Category Archives: Eucharist

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.

The Gateway Vice

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As Eve twisted the apple from its stem, little did she grasp that she was also twisting the desires of her progeny for all time.  By mingling good and evil, their desires would no longer be the North Star that God intended them to be.  For He had willed that man, in pursuing those things that were truly good for him, would be rewarded with pleasure.  Reason commanded the will towards the good and pleasure was its reward.  Adam seized the reward instead by choosing that which was “pleasing to the eye and good for food,” Adam truly upset the apple cart.  In choosing pleasure over reason, reason no longer ruled but instead wrestled with pleasure.  In seemingly becoming “like unto the gods” he became like unto a beast. 

God did not leave mankind unaware of its fundamental brokenness but instead left an orientation towards those things that are truly good for them intact.  It became difficult, but not impossible.  Generation after generation knew this and sought to root out vice and find fulfillment in virtue.  But few of those generations have embraced this brokenness with such gusto as our own.  Virtue is something to be signaled, not actually owned, and vice is to be rationalized away as, at worst, a “bad habit” akin to cracking your knuckles or clicking your tongue before you speak.  If virtue is to be more than signaled, then we must restore a proper understanding of vice. 

Following in the footsteps of the desert monks, St. Gregory the Great and St. Thomas Aquinas, Tradition has left us with Seven Deadly Vices.  St. Thomas called them Capital Vices because these seven vices are usually the source or head of all of the sins we commit (see ST II-II, q.153, art.4).  The reason why this is important is that these vices remain hidden to us as subconscious motivations for the sins we do commit.  They cause us to steal pleasure where none should be found.  Only once they are recognized can we restore pleasure to its rightful place as a side effect. 

A Useless Vice?

One of these vices, gluttony, at least on the surface does not seem to be a big deal.  How could a little overeating or carrying a little too much have anything to do with our spiritual life?  But, as St. Gregory the Great said, “unless we first tame the enemy dwelling within us, namely our gluttonous appetite, we have not even stood up to engage in the spiritual combat.”  His point is that gluttony is a gateway vice that, left unconquered, will most certainly lead to hell.  It trains us in the practice of self-indulgence and causes us to more and more of it.  Likewise, when we abandon reason when it comes to eating, we are almost certainly going to abandon it in other areas too.

Now I mentioned the connection between being fat and gluttony, but we would err greatly if we thought gluttony is all about whether we are fat or not.  The skinny woman who drinks a six-pack of Coke Zero a day is likely to be far more gluttonous than the man whose six pack is buried beneath 25 pounds of fat.  The latter might recognize that the purpose of eating is to provide nutrition while the former has no such awareness.  She merely wants the pleasure of Coke without the caloric consequences.  She is limited only by the amount of pleasure she craves, not by any bodily need or capacity.  And herein lies the vice of gluttony: “the sin of gluttony is when the desire for such pleasures goes beyond the rule of reason.  And so there is the saying that ‘gluttony is the intemperate desire to eat.’” (St. Thomas Aquinas, On Evil).  

The problem is not the pleasure attached to eating—God has attached that pleasure to eating because eating fulfills our nature.  Nor is it necessarily that we choose a food we like better than another to eat.  Gluttony is deeper than that, it resides interiorly in that it is the pleasure, rather than the reason for eating, that drives us.  Right reason says that food is necessary for humans in two ways: first as nutrition and second as a means of sharing life with others.  Anytime we go beyond those reasons, we are operating under the vice of gluttony. 

As proof that gluttony is more than just about girth, there are five ways in which it tends to manifest itself.  These can be remembered by invoking the acronym FRESH—fastidiously, ravenously, exceedingly, sumptuously, and hastily.

In the Screwtape Letters, Wormwood complains to Screwtape about how useless gluttony is for capturing humans.  Screwtape quickly corrects him and says that fastidious gluttons are often very easy to ensnare.  The Fastidious Glutton is the one who suffers from the “‘All-I-want’ state of mind.”  Its hiddenness makes it quite useful in capturing her in a diabolic net because she is so particular about her food and how it is prepared that she is miserably attached to the pleasure of eating foot that is “made your way.”  The taste is all that matters for the fastidious glutton.  The pleasure dominates her eating rather than coming as a side effect.  It also makes all those who have the misfortune of eating with her or preparing her food positively miserable.

