caring community. When you read an English translation that mentions the Holy Spirit, the original Greek is talking about a spirit of godliness or goodness that leads people to care about and take care of others.

Scholars who study other early documents like “The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles” (often called the Didache for short, from the Greek word for teaching) are finding that these writings were also attempts to spell out in words what the followers of Jesus were experiencing in their lives. But in the third century, things began to change.

You could say that, over time, the experience behind the early writings got forgotten, but the words remained. The writings were recognized as precious, and they got called sacred scriptures. Even the Didache appeared in some early lists of sacred scriptures.

Christian intellectuals in the third century, sometimes called apologists, tried to explain their faith to people in the wider pagan world who suspected that the followers of Jesus were members of a dangerous cult. In response, one apologist name Justin compared the Christian community meal to a temple sacrifice, where pagans shared food in the presence of their god, to show that Christians were religious even though they did not worship in temples. But other apologists began to talk about their faith as a set of beliefs rather than as a way of living. The words were becoming disconnected from the experiences that gave rise to them.

In the fourth century, Constantine wanted to unify the sprawling Roman Empire with a single religion, so he legalized and promoted Christianity. When Christians began to travel freely throughout the empire, they discovered that people in different regions had different theologies. Some believed that Jesus was a prophet, others that he was God, others that he was both human and divine. Instead of uniting Constantine’s empire, Christians started arguing with one another and dividing it even further.

To address the problem, Constantine ordered all the bishops to his villa in Nicaea, and he forced them to stay there until they produced a document they could all agree on. They came up with the Nicene Creed, a statement of belief that said nothing about the Jesus way of living but only about divine beings and the earthly church. The first removal of theology from the experience of Christian living was complete.

The Middle Ages

The attempt of the emperors to preserve the empire failed, and in the fifth century the western or European half of it fell to barbarian invaders from the north. The so-called Dark Ages lasted until the tenth century. Theological thinking came to a halt while people struggled to survive.

Church life, on the contrary, evolved and flourished. The elaborate eucharistic liturgy got pared down to a mass that could be said by missionaries who carried the faith to the tribes that were settling on the continent, and it was called a sacrifice even though no one remembered why. Baptism became a short rite that was performed on babies in a church or adult converts in a river. Confirmation could be given by a bishop on horseback to children who were held up for him to touch. Private confession was introduced by monks for people who needed assurance of God’s forgiveness. Weddings became church ceremonies because there needed to be a public record of marriages. Ordination became a series of rites for apprentices who were learning how to be clerics as they ascended through a series of holy orders. Anointing of the sick began as a ministry to people who were ill, but in the absence of modern medicine it became the last anointing called extreme unction.

By the eleventh century, the chaos had subsided. The weather got warmer, farming flourished, commerce expanded, towns grew into cities, cathedrals were built, and schools were founded. Monks turned their attention from copying ancient manuscripts to studying them. Philosophy and theology were reborn.

Among other things, the schoolmen of the high Middle Ages turned their attention to religious rituals, and especially to those called sacraments. How did bread and wine turn into the body and blood of Christ? Why could baptism and confirmation be received only once? How did the sacraments of penance and extreme unction work? What were the different powers of priests and bishops? Why was the bond of marriage indissoluble? Like Christian writers in the first and second centuries, the schoolmen reflected on their experience to describe and explain the life in medieval Christendom.

The schoolmen did not realize, however, that much of their theological language was already somewhat removed from life, and so they thought that salvation meant going to heaven, that the gifts of the Holy Spirit were not experienced, that sins were remitted even if they were committed again, that the bond of marriage was invisible, that priestly powers were unrelated to priestly ministry, and that extreme unction could be received by someone who was unconscious. They saw nothing amiss in a mass that was performed by a priest using words that the people could not hear, much less understand, and who paid attention only when a bell was rung.

The Modern Centuries

In many ways, sacramental ministry devolved into sacramental magic in the late Middle Ages, but the church’s leadership rejected repeated calls for reform until the sixteenth century, by which time half of Europe had turned Protestant. The Council of Trent reformed the sacramental system, eliminating the most superstitious practices, insisting that bishops be true shepherds of their flocks and that priests be trained in seminaries. From the sixteenth to the mid-twentieth century, Catholic sacramental practice and Catholic sacramental theology mirrored one another.

The baptismal and priestly characters explained why Catholics never left the church and why priests never left the ministry. The Eucharist was surrounded by great ceremony, elevated at mass and ensconced in a monstrance for exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, and received only rarely, usually after a sincere confession of sins to a priest. The indissoluble bond of marriage explained why Catholics never divorced. Confirmation and extreme unction did not have very visible effects, but Catholics trusted that the former was good to receive in adolescence and the latter was good to receive before dying. The Catholic Church remained medieval in form and thought well into the twentieth century.

