Category Archives: Sacraments

Preparation for Holy Communion

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As mentioned in a previous post, the Church has long understood Sacramental Grace as operating in two dimensions.  On the objective plane we say that the Sacraments contain grace ex opere operato.  What this means is that grace is made available by the Sacrament regardless of either the faith of the recipient or the minister.  It is created “from the work performed.”  This does not mean however that the recipient of the Sacrament is a recipient of grace or even all the grace that is available.  That is because there is also a subjective plane by which the grace received is proportional to the disposition of the receiver.  In no other Sacrament is this distinction more important than in the Eucharist, not only because It contains grace, but because it contains the Author of Grace Himself.  Therefore, there is an abundance of grace available to the receiver provided that he is properly disposed to receive it.

Obviously then, preparation to receive Holy Communion ought to be the primary focus for those who desire closer communion with Christ and through Him the Holy Trinity.  But for most of us, our preparation is sorely lacking either through ignorance, neglect, or distraction.  Thankfully St. Louis de Montfort has left the Church a surefire way to prepare to receive Holy Communion that is sure to increase the graces we receive.

Our Lady of the Eucharist

To grasp the simplicity of his method we must first remove any abstractions we might have related to Our Blessed Mother.  What is meant by this is that we all too often forget that she was a real person who lived out her Christian life in the Early Church.  When Our Lord left her in St. John’s care, He wasn’t just taking care of her physical well-being.  Nor was He abandoning her to someone else’s care.  Instead, He was leaving her in the care of one of the men whom He had empowered to make Him present to her.  In other words, Jesus left Mary with St. John so that she could receive Him in the Eucharist daily.

Once we realize that Our Lady received the Eucharist regularly, we can begin to let our imagination take to flight as to what her disposition was like when she received Him.  Her heart was found worthy for her womb to house the Son of God would have daily received Him into that same Immaculate Heart with a renewed and deeper love than at the Incarnation.  Her fiat would have echoed in her Amen.  Separated from His physical presence, she would have run to the Communion rail to taste that presence once again.  She would have offered herself yet again as the Sorrowful Mother at the foot of the Cross and renewed her commitment to be Mother of all the Elect just prior to receiving.  She would have overflowed with adoration and thanksgiving after her reception.  She would have longed to receive Him again when she wasn’t at Mass.  The love with which she received Him grew so much that upon receiving her Viaticum she was taken body and soul to Heaven.  She was and is always Our Lady of the Eucharist.

St. Louis de Montfort, Our Lady, and Holy Communion

Knowing that Our Lady’s disposition was perfect for receiving Our Lord in the Eucharist may inspire us to imitate her example, but that is not the reason why this reflection is necessary.  When Our Lord is received by one of her children, she flies to that child in order to adore His Eucharist presence.  As she draws closer to Jesus within the bosom of the believer, Jesus only draws closer to the believer.  Her act of adoration brings more glory to God than all earthly acts of adoration and He pours His pleasure of being in her presence out on this child of His Mother.

All of this may go on without our awareness or we might, following the advice of St. Louis de Montfort, actively and consciously participate in it.  The Saint says in The Secret of Mary that the best way to prepare for Holy Communion is to “implore that good Mother to lend you her heart, that you may receive her Son there with the same dispositions as her own.”  We pledge that if she will give us her heart, then we will place Jesus in it.  For those fortunate souls that who are consecrated to Jesus through Mary, the two of them during Holy Communion will lodge within our soul.  Our Lady will share with Our Lord all our needs and will glorify Him more than in our asking.  As St. Louis de Montfort puts it, “Let us allow the King and Queen to speak together. Let us not disturb their divine colloquies by our restless thoughts and unsettled desires. Let us entrust to them the care of our future and the choice of means.”

The Eucharistic Marriage

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Although the idea is no longer in vogue, the notion of the “marital debt” remains an important Biblical principle within Christian Marriage.  Within his teaching on Marriage in 1Cor 7, St. Paul exhorts married couples to never forget this principle that follows from the vows that seal the Covenant of Marriage.  Because the spouses pledge to give themselves personally, and therefor bodily to their spouse, they give their spouse rights over their body.  This is especially true when it comes to the marital embrace.  It is important not because spouses necessarily have to engage in the marital embrace anytime one of them feels like it, but because it is a sign that reveals something very important about the relationship between the Divine Bridegroom and His Bride. 

The preferred image of Sacred Scripture for the relationship between God and mankind is that of Bridegroom and Bride.  The Bible has numerous examples, most prominently that of the end of time when Christ will take His Bride into His home (Rev 19:7).  The actual wedding took place when a Virgin said Yes and became a mother, offering her body so that He could take human nature to Himself.  The Incarnation is the one flesh union of God and Man—what God has brought together, no man can ever draw asunder.  It is consummated when Bridegroom gives up His Body for His spouse with a love that is stronger than death.

If we were to stop there, we would be leaving things on a rather generic term.  Christ did not intend to consummate His marriage to mankind in general, but each man specifically; not just the Church, but each of her members.  And this is where the Marital understanding of the Incarnation meets the Eucharist.

At each and every Mass, Christ states His desire to enter into a one-flesh Communion which each of the believers present.  “This is My Body, given up for you” is meant to be taken quite literally as Christ giving Himself bodily to each of us.  We must likewise specify our consent to enter into this communion with our Amen.  To receive the Eucharist is to literally enter into a one-flesh Communion with Him, a Divine/Human marital embrace if you will.  This is one of the reasons why God, when He designed marriage, and the marital embrace specifically, attached such great desire and pleasure to it.  It was meant to point to the desire and joy that we experience in the heavenly consummation first and foremost.  But it is also meant to be a sign of the desire and joy of the earthly consummation in the Eucharist. 

The Marriage Debt and the Eucharist

All that being said, what does this have to do with the marriage debt?  Through the true one-flesh union that is effected in the Eucharist, the individual believer gains the rights over Christ’s Body.  These “rights” mean that they can offer Him to the Father as if the offering was their own and that there is a moral unity so that His acts become ours.  The Marriage Debt ultimately allows us to fulfill the debt that each of us has to God of offering a worthy sacrifice.  The Natural Law demands that we offer sacrifice to God.  But no sacrifice that man offers on his own could ever fulfill this obligation.  So Christ now makes such a sacrifice possible and in such a way that it is man that offers it.  This is no mere substitution but an offering in spirit and truth of the made possible only through the one flesh union that occurs in the Eucharist. 

The comparison then that St. Paul makes in Ephesians 5 is not just about marriage but about the Eucharist as well.  It also eliminates any understanding of the Eucharist as a mere symbol.  A symbol could not bring about a true Communion—only Christ truly present in the Eucharist will do.

With the one flesh union between Christ and the individual believer that occurs in the Eucharist, each person is able to give glory to God and achieve the salvation of their soul.  The one-flesh union is not just a union of bodies, but a union of Persons so that the fourfold intention of Christ in the Eucharist, becomes the fourfold intention of His Bride.

Furthering the Communion

This makes the short time in which this physical union takes place, namely the time right after receiving Communion, an important time.  It is the time where we further solidify our communion with Christ.  We join Christ in His fourfold intention and make His acts ours.  First, the Eucharist is offered as an act of adoration.  Adoration is the acknowledgement of our utter dependence upon God as our Creator Who alone is worthy of supreme honor and dominion.  Because it is Christ, true God and true Man, Who offers it the Eucharist is the most pleasing act of adoration to God.  Likewise, the Eucharist is offered as an act of Thanksgiving for all the benefits that God has bestowed upon us.  Each Eucharist can be offered for specific benefits.  Third, the Eucharist is a sin offering by which are sins are forgiven.  Finally, it is offered as an act of impetration asking for the necessary graces for salvation.  These same graces were won by Christ and are distributed through the Eucharist.

It is in and through the Eucharist that Christ fulfills the marital debt by offering His Body to His Bride for her use.  The Holy Eucharist is a nuptial Sacrament that is the greatest expression of married love.

The Worst Sin

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What is the worst sin that afflicts the world today?  Our immediate inclination might be to respond, Abortion.  And we would not be wrong in identifying the sheer magnitude, done with impunity and under the legal protecting of the State, of the deliberate murder of the most innocent members of society.  We most certainly cannot turn a blind eye nor remain silent in the face of such a grave evil.  The murder of the innocent cries out to Heaven for vengeance prompting us to clothe ourselves in “sackcloth and ashes”—doing public penance for so public a sin—but, as evil as it is, it is not the worst sin. 

Admittedly, all sin is evil because it is an offense against God first and foremost.  Sins such as murder, abortion, adultery, and theft are direct offenses against love of neighbor.  Other sins such as sacrilege, idolatry, blasphemy, apostasy, heresy, final impenitence, and the like are offenses directly against the love of God.  The latter set always represent, objectively speaking, graver offenses for that reason.  So as evil as abortion is, it is not the greatest evil.  Instead, the greatest evil in the modern world, both in magnitude and frequency, is sacrilege against the Eucharist.

Sacrilege

Sacrilege is, according to St. Thomas Aquinas, “irreverence for sacred things.”  A thing is sacred because it is been set aside for Divine worship.  “Now just as a thing acquires an aspect of good through being deputed to a good end, so does a thing assume a divine character through being deputed to the divine worship, and thus a certain reverence is due to it, which reverence is referred to God…and is an injury to God” (ST II-II q.99, art.1).  The worst acts of sacrilege St. Thomas says are committed against “the sacraments whereby man is sanctified: chief of which is the sacrament of the Eucharist, for it contains Christ Himself. Wherefore the sacrilege that is committed against this sacrament is the gravest of all” (ibid, art.3).

Considering the magnitude alone should give us great pause in both the manner and intention by which we approach the Eucharist.  But in our time, it is the frequency by which this sin is committed that makes it the worst sin.

First of all, at least objectively speaking, Protestant services by which “Communion” is “blessed” and given represents an act of sacrilege against the Eucharist.  This does not, to be clear, consider the subjective guilt of those who participate which may be relatively light.  Still, simulation of a Sacrament, even when done by professing Christians who have no intent of offending God, still can be an act of sacrilege.  I bring it up, not as an attack on Ecumenism, but for Catholics to be conscious of this fact when they are considering participating in such services, even if they choose not to actually partake of the communion wafers and grape juice.  Regardless, it is still objectively an act of sacrilege and calls for those who do love Jesus in the Eucharist to do penance and acts of reparation.  Perhaps the Ecumenical Movement would gain more steam if Catholics did not commit what St. John Paul II referred to as Eucharistic “duplicity” (c.f. Ecclesia de Eucharistia, 38) by ignoring the fact that Communion will never be achieved while these sacrileges are glossed over.

Then there are the sins of those who are professed members of the Catholic Church.  By far these are most grave and frequent because “he who handed me over is guilty of the greater sin” (John 19:11).  For a Catholic to commit any sacrilege of the Eucharist is akin to betraying the Son of Man with a kiss.  The Eucharist is Christ’s gift of Himself to His friends.  To betray a friend, especially when that friend is Christ Himself, is a diabolical deed.  These sacrileges tend to happen in one of three ways.

Sacrilege in the Church

First, there are those who “eateth and drinketh unworthily” (1 Cor 11:28) by receiving when in a state of mortal sin.  These sinners, according to St. John Vianney, crucify Jesus in their hearts:

He submits Him to a death more ignominious and humiliating than that of the Cross. On the Cross, indeed, Jesus Christ died voluntarily and for our redemption; but here it is no longer so: He dies in spite of Himself, and His death, far from being to our advantage, as it was the first time, turns to our woe by bringing upon us all kinds of chastisements both in this world and the next. The death of Jesus Christ on Calvary was violent and painful, but at least all nature seemed to bear witness to His pain. The least sensible of creatures appeared to be affected by it, and thus wishful to share the Savior’s sufferings. Here there is nothing of this: Jesus is insulted, outraged by a vile nothingness, and all keeps silence; everything appears insensible to His humiliations. May not this God of goodness justly complain, as on the tree of the Cross, that He is forsaken? My God, how can a Christian have the heart to go to the holy table with sin in his soul, there to put Jesus Christ to death?

Sermon on Unworthy Communion, Book IV, Sermons of St. John Vianney

When members of the Hierarchy either promote such sacrilege by encouraging those who are living in an objective state of sin to receive the Sacrament or by those who look the other way when a public sinner presents themselves for Communion, then they become complicit in the guilt.  At least Judas kept his betrayal to himself and did not try to corrupt other members of the Apostolic College or the rest of Our Lord’s disciples.

Likewise, sacrilege can also occur when a sacred thing is treated as profane.  This is, to use St. Paul’s terminology, a failure to properly “discern the Body of the Lord.”  Faith is vitally important to receiving Our Lord in the Eucharist because it is our part in the exchange that occurs in Communion. Our Lord gives Himself completely while we give Him our faith that the Eucharist is.  It is only by first believing that the Victim for our sins is truly and really present that we can identify with Him as Victim and join Him in offering ourselves to the Holy Trinity.  This exchange cannot happen unless we first receive in Faith. 