There is also the glutton who eats sumptuously.  He is preoccupied with the pleasure of being full.  He will only choose those foods which are substantial enough to leave him with the feeling of fullness.  Reason should dictate when we have eaten enough to sustain ourselves and not the feeling of fullness.  When we eat to be full, we are again chasing pleasure rather than being controlled by reason.  Again there is no concern for what they are being filled with, only that they experience the pleasure of being full.   This is, by the way, the reason the Church in her wisdom traditionally recommends fasting from sumptuous foods during Lent and restricting the menu to bread and vegetables instead.

The ravenous glutton is the one who must eat as much as they can, regardless of whether there is enough food for anyone else and how full they are.  Their eyes might be bigger than their stomachs, but their stomachs will soon be bigger than their belts. 

Similar to the ravenous glutton there is the glutton who eats hastily.  This glutton treats his utensils like a shovel and must always have his mouth full without chewing or eating slow enough for digestion to occur.  The glutton who eats excessively.  He will eat past the point of fullness in order to indulge the tastes even if it leads to bloating and upset stomach later.

The Only True Antidote

The antidote ought to be obvious and something we have spoke about numerous times in the past—cultivating the virtue of fasting.  There is one particular aspect of fasting however that bears mentioning and that is the Eucharistic Fast.  We spoke of the reason for food and for eating being nutrition and sharing of life.  But the reason from God’s perspective is more expansive than that.  God gave us food as a sign of the only true Food that is the Bread of Life.  Therefore, we should forego the sign for the reality. 

The Church has us fast before receiving the Eucharist so that in experiencing bodily hunger we might recognize what that hunger actually points to.  By receiving the Eucharist in a state of hunger, it is Real Food that nourishes us.  To show us the truth of this, God gave a grace to the Saint of the Eucharist, St. Catherine of Siena by which she ate only the Eucharist for 7 years prior to her death.  This miraculous sign enabled her to eat only the Bread of Life and to suffer no ill effects from what would otherwise be a severe fast.  In order to truly hunger for the Eucharist then it becomes necessary to fast for more than just the obligatory hour before receiving.  We may choose to do something similar to what the Church had previously held that you could not eat anything during a day until you had received the Eucharist that day.

In his book Victory Over Vice, Venerable Fulton Sheen says that Christ’s cry of “I thirst” was His definitive destruction of the power of gluttony to rule the lives of Christians.  What better place then than the Mystical Foot of the Cross of the Eucharistic Sacrifice to receive those hard won graces to finally overcome the Gateway Vice of Gluttony.

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.

The Eucharistic Remnant

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Finding that love for God had greatly cooled in his time, St. Ignatius of Loyola placed the blame squarely upon a lack of devotion to the Eucharist.  This, of course, makes perfect sense for they are one and the same thing—“every one who loves the Father, also loves the Son” (1 John 5:1).  The Eucharist keeps our love for God from becoming abstract and always ensures that it remain fully human.  Returning to Ignatius, he says that

“the early Church members of both sexes received Communion daily as soon as they were old enough. But soon devotion began to cool, and Communion became weekly. Then after a considerable interval of time, as devotion became still more cool, Communion was received on only three of the principal feasts of the year. . . . And finally, because of our weakness and indifference, we have ended with once a year. You would think we are Christian only in name, to see us so calmly accepting the condition to which the greater part of mankind has come.” 

In short, we must return to our roots and receive Our Lord daily in the Eucharist.

Our Lord, on the Cross, gave all that was possible to mankind, emptying Himself of every ounce of blood, the symbol of life.  This sacrifice will always remain distant to us individually until each one of us climbs the Mount of Calvary to receive it.  Each Mass situates us really and truly, even if sacramentally, at the foot of the Cross.  But it is not enough to merely be there, His blood must come upon us so that His life becomes ours.  This is not symbolic, for the Creator of all that is needs no symbols, but real.  “unless you eat the flesh and drink the blood of the Son of Man, you have no life in you” (John 6:53).