Vatican II and After

At the Second Vatican Council, the world’s Catholic bishops called for an updating – aggiornamento in Italian – of the Church’s sacramental practices. Historians and liturgists reached back past the Middle Ages to retrieve earlier forms of the mass and other rites that had gotten lost during the Dark Ages – things like praying in the language of the people, receiving communion in the forms of both bread and wine, rethinking the relation between sin and confession, and returning anointing to the context of ministry to the sick.

Unexpectedly, the unity of practice and theology began to dissolve. People stopped going to confession regularly. Priests began leaving the priesthood and the number of seminarians dwindled. Married Catholics started divorcing in greater numbers and even remarrying without waiting for an annulment. The primary effect of confirmation seemed to be dropping out of church. Even baptism was no guarantee that people would remain Catholics or even Christians, as those who left the Church sometimes became agnostics or atheists, Jews or Muslims.

Alarmed by this apparent defection from the faith, popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI attempted to restore what was lost, insisting on strict adherence to ecclesiastical rules, affirming traditional doctrines, stifling dissent, and denying any further developments in sacramental practice such as allowing deacons to anoint the sick or allowing priests to marry. But the traditional doctrines no longer match Catholics’ contemporary experience of church membership, marriage and ministry, not to mention their sense of sin and their experience of illness. Even Catholic worship feels different from the way it did in the days of the Latin mass and Gregorian chant, and the previously strong sense of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist is hard to recapture. As happened in the third century, there is a growing gap between theology and experience, only this time the theology is twice removed from life. Official teachings about the mass and sacraments are not only disconnected from people’s everyday lives, but they are also often disconnected from people’s experience of worship. As noted earlier, for many people the liturgy is not the main source of their spiritual nourishment nor the high point of their week.

Around the time of the Council, Catholic thinkers like Edward Schillebeeckx in France, Karl Rahner in Germany, Bernard Cooke in the United States and Louis-Marie Chauvet in France tried to reinterpret the sacraments in more contemporary ways. Fifty years later, however, their work is not given much attention because it suffered from a fatal flaw. Instead of reflecting on the experience of ritual worship, as was done in the early centuries and in the Middle Ages, they reflected on the church’s sacramental doctrines and tried to translate them into thought categories derived from existentialism and phenomenology, the psychology and sociology of religion, and even postmodern philosophy. By being tied to medieval doctrines, however, these theologians found themselves having to explain why baptism is permanent, how confirmation gives spiritual strength, why confession is needed, how anointing benefits the sick, why marriage is indissoluble, and why the priesthood is forever. But these ideas no longer correspond to the world inhabited by most Catholics, so contemporary theologies are just as removed from real life as the scholastic theology they had hoped to replace.

Is there a way out of the current confusion? There is, but it is neither a dogmatic reassertion of the past nor a freefall into cultural relativism. We need to rediscover what is essential to the Christian way of life, reinvent ways to ritualize that, and reformulate what those rituals mean in terms that are faithful both to the teachings of Jesus and to the experience of living in accordance with them.

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What happened in Limerick

What happened in Limerick should not stay in Limerick: 2nd international meeting of priest associations and lay reform groups take up the tough questions

Dear Aaron,

From April 13 – 17, 2015, thirty-eight Catholics from priest associations and church reform organizations across ten countries met in Limerick, Ireland to discuss some of the most pressing issues facing the Church today and to work together for change. Traveling from Austria, Australia, Germany, India, various regions in Ireland, Italy, Slovakia, Switzerland, the U.K and the United States, men and women, ordained and lay, familiar faces and new, came together around some of the most difficult and painful problems facing the Church today.

This was the second such meeting. The first meeting in Bregenz, held in November 2013, was called by Fr. Helmut Schueller, the founder of the Pfarrer Initiative. It was the Pfarrer Initiative who issued the prophetic and controversial “Call to Disobedience” challenging Church leaders to halt the consolidation of parishes while calling for a “new image of the priest.” Many who had been in Bregenz also came to Limerick and were joined by more than twenty new participants from four new regions.

The “Limerick 38,” as I affectionately like to think of them, called on bishops to courageously support Pope Francis’ vision for reform. Fr. Tony Flannery conveyed the group’s sense of urgency at a press conference on the final day calling this “Francis era” our “last chance” to get renewal right.

Early on, a number of participants, myself included, raised the issue of women’s equality and gender justice as central areas that needed to be addressed. And throughout the conference, we worked in a small group to develop strategies that would advance those reforms including promoting a commission of women to work with Pope Francis on his desire to develop a “theology of women” and create a more “incisive presence for women” in the Church. Had nothing else happened, I would have left Limerick with a strong sense of satisfaction in having created solid plans for working together across diverse regions with plenty of “to do” lists to keep us all busy for months ahead. But, the real formative moment was still ahead.