This profanation of the Eucharist can occur in the manner in which Our Lord is handled.  I will not belabor the point that was made previously about how the unnecessary use of Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion, Communion in the Hand, and all of the sanitary abuses related to the pandemic have only served to increase the number of offenses against Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament.  Still, I would like to point out that when there is mass sacrilege going on, we must have the zeal to receive Our Lord in the most reverent way possible.  This means making acts of faith, hope and charity and self-offering (Suscipe) before receiving Our Lord on the tongue.  It also means approaching Him after making a sincere act of contrition and an act of thanksgiving afterwards.

It also calls for acts of reparation and penance to repair the harm done to the Church by abusers of the Blessed Sacrament.  This starts by committing to watching for one hour with Our Lord in Adoration in reparation specifically for sins against the Eucharist.  But it continues by joining Bishop Schneider’s Crusade of Reparation to the Eucharistic Heart of Jesus.  He has a prayer (at the bottom of this link) that should be said at the end of every Mass and each of the acts contained within the prayer offers a concrete way in which we might offer Reparation.

In many ways, the sin of sacrilege against the Eucharist and abortion are simply parallels in the same failure of love of God and love of neighbor.  Just as we fail to love the God Who hid Himself in the Eucharist we also fail to love our neighbor hidden in the womb of his mother.  Out of sight, out of mind as the expression goes.  But until we treat Our Lord in the manner worthy of us great gift, we likewise will not see an end to the mass killing of the hidden children in the womb.

A Healthy Sense of Sin?

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In a 1946 Radio Address, Pope Pius XII said that “perhaps the greatest sin in the world today is that men have begun to lose the sense of sin.”  There has been no great moral awakening since he uttered those words so that what was begun has found its completion in our age.  The widespread loss of a sense of sin has led to a great spiritual malaise in which any semblance of shame has been lost and sins are demanded as rights.  The soul of our culture is dead, which is not surprising because its natural soul, the members of the Church, have also lost their sense of sin.  Communion lines grow longer while Confession lines grow shorter and even public sinners are given Communion as a right. 

A Great Spiritual Awakening

Pope St. John Paul II thought that the only way to stimulate a Great Awakening was to restore this sense of sin:

“The restoration of a proper sense of sin is the first way of facing the grave spiritual crisis looming over man today. But the sense of sin can only be restored through a clear reminder of the unchangeable principles of reason and faith which the moral teaching of the church has always upheld.  There are good grounds for hoping that a healthy sense of sin will once again flourish, especially in the Christian world and in the Church. This will be aided by sound catechetics, illuminated by the biblical theology of the covenant, by an attentive listening and trustful openness to the magisterium of the church, which; never ceases to enlighten consciences, and by an ever more careful practice of the Sacrament of Penance.”  

Reconciliation and Penance, 18

The Holy Father was reminding the Church that one of her essential tasks in to preach the bad news of sin.  In fact, the Church has no mission if there is no sin, or at least if there is no sin to be forgiven. Just as the Father sent the Son into the world for the forgiveness of sins, so the Son sends the Apostles and their successors (c.f. John 20:21-23).  To omit the reality of sin from the Gospel renders the Good News utterly senseless. 

The Pontiff did not just say that a sense of sin was necessary, but a healthy sense of sin.  Sin and guilt, at least according to spirit of the world, are things to be explained away because it is unhealthy.  That we can develop a healthy sense of sin is itself Good News because it frees us from not only rationalization but also scrupulosity.  Both of these ensnare us because they leave us closed to the reality of God’s mercy.  What then would a healthy sense of sin consist in?

Elements of a Healthy Sense of Sin

We must first see sin for what it really is.  First and foremost it is an offense against God, but not God as Divine Rulemaker, but God as Father.  In fact, JPII says that all sin is ultimately a rejection of God’s fatherhood.  God gave to us the gift of freedom, but not so that we choose whatever we want, but so that we can choose Him.  He is at every moment providing (e.g. Providence) the means for us to do that.  We only need to orient our freedom towards this reality.  Sin then is disorientation, setting our eyes off in the wrong direction and away from God.  And this is why one of St. Thomas’ thought that “God is offended by us only because we act contrary to our own good” (SCG, 3.122).

A healthy sense of sin then begins by orienting our freedom with acts that are truly good.  When we see sin as ultimately harmful to us and enslaving us, we lose the desire to rationalize and self-forgive.  Now we desire to flush our sin and move forward in freedom.

But it also consists in seeing sin through the lens of God’s Providence.  God only permits our sin if He can turn it to our good.  The obvious example is the “happy fault’ of Adam that won for us the Redeemer.  But this principle applies to each and every sin that we commit.  Ultimately, we are permitted to commit certain sins and not others because those certain sins ultimately can be oriented by God towards our sanctification.

This sense of sin is unfathomable unless we drop the God strictly as Rulemaker paradigm.  He is not sitting in Heaven with His Divine Gotcha Button waiting for us to mess up.  From all eternity He plotted how He was to redeem me and you and that would include using those sins we commit as a means to that sanctification.  This is not to trivialize our sin, but to see them from God’s perspective.  We are permitted to commit certain actual sins because those are the sins that, when repented of, will draw down upon us the grace of a true and deeper conversion.  So that when we sin, the grace of repentance follows right behind it, causing us to run back harder and faster than when we fell.  This healthy sense of sin then takes the focus off of our actions and shines it upon Divine Mercy.  In other words, a healthy sense of sin sees all personal sin as a means that Providence uses to glorify God’s Mercy and save our souls.  Only a healthy sense of sin rooted in this reality protects us from falling into scrupulosity.    

Making the Ordinary Extraordinary Again

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G.K. Chesterton once said that there is “a silent anarchy eating out our society” because there is a wholesale “incapacity to grasp that the exception proves the rule.”  What he meant by this the very fact that when we treat something extraordinary, we are in fact admitting that there is an ordinary.  The anarchy has come in because we now treat the exception as the rule.  Possible is interpreted as probable and all dogmatic statements are rendered useless.  Unfortunately, this habit has crept into the Church as well and has led to a widescale adoption of things that were hitherto thought sacrilegious.  One such example considers special attention today and that is the use of so-called Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion. 

The Church has not been immune to the Covidiocy that has attacked our world, especially in the Liturgy.  Not only was there a long-term liturgical blackout, but the dictatorship of the hygienic has led to all kinds of abuses of Our Lord in the distribution of Communion.  Part of the issue can be placed at the feet of bad catechesis. 

The Real, Real Presence

In the 12th and 13th Centuries, the Church was confronted with a Eucharistic heresy that might be described as an exaggerated realism in which the broken Host or half-filled chalice was thought to no longer contain the whole Christ since the sacred species had become corrupted.  The Church, adopting the view of St. Thomas that Christ was wholly present as long as the appearances of bread and wine were not corrupted (say through digestion for example) was quick to defend the truth that Christ is wholly present in even the smallest particle of the Host or the smallest drop of the Precious Blood.  As St. Thomas puts it:

If there be such change on the part of the accidents as would not have sufficed for the corruption of the bread and wine, then the body and blood of Christ do not cease to be under this sacrament on account of such change, whether the change be on the part of the quality, as for instance, when the color or the savor of the bread or wine is slightly modified; or on the part of the quantity, as when the bread or the wine is divided into such parts as to keep in them the nature of bread or of wine. But if the change be so great that the substance of the bread or wine would have been corrupted, then Christ’s body and blood do not remain under this sacrament; and this either on the part of the qualities, as when the color, savor, and other qualities of the bread and wine are so altered as to be incompatible with the nature of bread or of wine; or else on the part of the quantity, as, for instance, if the bread be reduced to fine particles, or the wine divided into such tiny drops that the species of bread or wine no longer remain. 

ST III q.77, art.4

In summary, provided that the Eucharist does not undergo a substantial change, Christ remains whole and entire in each and every part.  This foundational truth has profound practical implications both in the manner in which we receive and respond.  If Christ remains whole and entire as long as the borrowed accidental appearances of bread and wine are present, then we truly have Christ wholly present within us until the species are digested.  This ought to inspire in us a profound reverence and gratitude by which we remain wholly attentive to the Divine presence.  We should be slow to leave the Church and never omit sentiments of sincere thanksgiving and self-offering.

Our response however is conditioned on our reception and so a special emphasis needs to be placed on the manner in which Communion is distributed.  Communion in the hand, which I have spoken of previously, is one such abuse that should be avoided.  The passing of the Sacred Host back and forth most certainly leads to particles of the Host falling to the ground.  Add to this the phenomenon of masks which are usually touched after receiving the Host in the hand and there is an even greater risk that the small particles of the Host is lost.  Receiving in the hand is also by far the less sanitary means of receiving as our hands are far dirtier than our tongues, especially considering that Communion on the tongue, when done properly, does not lead to any tongue to hand contact the way that there is hand to hand contact when receiving in the hand.

The hygienic considerations hinge on the clause “when done properly”.  Those who receive on the tongue know to tilt their head back and extend their tongue and priests know how to place it on the tongue without touching it.  Consider further that when the Priest is taller than the person receiving (which happens 100% of the time when Communion is received while kneeling) then the chances of contact are far less than if Communion was received in the hand.  The problem of course is that far too often, Communion is distributed by someone other than a Priest.

“Eucharistic Ministers”

All of this leads up to the question of Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion.  This “office” is a relatively new phenomenon in the Church and was not present anywhere at any time during the first 1900 years of Christianity.  It was added as part of the Liturgical changes made in the wake of the Second Vatican Council.  It was meant to facilitate the distribution of Holy Communion when some extraordinary circumstance dictated it.  The problem of course was that it fell upon the soil of anarchy that Chesterton mentioned so that it became ordinary and thus has led the way to great abuse of the Blessed Sacrament.

One of the reasons the Church has traditionally avoided the sanctioning of Extraordinary Ministers is certainly the practical things we have already discussed.  But there are deep theological reasons for not using them also.  Not only does it lead to abuses of Our Lord in the Sacrament, but it ends up being an attack upon the Faith itself.

Traditionally only men who received the Sacrament of Orders could touch the Eucharist because only they, by virtue of their ordination, have been consecrated to the service of God in the Liturgy.  This consecration is not merely symbolic but real.  Sacraments effect what they signify so that they have been Sacramentally conformed to Christ the Priest through a Sacramental Character.  It is Christ who distributes the Eucharist and only those who have been Sacramentally conformed to Him should do so.  This power cannot be delegated.

If that is true then why did the Church reverse course?  They thought that there might be times when, because of some extraordinary circumstance such as a Priest not being available or too infirm to come off the Altar and distribute Communion.  But like all “exceptions” those who have a clear agenda to Protestantize the Church seized the opportunity to further blur the distinction between the Ministerial Priesthood and the Priesthood of All Believers.  The exception became the rule. 

The Vatican has repeatedly cautioned against the “habitual use of extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion…[as something that is] to be avoided and eliminated where such have emerged in particular Churches” (Ecclesia de Mysterio, 1997).  Despite the clear mandate and the fact that most churches are now at less than 50% capacity, the practice has continued.

The Mandate

The Congregation for Divine Worship in 2004 called upon all the Faithful to maintain Eucharistic integrity, saying “In an altogether particular manner, let everyone do all that is in their power to ensure that the Most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist will be protected from any and every irreverence or distortion and that all abuses be thoroughly corrected. This is a most serious duty incumbent upon each and every one, and all are bound to carry it out without any favoritism” (Redemptionis Sacramentum §183).  It is in that spirit that “everyone” should actively work to remedy the abuse.  This can be done, not in some democratic way, but through an application of the law of supply and demand.  Those who want to see greater reverence for Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament should not serve as Extraordinary Ministers to cut off the supply.  To reduce the demand, one should avoid receiving from them in situations where it is reasonable to receive from the Ordinary Minister of Holy Communion.

St. Paul informs the Corinthians that many of their infirmities are being caused by their Eucharistic irreverence.  Abusing the Blessed Sacrament is literally causing their sickness.  That is why it is ironic that in the name of keeping people from getting sick, the Church has turned a blind eye to the many Eucharistic offenses.  What if, rather than making it better, it was actually making people get sick?  We need to all work to restore Eucharistic piety, which starts by eliminating the ordinary usage of Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion.

Guest Post: Against the Institution of Female Acolytes and Lectors

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Recently, the Holy Father promulgated a ruling which allows for laywomen to be formally accepted into the to roles of lector and acolyte, roles which for sometime they have already been filling in practice. Up to this point, however, the formal acceptance was restricted to men. The move, while having very little visible effect on the current state of the liturgy, formalizes growing problems that will now be explored.

Why is Reading a Big Deal?

In the liturgical tradition of the Church, the priest reads from Sacred Scripture from the altar while facing away from the people. This liturgical choice preserves two important ideas: 1) the sacredness of the Word of God and 2) the offering of the Word to God. The first idea, the sacredness of the Word of God, is shown by the fact that only a person that has been in some way consecrated to God is able to the proclaim the word of God in the Church’s public worship. In the past, a distinction has existed between those possessing sacramental ordinations (deacons, priests, and bishops) and those that had received non-sacramental ordinations (lectors, porters, acolytes, exorcists, and subdeacons). Those receiving non-sacramental ordinations (also called minor orders) were understood to be acting as an extension of the ministry of the deacon, who possessed a sacramental ordination.