On the third day, the group entered into the most poignant, painful and ultimately transformative moment of the conference.

A small group of women, myself included, had approached Tony Flannery with the idea that one of the women at our conference might co-preside with one of the priests at our shared Eucharist. We reasoned, the Eucharist, the sign and symbol of our unity in the Church, should reflect our common work together in Limerick as co-equals working for change. One person asked, “After working alongside each other these last few days, how can we celebrate a Eucharist that isn’t a sign of our unity?”

Tony wisely suggested that we submit the question to the group. And we did.

On Wednesday morning, participant Kate McElwee, put the question of a woman as co-presider to the group. And it started a conversation like no other I’ve experienced among priests and lay women and men. Thirty-eight women and men wrestled with the question for several hours. With the guidance of our skilled facilitators, we held the space open as each person expressed their support, concern, pain and, yes, fear.

Tears fell without shame. The space became a sacred space…a transformative space…maybe not so unlike the Council of Jerusalem where Peter and Paul and the community wrestled with who was in and who was out in their day.

What happened in Limerick should not stay in Limerick.

After the long, deep and rich conversation, we decided to forego the celebration of the Eucharist in favor of a prayer service that would continue to help us hold the space and the pain felt around the issues of women’s participation. A small group volunteered to coordinate it and it turned out to be a sacramental sign in and of itself.

The wine and bread placed on the altar was not shared, a symbol of the painful reality of women’s place in the Church and the divisions that tear at the heart of our communities. And all thirty-eight of us took a candle and placed it on the altar, a sign of our solidarity with women in the Church and our hope for a healed, whole and just Church where women can participate fully as co-equals.

Even as I write these words, tears flow. I was transformed…by the grace each person offered in that circle…by the authenticity and honesty of the conversation…by the tears of my dear friends and colleagues…and by the Spirit that washed over us as we struggled together to find a way to come together as a Eucharistic people given the realities of our roles, as well as the injustices in our Church so poignantly and personally felt in this cherished setting.

What happened in Limerick should not stay in Limerick

What happened among the “Limerick 38” was not just for the

Press conference- final day

thirty-eight gathered there.
It is my hope that the Spirit felt so deeply in Limerick will flow out of each one of us in a new way so we can create every space necessary to work with our differences and build on our common hope for a renewed and revitalized Church, not only for ourselves, but for those who will certainly come after us longing for a God and a community where justice, love, compassion and mercy are made real in each other.

I am grateful for all those who made the gathering possible, but also for those who participated with such courage and honesty. Every once in a while we get a chance to see the heart of God in each other. Limerick was such a moment for me.

Deborah Rose-Milavec   (source)

Who Eats at the Lord’s Table?

Who Eats at the Lord’s Table?

 

Dear Cardinal Pell,

peterdayIn the lead-up to next month’s Extraordinary Synod of Bishops on the Family you and a number of your confreres are re-asserting the church’s longstanding exclusion of divorced and remarried people from communion.

Your foreword to The Gospel of the Family appears to leave us with little doubt: outsiders are not welcome.

As you have said, “The sooner the wounded, the lukewarm, and the outsiders realise that substantial doctrinal and pastoral changes are impossible, the more the hostile disappointment (which must follow the reassertion of doctrine) will be anticipated and dissipated.”

Respectfully, I have a number of questions I’d like to consider with you; conscious, of course, that neither of us in our grappling can claim to really know the mind of Christ.

So, what was it that our Lord had in mind when he instituted the Eucharist with these self-emptying words, “This is my body, this is my blood?” Whose hunger was he responding to? Who was welcome? And what are the implications for our Sunday worship and beyond? 

Well, we do know this: The tax collectors and sinners were all crowding round to listen to him, and the Pharisees and scribes complained saying, ‘This man welcomes sinners and eats with them …’ (Lk 15:2-3) 

And this: It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. Go and learn the meaning of the words: ‘Mercy is what pleases me, not sacrifice.’ And indeed I came to call not the upright, but sinners. (Mt 9:12-13)

And this: Let anyone who is thirsty come to me!