It is also important to note that, keeping in mind the principle that liturgical actions often have both a practical and symbolic purpose, the restriction of the ability to read publicly to those who will have a clear reading voice and will be knowledgable enough to correctly pronounce the more difficult words in Scripture will stop the proclamation of the divinely revealed Word of God from becoming an event the faithful laugh about on the car ride home.

Why do you hate Altar-girls?

With regards to the second idea, it must be kept in mind that the priest is offering the entire Mass as a sacrifice to God. This reality is reinforced by the priest facing towards the tabernacle while he is proclaiming the Word. The addition of women to the role of lector, in addition to the problems created by reading while facing the people, destroys this because God has always indicated that He desires the priestly ministry of offering sacrifice to be reserved to males.

In the liturgical tradition of the Church, only men are allowed to approach the altar, be it as bishops, priests, deacons, or even humble altar servers. Why is this? Is it because the Church fell to the spirit of past ages and has reinforced in its liturgy sexist ideas? The answer is a clear ‘No.’ To see why this is, one only needs to open a Bible and observe the patterns of worship that have been in place since the beginning and have been shown to please the Lord. (Exo. 28-29, Num. 3) They all contain male-only clergy because they are types of Christ Who will be both Priest and Minister in the New Testament. Those who participate in that liturgy act as sacramental signs of Christ, Who is male. This practice continues into the New Testament when Jesus and His Apostles continued the practice of male-only clergy even though they could have changed it. This change would not have even been perceived as strange outside the Jewish community as female clergy already existed in other religions in other parts of the Roman Empire, e.g., the vestals.

While the change only allowed for female acolytes, the formalization of an altar server, the principle on display is one that would eventually advocate for the female diaconate, priesthood, and episcopacy. This principle is rooted in the denial of the different roles of men and women in the Church, roles that have been clearly established in Scripture and vindicated by two millennia of tradition.

What about the Priesthood of the Baptized?

Forgetting the problems introduced by these changes discussed above, let us ask ourselves the question, ‘To what end are these changes made?’  Some would advance that it is desire to teach the doctrine of the priesthood of all the baptized. In response to this, it must be realized that this method will never achieve that goal because it obscures that reality more than it reveals it.

The sacrifice of the Mass is the perfect prayer of the Church and it is the meeting of Heaven and earth. All the faithful ought to hear Mass and offer this most perfect offering to God. An authentic teaching of the doctrine of the priesthood of all the baptized would teach the faithful how to more perfectly offer this sacrifice, because offering sacrifice is exactly what priests do. However, the priesthood within the liturgy is not the same as the priesthood outside the liturgy.

The ordained priest has been given the honor of offering the Mass and the faithful participate in the Mass to the degree that they spiritually unite themselves with him in his offering. This, however, is precisely the opposite of what is shown by allowing more and more faithful on the altar. Does the man or woman that reads at Mass participate more fully than one that doesn’t? If so, does that mean that we need to multiply roles until everyone attending the Mass is able to more ‘fully’ participate? This, again, is exactly the mindset forwarded by the increase of the roles of the laity in the Church’s liturgy.  From this, confusion emerges and we are left with a faithful that has traded true spiritual participation for a visible and ‘active’ participation and reduced the ability of others to spiritually participate in the liturgy by needlessly multiplying distractions.

Stripping down the Priesthood

What these changes leave us with, in addition to a liturgy less able to lead the faithful to union with God in prayer, is a sacramental priest stripped down and lacking identity. The priest has a sacred duty to offer sacrifice to God, namely the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. At the center of his spirituality must be this sacrifice and his entire life must be conformed to this sacrifice such that his entire life becomes a sacrifice. Just as a married man must lay down his life daily for his wife (who is the altar upon which he offers himself to God) and they are so conformed together that they become one flesh, so to must the priest become so conformed to the sacrifice of the Mass that he becomes a Victim-Priest just as Christ was. These changes, however, lead him more towards the roles of presider and orchestrator. One by one, his sacred duties are ‘contracted out’ to the laity and therefore lose their priestly character and change the character of the priest. The retractions are even more impactful to the diaconate, who has the duty to preform the exact ministerial actions that are being given to the laity.

The clergyman (be him a deacon, priest, or bishop) is a man chosen by God and consecrated such that he is given God-like powers, e.g., forgiving sins, calling down Christ from heaven, and strengthening a soul to endure death. Why are we stripping him of his duties and making him seem like an ordinary man? The evidence of this transformation is clear from priests being uncomfortable with saying, “I absolve you”, and replacing the ‘I’ with ‘Jesus’ or something similar. How can a man unconvinced of the massive amount of supernatural grace given to him and unwilling to proudly proclaim, with St. Paul that, “by the grace of God, I am what I am,” (1 Cor. 15:10) going to be able to fill the souls entrusted to his care with supernatural grace. We, the faithful, must support our clergy in living out their vocation by insisting that they keep the clerical duties for themselves.

About the Author

Connor Szurgot is currently a senior study for his BS. He has given multiple talks to the Catholic Campus Ministry at his university on topics such as Eucharistic reverence and mental prayer. He is a member of the Thomistic Institute and is a regular participant in their intellectual formation. He enjoys discussing the practical and philosophical aspects of politics as well as religion, particularly systematic theology.

Masking and the New Religion

Apologetics, Church and State, Church Authority, Conscience, Culture, Human Dignity, Magisterium, Marxism, Moralilty, Natural Law, New Age, Paganism, Politics, Sacramentals, Sacraments, Virtue, , , ,

We have been hearing for decades that we are living in a post-Christian society.  This has mostly been a way to describe the fact that Christian values have been in decline.  But Christianity has still been the dominant religion; dominant, that is, until the Covid-19 crisis hit.  The arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic in our society marked the official changing of the guard.  While we have been hearing about the emergence of a post-Christian society for decades, Christianity was still the dominant religion.  No longer is this true, however.  Christianity has been toppled and replaced by a new Gnosticism that we call Science. 

To be clear, the issue is not against science per se, but what is more accurately described as religion masquerading as science.  After all, as Aquinas says “He who neglects the experimental order in natural science falls into error” in all aspects of knowledge.  To solve the Covid-19 crisis, natural science plays a necessary, although not sufficient, role.  The peddlers of the new religion, would have us believe that it is sufficient because all we need to do is “trust the science.”  We are saved by faith, not in Christ, but in Science.

The New Priesthood

Nor should we be quick to dismiss expert opinion.  But expert opinion is not fact, it still must be based on solid reasoning.  The problem is that expert opinion is often treated like dogmatic truth because the Scientific Elite are the new priests.  Based on their secret knowledge that only “experts” such as themselves can understand, they dictate religious dogma.  Spoken word becomes fact.  Thus says the Scientist—“Masks don’t work” and it is so.  Thus says the Scientist two months later—“Masks do work” and it is so.  The Shepherds have spoken and the Sheeple must follow suit.  Laws are made to punish heretics who dare to question the spoken word.

This, by the way, is why masks have elicited such a strong response.  The High Priest initially said that they don’t work.  Then he spoke again saying they did and that the Priests lied because they were worried about a shortage.  But if a person unapologetically lies once, how do you know they are telling the truth now?  Actually, a leading Priest at Johns Hopkins says, it wasn’t lying but that “[A]t first, researchers and scientists did not know how necessary mask wearing would be among the general public. Now we are aware that wearing masks is an effective way to help prevent spread of this coronavirus” (Emphasis added).  Given the timeframe and the rather dramatic shift from no-mask to mask, where did this awareness come from? Changing your mind is fine. But changing your mind without a change in the data is based not on science, but fiat.  If you search prior to the dogmatic declaration, scientific opinion for the most part deemed them ineffective.  The fact is that the Priests exercised their hidden knowledge (because there was no new data) and declared them so.  I would probably be clothed in a scarlet mask for this statement alone, but let me go a little further as a statistician and speak about what a reasonable approach to this question would look like.

The Statistician Speaks

First, proving a negative is extremely difficult.  To conclusively say “masks don’t work” is a practical impossibility.  Having said that, there is little data to suggest that they do work (a complete summary that is thoroughly documented can be found here).  There have been studies in the last few months that have suggested they might, but these are inconclusive at best.  They are all very poorly done because they are being done in the midst of the crisis.  To study the problem properly you need to set up what would be something akin to a clinical trial in which you had a placebo group to compare it to.  But you also have the problem that mask usage is almost certainly confounded with social distancing.  Is social distancing the thing that helps, or is it masks, or is it both?  You’d have to set up a study to separate them.  Secondly, not all masks are created the same or are equally effective.

Carnegie Mellon tracks (among many other things) mask compliance here.  Notice that many places are in the high 80ish% for compliance and yet “cases” continue to increase in all of those areas.  If any intervention works, then you should expect the slope of the line of increase to decrease (“flatten the curve”).  But the data suggests that the lines are actually steeper.  For example, see the plot below of my home state of North Carolina which instituted a Mask Mandate on June 26th and has had above an 85% mask compliance rate (currently 91%).  North Carolina is far from unique in this regard and you can find similar data for all your favorite states.

If we were true to “Science” we would look at this medical intervention and determine that it does not work.  A drug company running a clinical trial (where they are using their own money) would stop the trial and might even decide that the intervention is actually making it worse.

This might mean that…wait for it…masks are making it worse.  You would again need to study this, but it is a reasonable supposition given the data.  It also makes sense in that it could easily be creating a false sense of security or become a petri dish of germs just waiting to be deposited on someone else or an aritficial barrier suppresses the body’s natural barrier of the immune system.  To be sure though, if we were testing a drug and the data looked like this, we would stop giving it to people.

This tangent was necessary because it speaks to the reasonableness of mask mandates.  Law, according to St. Thomas, is “an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community and is promulgated.”  Any law that does not fulfill those four requirements—reasonable, aimed at the common good, proper authority, and made known—is not, properly speaking, a law.  Therefore, because they are not reasonable (or at least can not be proven to be at this point reasonable) we have no obligation to obey them.  As true Shepherds of the Flock, Bishops and Priests need to stop being so deferential to mask mandates precisely for this reason.

The New Sacrament

The revolt against masks then is really a revulsion to what they symbolize.  They have been made into sacraments through the words of the New Priests.  They are said to protect and so therefore they do.  Those who do not want to subscribe to this religion therefore will not want to wear them.  It seems like a small thing to do, but it plays a key role in the overall narrative that Science can save us.  As a sacrament it symbolizes the fact that the Coronavirus is a serious threat to our overall well-being.  If you are tempted to think “well 99.99% of people that get this will survive”, then you only have to look around at everyone wearing a mask to tell you that you should be scared anyway.  The smiling face of your neighbor, which would normally comfort you, is now hidden from your sight.  The masks will permanently disfigure us because when the next virus comes along, and it will, they will tell us “this is more serious than the Coronavirus (which it likely will be) you must put the mask back on.” 

By blessing the mask, the Priest also makes it into a Secular Scapular.  Through the words of Mary to St. Simon Stock, we know that the Brown Scapular helps to save you eternally.  Through the words of the Scientist, the mask saves us from Covidoom.  The Brown Scapular is an aid to our growth in virtue, the Covid Scapular signals that we have virtue.

One of the things that the totalitarian regimes of the 20th Century was their exaltation of Science as the new religion.  Lenin, Stalin, Chiang Kai-Shek, and Hitler all committed their atrocities using “Science” as their justification.  Had someone stood up to them early on, one has to wonder whether things would have been different.

On Contrition

Church, Conscience, Divine Mercy, Mercy, Sacraments, Sin, , , , , , ,

If you are a “chalice is half-full” kind of person, you might be able to find a silver lining in the Sacramental suppression that the Church has to endure thanks to, what one Prelate has called, the “dictatorship of the sanitary”.  With ready access to the Sacraments, there is always the danger of them becoming mere formalities.  It is, after all, hard to do things well when we do them regularly.  The optimist sees this as a way to overcome this temptation. 

Regular Confession is a good example of this.  There are many of us who go to Confession regularly, yet rarely see the kind of growth that we would expect from these regular encounters with Our Lord.  When access becomes limited, we are forced to examine both our desire and our real motives.  In the case of Confession that desire and motivation are one and the same thing—Contrition.

When the Confessionals were sealed, the faithful were instructed to make an act of perfect contrition and go to Confession when they could.  Thanks to bad Sacramental Theology and poor catechesis over the past half century, hardly anyone knows what that means, let alone how to do it.  That is why it behooves us to examine the topic of Contrition more closely in hopes that this great gift will grow in our hearts.

What is Contrition?

Contrition is the grief of soul brought about by the hatred of sins committed and marked by the resolution to avoid them in the future.  This “grief” is primarily effective, that is, it is an act of the will to leave our sins behind and run into the embrace of the Father.  It need not be affective to be true contrition, although often we will feel sorrow or even have tears.  This internal grief may express itself in words through prayers like the Act of Contrition, but no mere lip service will do.  Furthermore, true contrition is always a supernatural gift because it is based on a supernatural motive, namely a love of God.  Because it is based on this motive, it must also be universal in that it covers not just a sin, but all our sins.

The supernatural motive of love of God occurs in degrees.  We may love God for what He can give us or help us avoid.  This mercenary love is still love, even if it is imperfect.  Out of this love comes imperfect contrition or attrition.  This is a sorrow for sin based on the loss of heaven or the fear of hell.  What makes this imperfect is that it is still tinged with self-love.  When our love is completely focused on God and we experience sorrow for our sin then it will always be based the fact that we have offended God, independent of any benefits He might bestow upon us.  This is perfect contrition.  Although we might not be aware of it, we make this distinction every time we pray the tradition Act of Contrition when we “detest our sins because of Your just punishments [attrition] but most of all because You are all Good and deserving of all my love [perfect contrition].” 

We might be tempted to think that an act of Perfect Contrition is impossible.  But God does not command the impossible.  Instead He makes it possible through the gift of grace.  Perfect contrition, while outside of our natural grasp, may be bestowed upon us if we ask.  St. Charles Borromeo, no stranger to Sacramental crises brought on by pandemics, offered us what he called the “Three Visits” in order to prepare our souls for the gift of perfect contrition.  The first two visits, one to Heaven and one to Hell, are meant to stir up imperfect contrition.  We should meditate both on what we risk losing and what we are gaining so as to be sorry for our sins.  The third visit is to the foot of the Cross to look upon the sufferings of Jesus all brought about by your sins.  He says to stay there until you are sorry for the pain you have caused Our Lord.  In so doing you have made an act of Perfect Contrition.

“Perfect” contrition then might be a somewhat of a misnomer in that it makes it seem like you have to love God perfectly, rather than loving the God Who is perfect.  The Scholastics avoid the terms perfect and imperfect contrition and instead use contrition for the former and attrition for the latter.  This distinction helps us to grasp that contrition may occur in degrees, degrees that are proportional to our charity.  We need not be St. Mary Magdalene, whose sins were forgiven because “she loved much” and wiped Our Lord’s feet with her tears, but there can be no contrition without some degree of charity.  We need not be anxious if we struggle to make such acts, but only ask God to bestow upon us that great gift.

Contrition and Confession

If an act of contrition then forgives sins, even mortal sins, then what is the connection with Confession?  Contrition may have the same effect as Confession, but its effects are not independent of the Sacrament.  Contrition may be sorrow expressed, but Confession is sorrow received.  Even if we may an act of perfect contrition in response to mortal sin, we must still go to Confession before we can receive the Eucharist.  Perfect contrition then is an extraordinary means of forgiveness provided that we avail ourselves of the ordinary means, Sacramental Confession. 

The advice to “make an act of perfect contrition until you can get to Confession” that has been given during the pandemic is very dangerous without all of the proper qualifications.  A person, no matter how hard they try, cannot make a perfect act of contrition without the necessary grace.  To act as if God always grants it immediately when it is asked for is to be guilty of presumption.  God may withhold such a gift for reasons only His loving Providence could explain.  This is why Canon Law protects the Faithful from Prelates who would withhold the Sacrament.  The Sacrament does not require that we have contrition; only attrition is needed to be valid.  As Fr. Alfred Wilson reminds us in his classic book Pardon and Peace, when we go to Confession, Christ has already confessed those sins.  He has sorrowed for them.  Your task is to supplement His perfect confession and contrition the best you can.

This connection with Christ’s confession and sorrow brings us to the whole point of contrition.  Perfect contrition comes from Christ Himself and thus is best understood as a participation in His sorrow.  This understanding is important because it takes any of the focus off us and our faults. leaves us standing squarely on the solid ground of His Mercy.  Genuine contrition is a habit then that grows out of this.

St. Therese on her death bed offers us the best example of this.  The sisters had gathered around her and were singing her praises.  She requested that they stop and instead to list her faults, not because she was worried about her humility, but because she wanted to have more reasons to praise God in His mercy.  She was quite literally filled with Contrition because she loved God.  Let us beg her intercession that during this time we might likewise receive and develop such a precious gift.

Why We Need Churches

Church, Eucharist, Sacraments, , , , , ,

As we endure continued lockdowns, masks and church closings, a new consensus has arisen—“we don’t need a building to be a Church.  We don’t need a structure to be Catholic.”  I say new, but in truth it is old, half a millennium old.  It is simply the Protestant spirit rearing its ugly head once again.  Protestants don’t need a building because they aren’t, at least properly speaking, a Church.  Catholics on the other hand do need a building to be a Church and the fact that we don’t immediately recognize this truth shows how deeply infused the Church has become with this Protestant spirit.

All true religion requires the offering of a sacrifice to God.  St. Thomas even goes so far as to say that sacrifice is a precept of the natural law.  A true sacrifice begins with an inward act in which a man “should tender submission and honor…to that which is above man.”  But because man’s person is both interior and exterior, spirit and matter, his mode of offering inward acts of sacrifice must also include an outward expression.  “Hence it is a dictate of natural reason that man should use certain sensibles, by offering them to God in sign of the subjection and honor due to Him, like those who make certain offerings to their lord in recognition of his authority” (ST II-II, q.85, a.1).

This helps to explain the near universal phenomenon within ancient religions of every ritual act of worship including as a constitutive element sacrifice.  It also explains why the religion of the Old Testament portrays a continual groping for the perfect sacrifice that only finds its fulfillment in Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross.  Only in Him do we find a perfect fit between the interior and exterior acts; the perfect victim making the perfect sacrifice.  The New Adam sets the sacrificial standard and becomes mankind’s representative.  Through His representation, it remains for each man to re-present that sacrifice in order to make it his own.

Sacrifices must be offered from within a temple.  A temple is the dwelling place of God and the place where God and man meet.  The believer who is in a state of grace, that is one who has “put on Christ’ is one such meeting place enabling the man to offer a sacrifice to God.  For the Protestant and our Catholic friend who has no need of a church building, this is sufficient.  But for God, this is not yet sufficient.  To be “a Church”, that is the People of God, they must also offer a sacrifice. 

Making the People of God

What exactly makes the People of God a People?  Unlike the Jewish People who were united by blood, the Church is truly catholic, uniting men and women of many different races.  The Church then is a People because it is united by the Blood of Christ, the Blood poured out on Calvary and of which we partake in the Eucharist.  As Saint Paul says, it is “The bread which we break, is it not a communion in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Cor 10:16-17).  It is the “bread that we break” that creates the communion that is the Church. 

The Eucharist is what makes the Church the Church.  Without it, there would be no Church because there would be nothing that unites us.  St Thomas says that the Eucharist is the cause of “Ecclesiastical unity, in which men are aggregated through this Sacrament; and in this respect it is called ‘Communion’ or Synaxis. For Damascene says that ‘it is called Communion because we communicate with Christ through it, both because we partake of His flesh and Godhead, and because we communicate with and are united to one another through it’” (ST III q.73, a.4). 

In commenting on St. Paul’s passage, Pope Benedict XVI says that “the Eucharist is instrumental in the process by which Christ builds Himself a Body and makes us into one single Bread, one single Body…It is the living process through which time and again, the Church’s activity of becoming the Church takes place…The Church is a Eucharistic fellowship.  She is not just a people: out of the many peoples of which she consists there is arising one people, through the one table that the Lord has spread for us all.”  If the Church were to cease making this living process which is the Eucharist manifest, then the Church would cease to be the Church. 

The sacrifice of the Eucharist needs a Temple in which it may be offered.  Therefore, the church is not “just a building”, but the fulfilment of the Jewish Temple and the sacrament of the Temple in Heaven.  It offers a real experience of Heaven, even if it “only” does so sacramentally.  So while the church building itself does not make us the Church, it is a necessary element for the formation of the Church.  In short, without churches in which the Eucharist is offered there would be no Catholic Church.      

The Power of Sacramentals

Church, Grace, Prayer, Sacramentals, Sacraments, , , ,

As Jesus entered the town of Bethsaida, some people there brought to Him a man who was born blind and asked Him to heal Him.  Jesus took some spittle and rubbed it in his eyes, but it effected only a partial healing.  The man could only see shapes.  It was not until He laid His hands upon the man that the man was able to see clearly (c.f. Mark 8:22-27).  This event has often plagued Biblical commentators who have struggled to interpret it.  At first glance it appears that Jesus was somehow limited in His power to heal, having to do it in stages.  But those who are familiar with the Catholic practice of using Sacramentals will recognize it for what it is, an institution of sorts of the practice.  The man receives the grace of healing after the man has been properly disposed after coming in contact with a consecrated object. It is with this in mind, that we shall discuss the Church’s use of Sacramentals.

Theology of Sacramentals

Any discussion of Sacramentals must begin with making an important distinction between Sacramentals and Sacraments.  As the Catechism puts it, “Sacramentals do not confer the grace of the Holy Spirit in the way that the Sacraments do, but by the Church’s prayer, they prepare us to receive grace and dispose us to cooperate with it” (CCC 1671).  Sacramentals do not work ex opere operato the way Sacraments do, but instead their efficacy comes from the intercessory power of the Church.  In short they do not bestow sanctifying grace but only aid in disposing the person to receive them.

Because the efficacy rests upon the intercessory power of the Church, unlike Sacraments which were instituted by Christ, Sacramentals are instituted by the Church.  By bestowing a prayer of consecration over the object, it becomes a means by which those who use them become disposed to the infusion of sanctifying grace.  The specific grace of the Sacramental depends upon the prayer itself, a prayer that is said by a Priest but has the entire Church.  The consecrated object is given a power to effect a certain blessing, although it is not infallible as with the Sacraments.  Nevertheless, Sacramentals are a powerful help in the pursuit of sanctity.  This is what makes Sacramentals so powerful.  But they are also made powerful through the intercessory power of the whole Church.  In this way they are different from having someone pray for you.  If, as St. James says, “the prayer of a righteous man is indeed powerful and effective” (James 5:16), then the prayer of the whole Church, the spotless Bride of Christ is much greater.

St. Thomas in his Theology of the Sacraments says that the existence of Sacramentals is fitting because none of the Seven Sacraments “was instituted directly against venial sin. This is taken away by certain sacramentals, for instance, Holy Water and such like” (ST III q.65, art.1, ad.8).  This “supplementary power” placed upon some Sacramentals is a key point to grasp in their use so as to keep us from treating them like good luck charms.  They each contain a certain power that comes from the prayer of consecration by which they were made to be Sacramentals.

Some Examples of Sacramentals

Using St. Thomas’ example, this power to take away venial sins is bestowed upon Holy Water because it was specifically consecrated for that purpose by the prayer of consecration:

Blessed are you, Lord, all-powerful God, who in Christ, the living water of salvation, blessed and transformed us.  Grant that, when we are sprinkled with this water or make use of it, we will be refreshed inwardly by the power of the Holy Spirit and continue to walk in the new life we received at baptism.  We ask this through Christ our Lord.

A blessed crucifix is effective in providing both bodily and spiritual protection, especially “against the cruel darts of the enemy” (1962 Rituale Romanum).  Likewise, sacred images, be they of Our Lord, Our Lady, St. Joseph or any of the saints make available the merits and intercession of those who are depicted when a person pays devout homage to them.  In a very real way they make the person in the image immediately present to the person who seeks to speak with them.

Another important Sacramental, especially relevant to Lent is Palms.  As Dom Prosper Gueranger describes in his book The Liturgical Year, palms are blessed using “prayers that are are eloquent and full of instruction; and, together with the sprinkling with holy water and the incensation, impart a virtue to these branches, which elevates them to the supernatural order, and makes them means for the sanctification of our souls and the protection of our persons and dwellings.”   The palms act to give protection to houses and the people in them when they are kept there.  This is a reason why if palms are being offered, even if you can’t get to Mass, that you should seek them out.

Obviously then the efficacy of Sacramentals depends upon the blessing that has been bestowed upon them by the Priest.  When we ask for an object to be blessed then, we are not just asking to make it somehow holy but to have it set aside for a specific purpose.  We should always ask that the proper blessing be said over the object so that it can be used for the purpose that the Church puts forth.  Similarly, we should listen to the words of blessing so that we can learn exactly what the objects do.

Keeping Your Hands Off

Church, Church Authority, Church Fathers, Eucharist, Magisterium, Sacraments, , , , , , ,

It has been alleged that in the early years of his revolution, Martin Luther was in the practice of celebrating “Mass” by omitting the words of consecration while still elevating the bread and chalice.  This was done so that those gathered would not realize that Luther was doing something novel.  His act of deceit reveals not only his own lack of faith in Transubstantiation, but the power of the signs that surround the Sacrament.  He knew that if he were to eliminate the sign completely, he would quickly be branded as a heretic and his revolution would be dead on arrival.  But if he could make small, subtle changes, it would be much easier to eliminate faith in the Eucharist.  Applying this law of anti-Sacramental gradualism the Protestant Revolutionaries also introduced the practice of distributing Communion in the hand as a subtle attack not only against the Real Presence but also the ministerial priesthood.  Wise as serpents, they knew that to attack these foundational beliefs head-on was reformational suicide, but if they changed the practice, toppling belief would be easier.

This lesson in ecclesiastical history is instructive because it relates to one of, if not the biggest, crisis facing the Church today—a diminishment in belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.  Through a certain Protestantization, namely Communion in the hand, a back door into the Tabernacle has cleared a path for the removal of Christ from the Eucharist.  It is only by reintroducing this practice that we can hope to reverse the rising tide of unbelief.