Let anyone who believes in me come to drink! (Jn 7:38)

And this: When he arrived at the Pharisee’s house and took his place at table, suddenly a woman came in, who had a bad name in the town … She covered his feet with kisses and anointed him … the Pharisee said to himself, ‘If this man were a prophet, he would know … what sort of person [was] touching him and what a bad name she has …’ (Lk 7:36-39)

And this: They were at supper … and he got up from table, removed his outer garments … and began to wash his disciples’ feet(Jn 13:2, 4, 5) 

And this: Peter said …‘You know it is forbidden for Jews to mix with people of another race or visit them; but God has made it clear to me that I must not call anyone profane or unclean … God has no favourites … and who am I to stand in God’s way?’ (Acts 10:28, 34 & 11:17)

Could it be, given the exclusivity of our Communion, that when we proclaim these words we are potentially condemning ourselves as well?

Just think: Jesus, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of sinners (Lk 7:34), real and present in our Breaking of Bread. Wow. Extraordinary. Out of this world. We actually believe this … don’t we?

If we answer in the affirmative, there are profound consequences: are we not also compelled to look beyond the in-crowd and welcome outsiders; are we not also compelled to take risks: like the risk of being labelled and pilloried for sharing our table with those we are not supposed to; for doing something that is forbidden by law. I am not thinking here of people who do not care. I am concerned for those who are hungry for love and long to share even the crumbs from the table.

Can any of us truly look at our Lord and Master and say without a profound sense of foreboding: ‘Yes, I am a follower; but you must understand there are rules …’

His disciples were hungry and began to pick ears of corn and eat them. The Pharisees noticed it and said to him, ‘Look, your disciples are doing something that is forbidden on the Sabbath’. (Mt 12:1-2)

If the Eucharist is essentially an encounter with the real presence, rather than essentially an institutional-cum-cultic event, then surely the Master’s social interactions make it abundantly clear: hunger, not worthiness underpins Table Fellowship. To allow the law, cultic statutes, and theology to take precedence over mercy and love and encounter, is tantamount to perpetuating the hard line rigour of those Pharisees who complained bitterly and moralised pompously about so many things.

Their approach fostered a cold, superficial temple-based religion. But Jesus invited his followers to a change of heart, a heart oriented to the one called, Abba – Father : a relational, God-based faith.

Indeed, if Jesus himself was bound by the strictures of his religious tribe and the social mores of his day, he would never have encountered the woman at the well because ‘Jews, of course, do not associate with Samaritans’ (Jn 4:10). Thankfully, he was not. Thus, a women consigned to the margins, and thirsting for love, was afforded one-on-one time with the One who risked everything to offer her living water.

Yet, despite the extraordinary inclusiveness and openness of our foot washing Master; not to mention the accusations his behaviour attracted – blasphemy, law-breaking, ‘prince of devils’ – there are still those who insist that the meal instituted by him who emptied himself, taking the form of a slave (Phil 2:7) be an exclusive, High Church event with all the accoutrements, pomp and ceremony, do’s and don’ts, and rules about who’s in and who’s out, as if the Holy One needs protection and distancing from an encounter with the great unwashed.

If this non-relational Temple-centred worship takes hold, then we too leave ourselves open to the criticism:

Now here, I tell you, is something greater than the Temple. And if you had understood the meaning of the words: ‘Mercy is what pleases me, not sacrifice’, you would have not condemned the blameless. For the Son of Man is master of the Sabbath. (Mt 12:5-8)

And if, in the depth of our being, we believe Jesus is real and present at the breaking of bread, then how do we justify the exclusion of so many? Can we in good conscience continue to turn away those longing to drink from the well-of-life because Catholics, of course, do not break bread with …? 

There can be neither Jew nor Greek, there can be neither slave nor freeman, there can neither be male nor female – for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Gal 3:28-29)

I do not presume to know the mind of Pope Francis either, but his musings on spiritual worldliness seem especially apt:

[There] are those who ultimately trust only in their own powers and feel superior to others because they observe certain rules or remain intransigently faithful to a particular Catholic style from the past. A supposed soundness of doctrine or discipline leads to a narcissistic and authoritarian elitism, whereby instead of evangelising, one analyses and classifies others, and instead of opening the door of grace, one exhausts his or her energies in inspecting and verifying. (Evangelii Gaudium #94) 

In some people we see an ostentatious preoccupation for the liturgy, for doctrine and for the Church’s prestige, but without any concern that the Gospel have a real impact on God’s faithful people and the concrete needs of the present time. In this way, the life of the Church turns into a museum piece or something which is the property of a select few … The mark of Christ, incarnate, crucified and risen, is not present; closed and elite groups are formed, and no effort is made to go forth and seek out those who are distant or the immense multitudes who thirst for Christ. (Evangelii Gaudium #95)

It prompts the question: has a simple, inclusive and profound ‘family’ meal been overwhelmed by an impersonal and, often times, sterile institutional sacrifice; one that tends towards mass exclusion?

Peace and regards,

Fr Peter Day, Parish Priest, Corpus Christi  (source)

Archdiocese of Canberra and Goulburn, Australia