How We Got Here

For at least a millennium and a half, the Eucharist was always and everywhere received on the tongue.  In 650 we find the Synod of Rouen issuing condemning Communion in the hand as an abuse revealing that at the very least it was common practice at the time to receive It on the tongue.  This remained the norm until just after the Second Vatican Council.  After because the Council Fathers never made mention of altering the practice.  Instead the false “Spirit of Vatican II” that grew out of the yeast of ambiguity and loopholes, found permission in Pope Paul VI’s 1969 instruction Memoriale Domini.  Despite the declaration that “This method[Communion on the tongue] of distributing holy communion must be retained, taking the present situation of the Church in the entire world into account, not merely because it has many centuries of-tradition behind it, but especially because it expresses the faithful’s reverence for the Eucharist”, the Pope left a loophole for those who had “special circumstances” to introduce or continue the practice.  Granting a loophole enabled the principle of anti-Sacramental gradualism to infect the entire Church.

What We Can Do About It

Unlike the great need to change the orientation of the Priest during Mass through the re-introduction of ad Orientem masses, the laity can do something about this directly by receiving only on the tongue.  By receiving on the tongue, rather than in the hand, the faithful witness directly to the Real Presence of Christ.  How this is so we will discuss presently.

When a family sits down for a meal, platters are set out and each person is served food on their plate.  From their plate they then feed themselves.  A similar thing happens in Mass when the “minister” serves the Host to each person and they then feed themselves.  This is all fine and good if the Host were simple food.  But if the Host is not ordinary food, then how we eat Him ought to reveal this.  By receiving the Host in a manner that is wholly unique to anything else that is eaten, namely on the tongue, the believer is testifying to the truth that it is no ordinary food, but instead Jesus Christ Himself.  In fact we would be killing two birds with one stone by also obscuring the “family meal” interpretation of the Eucharist that has persisted over the last half century.

The use of scare quotes around the word minister above anticipates another important aspect of the practice.  Just as the Protestant Reformers used Communion in the hand to diminish belief in the ministerial priesthood, a similar fascination with the priesthood of all believers has allowed this practice to thrive.  By receiving the Host directly from the hands of a Priest, the same Priest whose hands were consecrated so that he could touch the Eucharist, testimony is given to the sacredness of the Host.  Just as Mary Magdalene was chastised for touching the Body of Christ after His Resurrection, while the Ordained Apostle Thomas was not, the laity should avoid touching the Eucharist.  This, again, would not only have the positive effect of reducing the number of (Extra?)Ordinary Ministers of the Eucharist, but will also help to avoid even the smalles particle of the Eucharist (of which Jesus is truly present) from being dropped or desecrated.  One way to insure that doesn’t happen is to limit the number of touches.

Older is Better?

It is worth dealing with what amounts to the most common objection, namely that it was the ancient practice of the Church to receive Communion in the hand. 

There are a number of theologians which have addressed this question and it is not entirely clear that there was a universality in the reception of Communion.  To dive into this question historically however misses the point.  Because the Church is a historical reality governed by the Holy Spirit, we should have no desire to “go back” because doctrine, being living and active, develops.  As the understanding of the Deposit of Faith deepens, practice, especially liturgical practice, adapts to reflect that.  For example, the understanding of Confession, especially its power to remove sin, was not something that the Early Church had a firm grasp on.  That it forgave sins was never in question, but how and when was not understood.  Could this be done only once or many times?  If only once then you would want to save it, or even better save Baptism until there was an emergency or until you were about to die.  If many times, then how could you prevent its abuse?  From within this setting, Public Confession was widely practiced. 

The point is that as doctrine developed public Confession went away.  To have any desire to go back to public Confession would be to try to erase all of that development.  So unless the “older is better” crowd are willing to go back to that practice, then they should not desire to do something similar with the Eucharist. All that we now know about the Real Presence of the Eucharist can’t be put back in the storehouse of the Deposit of Faith.  The practice reflects this understanding as we have shown above.  Orthopraxy goes hand in hand, or perhaps hand to tongue, with orthodoxy. 

In short, antiquarianism is really innovation and ultimately degradation.  This is a point that St. John Henry Newman made in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine.  Using a false analogy, the antiquarians reason that just as a spring is clearest at its font, so too divine Revelation.  But Newman gone to great lengths to show that development admits of growth in clarity as it moves from the source.  As Pope Pius XII cautioned, we should not favor something just because it has “the flavor of antiquity. More recent liturgical rites are also worthy of reverence and respect, because they too have been introduced under the guidance of the Holy Ghost, who is with the Church in all ages even to the consummation of the world . . .the desire to restore everything indiscriminately to its ancient condition is neither wise nor praiseworthy.”((Pius XII Mediator Dei).  Communion in the hand ultimately then is a corruption and needs to be stopped immediately.

On Spiritual Communion

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Gratis vilis, that is, cheap grace, the supposed grace we receive when we treat the grace of the Sacraments as something automatically received is an ever-present danger of the Church.  Although the Sacraments do objectively contain grace, the reception of these graces depend upon the disposition of the receiver.  To think otherwise is to treat the Sacraments as if they were magic.  This “magical thinking” was discussed in a previous post and some of its ecclesiastical manifestations were brought forward in illustration.  It was briefly mentioned that all of us can fall into this mentality if we are not diligent.  In this post, I would like to discuss how to avoid allowing this Sacramental presumption to creep in.

The Occidental Accident

Despite the fact that the religious freedom is waning in the West, most occidental Catholics have ready access to the Sacraments.  They only need to get in their car and drive to their local Parish which is only a few miles away and they can go to Mass or Confession.  This blessing carries with it a curse—it can create a Sacramental routine by which they do not always discern how great a gift the Sacraments really are.  But this occidental blessing is merely accidental.  Catholics in the Middle East and in China, for example, by no means share the same privilege.  Neither did the Catholics trapped behind the Iron Curtain nor those in Revolutionary France nor Elizabethan England nor the Early Church.  Perhaps the Western “vocations crisis” will get far worse than it already has and availing ourselves of the Sacraments will become far harder.  The point is that this privilege is not always a given and it is something that we need to be constantly grateful for.

This Sacramental ease of access can cause us to make their reception routine only if we allow it to.  There is a sure-fire way to avoid this by adopting a practice that many of the Catholics (or at least those who remained Catholic) did in those times of Sacramental scantiness—Spiritual Communion. 

We are all familiar with the idea what is commonly referred to as a Baptism of Desire.  A person may receive the effects of Sacramental Baptism when, unable for some reason to actually receive the Sacrament, they express either an implicit or explicit desire for baptism.  This “Sacrament by Desire” is by no means limited to Baptism.  In truth the effects of all of the Sacraments can be experienced when a person expresses a desire for the Sacrament but because of some reason outside of their own control they are unable to receive it.  As St. Thomas puts it in the Summa Theologiae “This sacrament has of itself the power of bestowing grace; nor does anyone possess grace before receiving this sacrament except from some desire thereof; from his own desire, as in the case of the adult. or from the Church’s desire in the case of children, as stated above (III:73:3). Hence it is due to the efficacy of its power, that even from desire thereof a man procures grace whereby he is enabled to lead the spiritual life. It remains, then, that when the sacrament itself is really received, grace is increased, and the spiritual life perfected: yet in different fashion from the sacrament of Confirmation, in which grace is increased and perfected for resisting the outward assaults of Christ’s enemies. But by this sacrament grace receives increase, and the spiritual life is perfected, so that man may stand perfect in himself by union with God” (ST III q.79 a.1 ad 3).

Communion of Desire

The list of “Sacraments of Desire” is not limited to just Baptism and Confirmation, but also includes, in a very special way, the Eucharist.  For a baptized person to express a desire to be baptized would be non-sensical, but for a Catholic who has received the Eucharist in the past to express a desire to receive it again not only makes good sense but is an important spiritual practice.  In fact, the Council of Trent said that there are actually three ways in which a person might receive the Sacrament of the Eucharist, the first two of which are Sacramentally and Spiritually.  “Now as to the use of this holy sacrament, our Fathers have rightly and wisely distinguished three ways of receiving it. For they have taught that some receive it sacramentally only, to wit sinners: others spiritually only, those to wit who eating in desire that heavenly bread which is set before them, are, by a lively faith which worketh by charity, made sensible of the fruit and usefulness thereof…”( Council of Trent Session 13, Chapter VIII).

It is the third way of receiving that most interests us here.  The Council taught that “the third (class) receive it both sacramentally and spiritually, and these are they who so prove and prepare themselves beforehand, as to approach to this divine table clothed with the wedding garment” (ibid).  And in so doing they linked Spiritual Communion with Sacramental Communion.  Those who routinely express a desire to receive the Eucharist when they are unable, not only receive the effects of the Eucharist in expressing the desire, but more perfectly receive the effect of union with Christ and the Church in faith and charity when they do receive the Eucharist sacramentally.  In short, the regular practice of Spiritual Communion is not only for those who are living in times of Sacramental deprivation, but also those who can’t, for whatever reason, receive Our Lord in the Eucharist, whenever and wherever the desire arises within them. 

This is a theme that St. John Paul II included in his encyclical on the Eucharist, Ecclesia de Eucharistia :“ Precisely for this reason it is good to cultivate in our hearts a constant desire for the sacrament of the Eucharist. This was the origin of the practice of ‘spiritual communion’, which has happily been established in the Church for centuries and recommended by saints who were masters of the spiritual life. Saint Teresa of Jesus wrote: ‘When you do not receive communion and you do not attend Mass, you can make a spiritual communion, which is a most beneficial practice; by it the love of God will be greatly impressed on you’.” (EE,34).

Before discussing how to make a Spiritual Communion, it is good to discuss a few caveats.  First, while it is good to receive the Sacrament by desire, the Sacraments were established to be taken in full reality.  Spiritual Communion is never a substitute for Sacramental Communion, but only a “holding over” until actually receiving the Eucharist is possible.  Secondly, only a person who is properly disposed to receive the effects of the Sacramental Communion can truly express the desire that is a Spiritual Communion.  Certainly, a person who is not disposed may still desire it, but it is not yet efficacious because they lack the perfect contrition (expressed through Sacramental Confession) necessary to receive its effects.

St. Alphonsus Liguori was an enthusiastic proponent of Spiritual Communion, so much so that he wrote an entire book explaining how to do it along with a meditation for each day of the month.  I cannot encourage the reader enough to grab a copy of this book, but in the meantime, and in closing, I offer the simple prayer that the Doctor of Church left us for articulating our desire in prayer:

My Jesus, I believe that You are present in the Most Holy Sacrament. I love You above all things, and I desire to receive You into my soul. Since I cannot at this moment receive You sacramentally, come at least spiritually into my heart. I embrace You as if You were already there and unite myself wholly to You. Never permit me to be separated from You.  Amen.

Limbo and the Fate of Unbaptized Infants

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In an age of exaggerated mercy there is perhaps no doctrine that is more reprehensible than that of Limbo.  Developed early on in the Church’s history, it is the belief that children who die without receiving baptism go to a place of natural bliss in which they do not share in the Beatific Vision given to the Blessed in Heaven.  Treated as a theological pariah, this belief is summarily dismissed as harsh and medieval but no alternative is given to tackle the difficult question of the everlasting destiny of these children.  When millions of children are lost every year because of abortion it would seem that it should be treated with some theological urgency so that the Church might find a true means of salvation to these children.

Original Sin and Hell

Properly framing the problem helps us first to see why it is a problem of particular urgency.  All of humanity at the moment of conception is plagued with Original Sin.  This condition is not one of actual guilt per se, but of deprivation.  A child is conceived and remains devoid of sanctifying grace until they are reborn in the waters of Baptism (c.f. John 3:5).  Why this matters is because without sanctifying grace, a soul cannot enter into the Vision of God.  This is not because God is a stickler for rules but because Heaven is not natural for human beings such that in order to enter into the presence of the Consuming Fire that is God, a man must be properly clothed (c.f. Mt 22:11) with the “spiritual fire suit” that makes him capable of partaking of the Divine nature (c.f. 2Pt 1:4).

The fact that Heaven is not the natural destiny of mankind is also important for understanding Limbo.  Because no one sees the face of God and lives (c.f. Ex. 33:20), that is by nature man cannot stand before the face of God, it is a supernatural gift that God bestows upon men.  It is a free gift offered to all men, but only those who have been given the gift and maintained it, can actually receive it.  That it is a gift means that to be deprived of the gift is not exactly the same thing as having been punished.

We see an example of this among the righteous men of the Old Testament.  Prior to Christ’s descent into hell, which is understood not as the hell of the damned but as the limbus of Abraham’s Bosom, these men and women were in a state of natural bliss.  They enjoyed God, not face to face and as He really is, but according to their natural knowledge of Him that was illuminated by their faith in His revelation up to that point.  This was a temporary state so that once they saw the Messiah God had promised they were immediately given the Beatific Vision. 

This example is illustrative because it offers us glimpse of what a permanent state of the Limbus Infantium would be like.  Although laboring under the constraints of Original Sin, the children have no actual sin and thus do not deserve to be punished.  That is, they avoid the two punishments of hell: the pain of sense and the pain of loss.  Even though they are deprived of the Beatific Vision (usually considered to be the pain of loss in adults), they have no supernatural knowledge of glory and thus do not know what they are missing.  Because they do not have the natural capacity to achieve it, they do not grieve its loss.  No man grieves the loss of his inability to fly because it is not within his natural capacity to do so.  Instead they experience a natural joy in that they achieve a natural end—contemplation of God by natural means.  As St. Alphonsus puts it:

“children will not only not grieve for the loss of eternal happiness, but will, moreover, have pleasure in their natural gifts; and will even in some way enjoy God, so far as is implied in natural knowledge, and in natural love: ‘Rather will they rejoice in this, that they will participate much in the divine goodness, and in natural perfections.’( St. Thomas Aquinas, De Malo, q.5, a.3)  And he immediately adds, that although they will be separated from God, as regards the union of glory, nevertheless ‘they will be united with him by participation of natural gifts; and so will even be able to rejoice in him with a natural knowledge and love.’”

The Great Means of Salvation and Perfection

“A Possible Theological Opinion”

Despite falling into theological disfavor, the theory of Limbo remains a “possible theological opinion” according to the International Theological Commission in their 2007 document Hope of Salvation of Infants Who Die without Baptism.  It remains possible because it offers a very reasonable solution to the problem.  It remains possible because it is also very hopeful in that it does not condemn otherwise innocent children to the hell of the damned.  It remains possible because it is really only a reasonable solution to the problem of which Revelation never treats directly and any solution would require us to piece together many different doctrines.  But the point is that we should also not be so quick to dismiss it because it is the best solution we have right now because it fits many, if not all, of the pieces together.  It is the best solution because it is the one that has the backing of numerous doctors of the Church, two of whom we have already mentioned—St. Thomas and St. Alphonsus. 

Nevertheless, the Holy Innocents teach us that there are extra-sacramental ways in which children can be saved, especially via a baptism of blood.  Cajetan thought that children could be saved also through a vicarious baptism of desire or others have posited that the children are given the use of their reason just prior to death in order to choose. 

That we don’t know however should spur us to do two things.   First is never to delay baptism.  Baptism remains the ordinary means of salvation and the only sure way we know by which children can be saved.  We should not delay their baptism any longer than is absolutely necessary regardless of a fear of germs or familial convenience.  Second is that the Church has a whole needs to be praying for these children, especially those in the womb who are in danger of death. 

On Transubstantiation

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In tracing the history of the Church, we find that whenever the doctrine of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist was challenged, the Church has turned to the dogma of Transubstantiation as a bulwark.  Our present age, in which a crisis of unbelief has arisen, also needs to be reminded of the powerful explanatory power attached to this doctrine.  For it offers an explanation of how Our Lord comes to be present on the altar that accords with reason all while showing the impossibility of positions contrary to the true doctrine.  In our very practical age, this explanation has fallen into disuse and even mockery and so it is important for Catholics to be able to put forth a reasonable explanation.

The Church has long preferred this explanation because it so simply accords with experience.  It was first introduced in 1215, was reaffirmed during the Council of Trent and defended as dogma by Pope Pius VI (1786) when the Synod of Pistoja wished to dismiss it as a “purely scholastic question.”  In short, Transubstantiation is no mere speculation, but instead belongs to the deposit of faith.  It is the belief that a Sacramental miracle occurs on the altar when the substances of the bread and wine is turned into the substances of Christ’s Body and Blood.

Philosophical Foundation

Lacking the philosophical language of our predecessors, this requires some explanation.  First, we define a substance as a distinct individual thing that exists independently of other things.  Each substance carries with it non-essential properties that we call accidents.  These include things like texture, taste, and color.  These accidents depend upon the substance themselves for existence.  A piece of bread is an individual substance that has the nature of bread and does not depend on anything other individual thing for existence.  Taste does not exist independently of the thing it is the taste of so that the taste of the bread depends on the piece of bread for its existence.  Likewise, two pieces of bread may taste differently, but still be bread.

Given all that exists does so either as substance or accident, then we can say there are two types of change—substantial and accidental.  A substantial change is one in which a thing is transformed into another things.  The most obvious example of a substantial change is nutrition.  A piece of bread is eaten and become a muscle cell (for example) in the body of the animal that eats it.  Bread and muscle cells are of completely different kinds and thus a substantial change has occurred.   An accidental change is one in which only the accidents attached to a particular substance change.  The leaves of an oak tree may turn green to yellow, but in so doing the oak tree remains the specific oak tree that it was prior to the change.  The substance did not change, but the accidents did.

We should notice one last thing before returning to the Eucharist and that is that any change always requires some subject that is changed.  Put another way, in order to speak properly of change we must have something that remains constant throughout the change.  Change may be the transformation from one being to another, but it is never a change from being to non-being back to being.  That would not be change, but annihilation coupled with creation.  For accidental change, the subject is obviously the substance itself.  The leaves of the oak tree change from green to yellow, but the oak tree remains.  Even a substantial change, in which one thing becomes another, has a principle of continuity which we call primary matter.  This principle is a little complicated to briefly explain, but we can view is as the matter that undergoes the change from one type to another when it is taken up by a new form.  Take for example the fact that the matter of the bread is taken up by the body and becomes the matter of the muscle cell. 

The Doctrine Itself

With this foundation in place, we can now set our sights on the altar and ask what this can tell us what happens to the bread and wine.  We are left with three alternatives—an accidental change, a substantial change or no change at all (i.e. a symbol).  We will examine each one in light of all that we have said.

First there is an accidental change.  An accidental chance would mean that the substance of the bread of wine would not change, but only their accidents.  Christ’s Body and Blood would be attached to the bread and wine.  This would mean that they would leave His heavenly abode and come to the altar.  The problem with this view is that He would be limited in His presence to one place at a time.  It would imply an accidental change not just in the bread and wine, but in Christ Himself as He moves from place to place.  Those familiar with Luther’s view will recognize this as consubstantiation and it proves why it is necessarily false.

With the elimination of an accidental change we can turn to a substantial change which would mean that the substances of the bread and wine are transformed into the substance of Christ’s Body and Blood.  This initially has appeal because it does not require any accidental change in Christ Himself and thus allows for the ubiquity of His presence on the many altars simultaneously.  This is possible because unlike a natural substantial change the bread and wine are changed not into some new forms, but already existing ones of Christ’s Body and Blood.  Thus there is no change in Christ’s members but in the bread and wine. 

It is not an annihilation and then creation, but a true change.  The subject of change are, miraculously, the accidents of bread and wine.  They remain on both sides of the change.  As St. Thomas puts it, “whereas in natural transmutation the matter of the one receives the form of the other, the previous form being laid aside. Secondly, they have this in common, that on both sides something remains the same; whereas this does not happen in creation: yet differently; for the same matter or subject remains in natural transmutation; whereas in this sacrament the same accidents remain.” (ST q.75, art. 8).  It is this miraculous change that we call Transubstantiation.

This suspension of the accidents, leads to no evidence of change that is discernible to the senses.  Any attempt to empirically prove that the change has occurred would ultimately fall flat because they can only measure the accidents.  This is why some confuse it for symbol.  This is also why ultimately the recently conducted Pew survey that found that 70% of Catholics do not believe in the Real Presence represents first and foremost a crisis in faith.  It is only the ears, attuned to the words of Christ, that can discern this change.  Reason can eliminate the possibility of consubstantiation but only faith can prove that it is really Christ present.

An Invitation to Awe

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One of the aspects of the Liturgy that is often overlooked is its inherent power to spark wonder and marvel and therefore leading to praise.  At least, it ought to do this.  Being no mere work of man, but an Opus Dei, a work of God, the Liturgy is meant to draw us into the “Sacred Mysteries”.  A liturgy that doesn’t elicit this response probably has too much man and not enough God in it.  Whether or not our current liturgy is awe-full or not, this need to be awe-filled remains key to the highly sought after “active participation” so cherished by the Fathers of Vatican II.  Rather than entering into  a debate over the merits and de-merits of the Novus Ordo  Mass, I want to offer a reflection on how to stir up the necessary awe that allows for a fuller participation in the Sacred Liturgy.

One of the more controversial changes to the Mass was the movement of the words “mystérium fídei” (Mystery of Faith) from the formula of consecration of the wine to right after the consecration.  Again, we will forego any critique of it and simply admit that the Liturgy is the way it is right now and we should make the best of it.  The words “Mystery of Faith” seem now to be awkwardly out of place, until we go back to the goal of causing us to marvel at what God has done and is doing.  The words Mystery of Faith, spoken by the Priest, are meant to be an expression of awe at what has just occurred before our very eyes.

All too often, rather than an invitation to awe, it is treated as a rubrical instruction for the congregation to say something.  But if we hover on the exclamation itself, then, rather than simply being a canned response, it can be an exclamation of faith in what has just occurred.  In order to grasp this however we must linger a while on the meaning of the words.

The Mystery of Faith

When the Son of God “took flesh and dwelt among us”, there was nothing remarkable about His appearance as a man.  But this same man, a man Whom they heard, saw with their eyes and touched with their hands was revealed to them to be the Son of God (c.f. 1Jn 1:1-3).  Their senses all supported the gift of divine faith they were given.  Never to leave His Church orphaned, this same Son of God extended the Incarnation throughout time and space through the Eucharist.  Now we are only in the presence of His words and no longer bound to the experience of our senses.  In the Eucharist our senses fail, but once we accept the words spoken by Our Lord we “recognize Him in the breaking of the bread.”

In his Encyclical on the Eucharist, Mirae Cartitatis, Pope Leo XIII reminded the faith that the Eucharist “is the chief means whereby men are engrafted on the divine nature, men also find the most efficacious help towards progress in every kind of virtue.”  But it is faith pre-eminently, that is exercised and strengthened—“nothing can be better adapted to promote a renewal of the strength and fervor of faith in the human mind than the mystery of the Eucharist, the ‘mystery of faith’…”  When we respond to the Priest’s awe-full utterance with a fervent act of faith, faith grows.  It is not merely a declaration on our part, but an exclamation that the entire history of salvation is bound up and made present in what we just witnessed.  But it is the Mystery of Faith because the mystery cannot be seen with human eyes but only through faith.

The Mystery of Faith

It is not only an act of faith, but participation in a mystery.  We are not just bystanders, but actual participants.  Our senses tell us we are in a pew in a church somewhere while faith tells us we are at the foot of the Cross speaking directly to Christ and offering Him up to the Father.  It is a mystery then first of all because it is real contact with the foundational mystery of the Cross.  And in this one mystery, Pope Leo XIII says, “the entire supernatural order is summed up and contained.”  Because in truth it is not just His Passion and death that is re-presented but His Resurrection as well.  It is, as St. John Paul II says, truly His Passover in which we journey with Him.  Each of the Memorial Acclamations contains the same content; the Passion, Death, Resurrection and “the eschatological footprint of Christ in His return”. 

We can see better what Our Lord meant when he told Thomas that those who did not see Him were blessed.  It is for our benefit that He presents Himself in a veiled manner.  By veiling Himself, His presence grows clearer and clearer in proportion to one’s charity.  Knowledge (faith) always leads to love so that His hidden presence in the Eucharist causes charity to grow in our soul. 

If this does not excite in us both reverence and awe, then we are merely going through the motions.  This Mystery of Faith is the content of eternity because it sums of all the mysteries of our Faith.  We will be contemplating this Mystery of Faith when faith gives way to vision.  In this way the Mass truly is training for life everlasting and we should treat it as such.

Why Are There Seven Sacraments?

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Within a generation or two of the first Protestant revolutionaries, the Sacraments became one of the shovels that were used to widen the chasm between Christians.  The debate began mostly over the number of Sacraments with Luther, Calvin and friends reducing the number to two or three.  Eventually, the Protestant Sacraments became unrecognizable, more because of a flawed philosophy than flawed theology.  They became mere signs, given power by the faith of the believer, rather than signs empowered by Christ to bring about the thing signified.  Because the reduction of the number of Sacraments was at the heart of their error, it is worth examining why there must be seven Sacraments so that, by removing one, you necessarily set yourself down a path of rejecting all.

To grasp the reasoning for seven Sacraments, it is first necessary to take a theological diversion into the use of analogy.  Analogy, in the theological sense, takes what would otherwise remain a mystery in the spiritual life and examines it “in the mirror of sensible realities”.  God is the author of both the natural and supernatural and He made them both for the same reason; to reveal Himself to mankind.  If they share the same purpose, then we can take the principles behind the things we can see and apply them to the things we can’t see.  This follows directly from a principle articulated by St. Paul in his letter to the Romans that “His invisible nature has been clearly perceived in the things He has made” (Romans 1:20).   

How Analogy Fits into Theology

This parallelism comes with a caveat however.  Creation could never exhaust all that God has to say about Himself, falling short in fully revealing Him.  To supplement the “Book of Nature” God gave man Divine Revelation.  There are things that we can discover about God on our own, but if we are to know Him, rather than just about Him, He must reveal Himself to us.  This means that while we can use the principles in nature and extrapolate them to Supernature, we cannot do so indiscriminately or univocally.  There is a similarity, but there is also a difference at the same time. The analogical concept of existence is powerful in theology because it allows us to say things about God we would not otherwise be able to say.

Knowledge of this principle is important because when God reveals Himself as say Father, neophyte will tend to equate the visible fatherhood with the invisible Fatherhood.  “If God is Father then how could a father watch one of his children die without doing anything?”  But God as Father is an analogical concept.  God is like an earthly father, but also unlike an earthly father.  In fact He is the only true Father, while all fatherhood on earth is a mere reflection (c.f. Familiaris Consortio, 32). 

Analogy then become a necessary tool to understand Revelation.  God reveals Himself as a Tri-unity of Persons.  Human reason is hardwired to never be satisfied with mere facts, even of Revelation, but instead seeks understanding.  Now we could never reason to the Trinity, but the analogy of marriage that undergirds St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body helps us to better understand it.  Likewise, we could never use reason to prove our supernatural destiny, but by examining our natural life, we can better understand it because both have the same purpose.

St. Thomas Aquinas and the Use of Analogy

St. Thomas Aquinas took advantage of the power of analogy better than any theologian in the history of the Church.  He includes these types of arguments throughout the Summa, our topic at hand being one such example.  He articulates the principle saying  that the “spiritual life has a certain conformity with the life of the body: just as other corporeal things have a certain likeness to things spiritual ” (ST III, q.65, art. 1).  Drawing on this analogy, he then goes on to explain why there are seven Sacraments.  Keep in mind that this is not proof that there are seven Sacraments, but explains why there are seven, and how ultimately, to remove one leaves the Christian wayfarer at a loss.

Always profound in his common sense, St. Thomas says that there are two ways in which a person reaches perfection in his bodily life; personally and as a social animal, as part of a community.  Personally, the man reaches perfection in the life of the body directly by being generated (i.e. birth), through growth and through nourishment.  But because he also encounters hindrances and is prone to disease he needs both medicine and those things that will strengthen him against the diseases.

The corporal needs are signs of spiritual needs.  A man is generated bodily by birth and spiritually by Baptism.  He grows to perfect size and strength which corresponds to Confirmation where the indelible mark of Christian growth is given.  This bodily life and strength is preserved through regular nourishment just as in the spiritual life there is the Eucharist.  Finally, to restore health to the spirit after sin, Confession becomes the medicine of the soul.  To strengthen the soul against the wages of sin, Anointing of the Sick is performed, “which removes the remainder of sin, and prepares man for final glory. Wherefore it is written (James 5:15): ‘And if he be in sins they shall be forgiven him.’” (ibid).

Man is a social animal and so he is perfected in relation to others.  “First, by receiving power to rule the community and to exercise public acts: and corresponding to this in the spiritual life there is the sacrament of order, according to the saying of Hebrews 7:27, that priests offer sacrifices not for themselves only, but also for the people. Secondly in regard to natural propagation. This is accomplished by Matrimony both in the corporal and in the spiritual life: since it is not only a sacrament but also a function of nature.” (ST III, q.65, art.1).

It becomes obvious then why a rejection of one Sacrament ultimately leads to the rejection of all.  They are a complete package meant to meet all of our spiritual needs.  A deficiency in one area always leads to a poverty in another.  That is why Jesus left the Sacraments to the Church in order to provide for all the spiritual needs of the members of His Mystical Body.  At each stage of life, Christ bestows supernatural aid to facilitate the growth of each person into a saint.  To remove one of them means that a need is left unmet and spiritual growth is stunted.  The Sacraments protect Christianity from becoming a “works-based” religion because they reflect our radical need upon God to save us, not just once, but throughout our earthly pilgrimage.  There are seven because God made us to need them.

Our Daily Bread

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Pope Francis recently approved a new translation in French and Italian of the Lord’s Prayer that offers a re-translation of the petition “lead us not into temptation.”  The Holy Father has repeatedly expressed his concern that the phrase as it is translated is misleading, making it seem like it is God that actually leads us into temptation.  Whether or not this is theologically correct or even prudent, I will leave to others to argue.  But this new translation business certainly opens up the question whether there are other phrases in the current translation that need to be amended.  In particular, I have in mind the petition “Give us this day, our daily bread…”

Familiarity can create a blind spot, but if we come to the petition afresh, we must admit that it is awkwardly worded.  In particular, it is the repetition of this day and daily that strikes us as odd.  Why don’t we pray simply “this day for our bread” or, more succinctly, “give us our daily bread”?  Either one would seem to be more in line with conventional usage.  But to see why this wouldn’t work and why the current translation doesn’t quite capture its meaning we should return to the original Greek.

A Faulty Translation?

Obviously, Our Lord did not give the Apostles the prayer in Greek, but the Holy Spirit did when He inspired the sacred authors to include it within the gospels.  So, we can assume that any mis-translation would occur from Greek to (in our case) English.  The word that we translate as daily is epioύsios in Greek. This word is utterly unique to Sacred Scripture and is not found anywhere else in the Greek language prior to its appearance in the gospels.  This created a historical difficulty in defining exactly what it means (let alone translating it).  None of the Fathers agreed upon its exact meaning, although a number of them settled upon the in literal meaning— epi meaning super and oύsios meaning substance—from which we would derive with the English term supersubstantial.  This is hardly a word that is found in the English vernacular, but its meaning is “above material substance”. 

The use of the term supersubstantial led the Fathers of the Church to teach that the petition relates “not so much to the material bread which is the support of the body as the Eucharistic bread which ought to be our daily food” (St. Pius X, Sacra Tridentina).  Why then do we say “daily”?  After all supersubstantial hardly has the same connotation as daily.  Until, that is, we put on a Biblical mindset.  There is one place is Sacred Scripture in which God provides “daily bread”.  It is the giving of the manna in the desert.  This same bread was in a very real sense supersubstantial as it just appeared with the dew fall and spoiled as quickly as it came the next day.  But Our Lord said the manna was but a prefigurement of the True Bread come down from heaven, the true “daily bread” that can only be described as supersubstantial—the Eucharist.

When the emphasis is placed upon the Eucharist the context of the petition is thrown into relief.  We pray to Our Father as His adopted children, brought into the family of the Trinity and united as one family on earth.  We pray that He feed us with the family meal because the Eucharist is only for us, it is Our daily bread.  But there is another sense in which we must deal with the current choice of translation as daily.

Receiving Our Daily Bread

Like the manna in the desert, the petition is meant to remind us that the Eucharist is something that is given to the Church daily, a gift that we both express gratitude for and petition God to continue blessing us with.  For there will come a time, at least according to some of the Fathers of the Church like St. Augustine, in which the persecution will be so bad that the celebration of the Eucharist will cease.  Whether it was to cease completely or not, one can still imagine how difficult it would be to receive the Eucharist during that time.  There are plenty of places in the world where it already is.  We risk, especially in times like our own in which belief in the Real Presence of the Eucharist is in decline, becoming like the Israelites in the desert, taking the manna for granted and grumbling in disbelief.  “The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me” (Mt 26:11).

Over a century ago, Pope St. Pius X made this connection between the manna the Eucharist in a decree that encouraged the “Frequent and Daily Reception of Holy Communion”.  The saintly Pontiff said that given the correct dispositions for worthy reception, all Christians “should be daily nourished by this heavenly banquet and should derive therefrom more abundant fruit for their sanctification.”  He states unequivocally that it is “the desire of Jesus Christ and of the Church that all the faithful should daily approach the sacred banquet.”  He encourages the Faithful to make use of the Sacrament for the purpose that Christ intended—extending the Incarnation in time in order to enable those who touch Him to receive His healing touch.  That is, “the faithful, being united to God by means of the Sacrament, may thence derive strength to resist their sensual passions, to cleanse themselves from the stains of daily faults, and to avoid these graver sins to which human frailty is liable…Hence the Holy Council calls the Eucharist “the antidote whereby we may be freed from daily faults and be preserved from mortal sin.”

St. Pius X also declares that the person “who is in the state of grace, and who approaches the Holy Table with a right and devout intention” should approach the Holy Table often.  This “right intention consists in this: that he who approaches the Holy Table should do so, not out of routine, or vain glory, or human respect, but that he wish to please God, to be more closely united with Him by charity, and to have recourse to this divine remedy for his weakness and defects.”

In short then, the Our Father ought to express a desire that Christ “give us always this bread” (John 6:34).  This of course assumes we understand what we are asking for.  One will be surprised how, once they commit to receiving Our Lord frequently, even daily, and prays as such, daily Mass begins to “work out” and they find their schedule opening up.   This is why a re-translation might lead not only to a re-education, but a re-invigoration of desire for the Eucharist.  This will start with the commitment to personally make this supersubstantial bread our daily bread.  If we nourish our bodies daily, then how much more do we need to nourish our souls? 

The Bread of Life and the Resurrection

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Each Easter season, the Liturgy carries us through the Bread of Life Discourse found in the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel.  We are all familiar with the setting, but this familiarity carries with it a danger of missing the point of  why the Church chooses these passages as part of her Easter celebration.  Of course, in a very real way, because the Eucharist is the “source and summit” of our faith, it is always in season.  But it is the connection between the Eucharist and the Resurrection that the Church wishes to highlight. Our Lord repeatedly issues the command to eat His body and drink His blood and for apologetical reasons that can grab our attention.  But each time He does, He attaches it to the promise of the future resurrection.  This creates an intrinsic link between the Eucharist and the resurrection of the dead that is worth further examination.

To grasp why this is so, we can turn to St. Augustine.  In the Confessions, Augustine recounts the time that he heard the voice of Christ saying “I am the food of strong men; grow and you shall feed on me; nor shall you change me, like the food of your flesh into yourself, but you shall be changed into my likeness” (Book VII, Ch. X).  St. Thomas interprets this passage as referring to the spiritual nature of the food that is the Eucharist.  Bodily food is changed into the substance of the person nourished and supports life as such.  Spiritual food changes the man into Itself and supports the spiritual life as such.

The Sacrament of the Passion

The Eucharist as both the Sacrament of the Passion and “true food indeed” transforms us into Christ  according to which “a man is made perfect in union with Christ Who suffered” (ST III, q.73, art.3, ad. 3).  It is Christ Who is really present in the Eucharist and it is Him Whom we receive, but we receive Him with particular reference to His Passion.  This reception allows us to not just “spiritually” unite ourselves to Him in His Passion, but so that we truly participate in it.  And it is from this that its fruits are truly available to us; or we should say one fruit in particular—a share in the bodily resurrection.  In short the Eucharist conforms us to Christ in His Passion so that we might share in His resurrection.  The Eucharist is then ordered towards the Resurrection, but only by sacramentally passing through the Passion of Christ.

By highlighting the end of the Eucharist, it helps us to understand two further aspects of this “hard teaching”.  First, when Our Lord says that it is the spirit that gives life and not the flesh He does not mean that we should take what He says symbolically and unite to Him spiritually.  Instead He means that it was, as St. Thomas says, “the Cross [that] made His flesh adapted for eating” (ST III, q.3, art.3, ad.1).  It is His resurrected, impassible body that gives life, not the passible, mortal body that they see.  In other words, the Eucharist, because it is the Sacrament of the Passion, would not have achieved its full meaning until “Christ our Passover had been sacrificed.”  This is why Pope Innocent III said the disciples at the Last Supper “received His body such as it was ” (De Sacr. Alt. Myst. iv), that is, mortal and passible. It was not until after the Resurrection that they would have received His immortal and impassible body.

Why It is Necessary

The second point has to do with Christ’s insistence that, “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink His blood, you shall not have life in you” (Jn 6:54).  It is difficult not to read this as imposing some sort of necessity that links the Eucharist to salvation.  But this is an often-misunderstood teaching because it requires a bit of explanation.  In fact, this is one of the doctrines that the Calvinists attacked when they broke away from the Church, saying that the Eucharist was not necessary for salvation.

The Council of Trent made a series of distinctions to help throw this teaching into relief.  First, as Scripture testifies, Baptism is absolutely necessary for salvation (c.f. Mk 16:16).  The necessity of the Eucharist is of a different kind—what the Church calls the necessity of precept.  This is a teaching that “is hard” but must be accepted, meaning that the believer must do as Our Lord commanded.  This is why the Church withholds it until one reaches the age of reason.  It is also why there is no absolute necessity like Baptism.  Young children do not need the Eucharist in order to be saved.

This distinction arises because Baptism, the Sacrament by which we are made to be “in Christ” and incorporated into His Mystical Body, deputizes the believer for divine worship, which means the offering of sacrifice to God.    This includes the offering of the Church’s sacrifice of the Eucharist.  So Baptism, like all the Sacraments, is ordered toward the Eucharist.  It essentially completes Baptism.

The moral necessity of receiving the Eucharist then is abundantly clear, but it is not clear how often one should do so.  In order to fulfill the precept, the Church obliges the faithful to receive it at least once a year during the Easter season (Canon 920).  But it is doubtful that one who only receives once a year will be able to preserve himself in a state of grace for very long.  The Eucharist is meant to provide supernatural nourishment for the soul so that when it is deliberately avoided for a long period of time, the person will almost necessarily begin to fill up on the junk food that the world has to offer.

This moral necessity absolves young children prior to reaching the age of reason from receiving the Eucharist.  It also absolves those who are so mentally handicapped that they cannot make a simple act of faith in the Real Presence.  But what about non-Catholic Christians?  Are they all pretty much like the disciples who walked away from Jesus over this hard saying?

Recall that we are bound by necessity of precept.  That implies that we are aware of the precept and understand it.  The person must not be culpably ignorant, although what that actually looks like is up to God.  What we can say for sure is that it will be a miracle if someone is saved without receiving the Eucharist regularly.  The natural means by which God grants the supernatural gift of perseverance is through the Eucharist.  God can circumvent those natural means via a miracle, but how often or even if that happens we cannot know.  That is why the man who does not regularly receive the Bread of Life but knows that He should is, in essence, testing God by demanding a miracle.

The Word of God Made Flesh rarely repeated Himself.  The Bread of Life Discourse is a notable exception as He commanded His disciples four times to eat His body and drink His blood.  This repetition wasn’t directed towards those disciples who “returned to their former way of life,” (Jn 6:66) but to those who continued to follow Him.  We should be constantly aware of just how dependent we are upon the Bread of Life and approach Him as such.

Protestantism and Infant Baptism

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One of the more hotly contested issues between Protestants and Catholics is infant Baptism.  What makes this particular practice contentious is that it really gets to the heart of the fundamental differences between Catholicism and Protestantism by pitting Tradition and Sacramental Theology against two of the Solas, Scriptura and Fide.  Because it is a “test case” of sorts for tackling these differences overall, it is necessary to have a ready answer to this common objection.

Although we have discussed this before, it is helpful to reiterate something related to relationship between Scripture and Tradition, namely the principle of the Development of Doctrine,  Because Sacred Scripture is the Word of God written using the words of men, it cannot fully express the divine ideas that God is trying to convey, at least not explicitly.  Instead it can contain those ideas implicitly.  When those ideas meet different human minds in different times and places, there is development of doctrine in that all of those things found implicitly in the Sacred Word are made explicit. 

Infant Baptism and the Development of Doctrine

As it relates to the question at hand, we must admit that nowhere do we find in Scripture an explicit statement regarding the baptism of infants.  But this does not make it “unbiblical” because there are implicit mentions of it.  In the Gospel of Luke, we find that ““Now they were bringing even infants to him that he might touch them; and when the disciples saw it, they rebuked them. But Jesus called them to him, saying, ‘Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them; for to such belongs the kingdom of God’” (Luke 18:15–16).  If the Kingdom of God belongs to children also, the same Kingdom of God that “no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit.’” (Jn 3:5) then one could infer that infants too should be baptized.  That coupled with St. Paul’s explicit connection of baptism with circumcision (Col 2:11-12), a ritual that was performed on the 8th day after a child was born, would seem to suggest that infant baptism is not only permitted but also recommended. 

This highlights one of the problems with Sola Scriptura.  Because it does not permit any development of doctrine (at least in principle) then its adherents really can’t say anything about this and any number of topics.  Strictly speaking because the Bible does not say “thou shalt not baptize infants” then there is absolutely no basis for disputing the fact that Catholics do it.  To condemn it is to add to Scripture.

The phrases “one could infer” and “would seem to suggest” imply a certain amount of uncertainty.  Any uncertainty is quickly erased when we examine how the Biblical Revelation, especially regarding infant baptism, was received.  We hear of the practice of baptizing entire “households” in Scripture so that the practice of baptizing entire families, some of which presumably included infants, was common practice in the early Church.  At least, that is how the Church Fathers received the message from the Apostles themselves.  St. Irenaeus, who himself was likely baptized by St. Polycarp, a disciple of St. John mentions it as if it is a given in his Against Heresies (2:22).  Origen says that the tradition of “giving baptism even to infants was received from the Apostles” (Commentary on Romans, 5).  In fact, we do not have a single record of anyone in the first two Christian centuries objecting to infant baptism.

This practice however was not universal in the early Church and, in fact, most Baptisms were of adults.  We hear of a number of famous saints like Augustine and Jerome who despite having Christian parents, waited until they were adults.  What is clear though is that if at any point a child was in danger of death, they would be baptized immediately.  They all agreed that baptism was necessary for salvation and that it was the means b which all sins were forgiven.  What they did not agree upon however is what to do when someone sinned gravely after Baptism.  They were well aware of the Sacrament of Confession (see for example Didache, 15 ~AD60), but they did not know how many times someone could receive the Sacrament.  Was it once, twice, as many times as a person sins, or what?  There were rigorists (like Tertullian for example), especially in the 3rd and 4th Century, who thought you could go at most once.  Therefore, a practice of delaying Baptism began to become the norm. 

In other words, the development of the doctrine of infant baptism depended upon the development of the doctrine of Confession.  Once this was worked out, by the 5th Century however we see a concurrent movement towards infant baptism being the norm.  Those children that were baptized as infants would however have to answer for their faith.  The great Catechetical Lectures of St. Cyril of Jerusalem imply that these children are among his audience (c.f. Cat XV, 18).

Sola Fide and The Sacrament of Baptism

This leads to the second way in which this discussion acts as a” test case” in confronting the second sola, namely Sola Fide.  We must first admit that no one, until we get to the 16th Century ever believed in Sola Fide.  The Early Church on the other hand always believed that Baptism was necessary for salvation.  Just like Baptism, faith is, by all accounts, necessary for salvation.  It is the relationship between the two that is at the heart of this part of the discussion.   

Faith, for the Protestant, is always reflexive.  Whatever the believer believes is so.  If he believes he is saved, then he is saved.  If he believes he is forgiven, then he is forgiven.  If he believes that Communion really is the Body of Christ, then it is. If he believes then he shows that belief by being baptized.  In this construct there is no need for the Sacraments and they can safely be replaced by faith.  Faith, not the Sacraments, is the efficient cause of God’s actions.

This is problematic because faith then becomes a work by which we are saved. This is the ironic part of the discussion because it is usually the Catholic that is accused of a “works-based righteousness.”  But Catholics are very clear that salvation, and all the is necessary for achieving it, are pure gifts.  In other words, baptism from the Catholic viewpoint is not a sign of faith, but a cause of it.  Saving faith is not believing you are saved, but believing all that God has revealed.  It is baptism that infuses this habit into us and thus it is necessary if we are to be saved.  “It is,” St. Peter says, “baptism that saves you” (1Peter 3:21).

In conclusion, we can see that Infant Baptism carries with it a number of principles that are absolutely necessary to grasp if we are to advance the discussion of the differences between Protestants and Catholics.  It offers an example of how Scripture is often pitted against Tradition and Faith against the Sacraments.  Only by developing a proper understanding of the issue can we begin to talk about it.

Worshipping Like the Early Christians

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One of the ironies associated with the proliferation of Protestant sects is that it has been marked by a certain antiquarianism in which the various groups try to return the style of worship that marked the early Church.  Often lampooned as a “dude starting a church in his garage”, the number of “house churches” in various forms continues to multiply as they try to recapture the spirit of the early Christians.  But none of them can quite get it right, partly because in rejecting Tradition, they can find no touchpoint from which to launch their liturgical crusade.  Their nostalgic zeal is certainly laudable, but once we look closely at the early Church we find that the early Christians themselves would most certainly have shunned these new “house churches”.

According to Acts 2:42, early Christianity was anchored by two buoys: “the teachings of the Apostles and the breaking of the bread and the prayers.”  These two elements really formed a single whole such that they could not be put asunder.  Those who tried were branded heretics.  Writing in 107AD, on his way to be martyred in Rome, the disciple of John the Evangelist, St. Ignatius of Antioch told the Philadephians (4), “Take heed, then, to have but one Eucharist. For there is one flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ, and one cup to the unity of His blood; one altar; as there is one bishop, along with the presbytery and deacons, my fellow-servants: that so, whatsoever you do, you may do it according to [the will of] God.”  This theme of unity, founded on the connection to Apostolic teaching (one bishop) and the breaking of the bread (one Eucharist), is merely a recurring theme that started on that same day of Pentecost described in Acts.  We find it repeated in St. Clement of Rome’s letter to the Corinthians (c.f. Ch. 37, 44) and St. Paul’s first letter to that same church in Corinth (c.f. 1 Cor 10:17, 11:17-28).  These two anchors were exactly what set Christianity apart from Judaism in both belief and practice.

Orderly Worship

The Church Fathers of the first and second centuries, those who still had “the voices of the Apostles echoing in their ears” firmly believed and taught that communal worship of God was to follow a certain form.  Anyone who has attempted to plod their way through Leviticus and Numbers would have to admit they had a point.  This certain form, “this reasonable worship”, was given to them by God because it was pleasing to Him (and thus sanctifying for them).  This orderly worship did not cease with the New Covenant (as the Last Supper shows us) but continued in a new form.  The call to order in worship is at the heart of St. Clement’s letter to the Corinthians as a response to their liturgical revolution.  He told them “We must do all things that the Lord told us to do at the stated times in proper order”(Letter to the Corinthians,40).  He who knew the Apostles personally firmly believed that the ordering of the liturgy was something revealed to the Apostles and therefore ought to be passed on.  It is this “proper order” that the various sects are trying to capture.

This spirit is praiseworthy even if, ultimately, they fail for reasons we shall see shortly.  Praiseworthy because most Protestants and many Catholics who want to hijack the liturgy see worship as a form of communal self-expression.  This attitude is entirely misguided.  As Pope Benedict XVI puts it, “real liturgy implies that God responds and reveals how we can worship Him.  In any form, liturgy includes some kind of ‘institution’.  It cannot spring from imagination, our own creativity—then it would remain just a cry in the dark or mere self-affirmation.”  Worship is always both reflective and formative of belief.  For God to reveal what to believe while at the same time leaving worship up to man is to risk losing revelation. 

To illustrate his point, Pope Benedict XVI uses the example of the golden calf.  He points out that there is really a subtle apostasy going on.  It is not that they are worshipping a false god, but that they have made their own image (something they were prohibited from doing) of the True God.  “The people cannot cope with the invisible, remote, and mysterious God.  They want to bring Him down into their own world, into what they can see and understand.  Worship is no longer going up to God, but drawing God down into one’s own world” (Spirit of the Liturgy, 22).  If we are to approach the unapproachable, then we must be given the path by which we might mount Jacob’s ladder.  This, my Catholic readers, is why you must never muck with the liturgy.  This my Protestant friends is why you should rethink the form of your “praise and worship” services.  How do you know they are acceptable to God?

The Early Mass

That being said, what did the first Christian worship services look like?  St. Justin Martyr, writing in the mid-second century, gives us an outline in two places in his First Apology (65,67).  Rather than quote it in full, we can look at it in outline form:

  1. Lessons from Scripture of indeterminant number
  2. Sermon
  3. Dismissal of Non-Christians and Prayers
  4. Kiss of Peace
  5. Offertory
  6. Eucharistic Prayer
  7. Memory of Passion including words of institution
  8. Great Amen
  9. Communion under Both Kinds (Deacons take to those absent)
  10. Collection for the Poor

Fr. Adrian Fortescue in his book, The Mass: A Study of the Roman Liturgy, offers some details of each of the elements which are summarized below.  First, it is worth mentioning that at certain times, what they called the synaxis and we would call the Liturgy of the Word (elements 1-4) and the Liturgy of the Eucharist (5-10) would be celebrated at different times.  But it wasn’t long before it was a single celebration.  Because the Church thought it was always fitting to preach the Gospel, elements 1-4 were always open to anyone.  But once the community began to pray together, the non-Christians were dismissed.  This was done both out of reverence to the Eucharist and because to the uninitiated it would have been very difficult to understand and easy to mock. 

With very minor differences, mostly with respect to the Kiss of Peace, a Catholic of today would feel at home in such a liturgy.  Likewise a Catholic in the first Century would feel at home in ours.  There is a certain corollary that is attached to this and it is the fact that all the liturgies of the early Christians were marked by uniformity.  They looked the same whether you were in Rome, Antioch, Alexandria or Jerusalem.  And this was because they believed the form was directly from the Apostles.  There was nothing like a GIRM, but when we find liturgical manuals in the 4th Century from the various Churches they are almost identical even in the text of the prayers.  There is of course a practical reason for this.    The Church began in Jerusalem.  Every Church that was a missionary Church of Jerusalem would follow the rubrics of the Jerusalem Church.  By the middle of the 1st Century, every Church is connected directly to one of the four patriarchies—Rome, Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria.  If there is uniformity in those four then you would expect it to occur in all the missionary Churches as well.  As a young bishop succeeded an older bishop, he would be expected to follow the way the older bishop did things. 

There is a second aspect as well that follows from the desire for order.  The liturgy was uniform and orderly because it allowed for the laity to participate.  They knew when to respond and how.  They knew when it was time for the Great Amen and when it was time for Communion.  The Church Militant was a well-disciplined and well-practiced army.

Finally, just as in Israel, Scripture was first and foremost a liturgical book.  They drew many of the prayers and forms of those prayers directly from Scripture.  The early Christians, even those who were not literate, regularly imbibed Scripture in the liturgy and were far from ignorant.  This connection between Scripture and the Liturgy is often overlooked, even though down to our own day we are exposed to it throughout the Liturgy (and not just in the readings).

The Breaking of the Bread, what the Latin Church would later call the Mass, stood at the center of the Church’s early life.  This legacy, rather than covered in the dust of history, is found in the Mass of today, a fact that becomes obvious once we study the early Church.