Meeting Our Lord’s Desire Head On

It should come as no surprise then that Our Lord so earnestly desired to give the Church the Eucharist (Luke 22:15).  For our part, we should earnestly desire to receive Him.  The Communion rail should be the place where the two desires collide and are consummated, igniting the fire of Divine Love in our souls.  This holy desire should be wholly consuming.  St. Catherine of Siena compares it to a candle that one carries to Communion:

“If you have a light, and the whole world should come to you in order to take light from it — the light itself does not diminish — and yet each person has it all. It is true that everyone participates more or less in this light, according to the substance into which each one receives the fire. I will develop this metaphor further that you may the better understand Me. Suppose that there are many who bring their candles, one weighing an ounce, others two or six ounces, or a pound, or even more, and light them in the flame, in each candle, whether large or small, is the whole light, that is to say, the heat, the color, and the flame; nevertheless you would judge that he whose candle weighs an ounce has less of the light than he whose candle weighs a pound. Now the same thing happens to those who receive this Sacrament. Each one carries his own candle, that is the holy desire, with which he receives this Sacrament, which of itself is without light, and lights it by receiving this Sacrament.”

Receiving Our Lord in the Eucharist is so vital to our existence that it was the first thing He told us to ask for ourselves; “Give us this day, our daily bread.”  The Eucharist is the only “Daily Bread”.  He tells us to ask food because He hungers to give.  His hunger converts our hunger.  As Christ tells St. Augustine, “I am the food of the strong; grow and thou shall feed on Me.  But you shall not convert Me into yourself as the nourishment of your body, but you shall be changed into Me.” (Confessions Book 7 Ch 10).

Pope St. Pius X in his Decree Sacra Tridentina exhorted the Faithful to receive Our Lord daily in the Eucharist.  But in order to do so fruitfully “one should take care that Holy Communion be preceded by careful preparation, and followed by an appropriate thanksgiving, according to each one’s strength, circumstances and duties.”  We must “approach the Sacred Table Holy Table with a right and devout intention” that is animated neither by “custom, vanity or any human reason but with the desire to satisfy the good pleasure of God while growing ever closer to Him in charity.”  We must receive Our Lord in order to quench His desire to give.

Tying together St. Ignatius sentiment with that of St. Catherine Siena helps us to grasp the ecclesiastical importance of fervent and daily Communion.  Both the sign of and the cause of the mass tepidity is a lack of desire for the Eucharist.  But when a Eucharistic remnant emerges that receives with St. Catherine’s holy desire, the love of Our Lord begins to spread like a flame as more and more candles are lit.  The Early Church was filled with Daily Communicants and they set the world on fire with the love of Christ precisely because they were Daily Communicants.  They gave what they received by bringing new converts to meet Our Lord in the Eucharist.  If you want to change the face of the Earth then commit to living a thoroughly Eucharistic life.  Catholics are Eucharistic Christians and thus meet Our Lord face to face every day.

Why We Need Churches

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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.      

Devotion to the Mother of the Eucharist

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When St. Luke wrote his account of the human origins of Our Lord, he wanted to make an important connection to Our Lady as the Ark of the New Covenant.  Likewise, St. John saw the need to make this connection more explicit in the Book of Revelation when he describes seeing the Ark of the Covenant in heaven and then describing it in terms that could only apply to Our Lady (c.f. Rev 11:19-12:5).  It was during Our Lady’s fiat at the Annunciation that she embraced her vocation as the true Ark of Covenant.  The Bread of Life, the True Bread Come Down from Heaven, was baked within her womb.  Her womb then became the first tabernacle as she embraced her title as Mother of the Eucharist.

Our Lady is Mother of the Second Person of the Trinity, the Son of God, who took His body and blood from her, created a soul for Himself and united it to His divinity in her womb.  In this way, the title is not surprising.  For that same Divine Person in an analogous way repeats the act on the altar during the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.  Each time Christ takes flesh on the altar, an echo of Our Lady’s fiat is heard as the Church gives birth to Our Lord in His Eucharistic presence. 

Mary, Model of the Communicant

Mary’s Annunciation then is the model for all of us in receiving the Eucharist.  With her Amen, Our Lord took flesh in her womb.  In so doing, she received an abundance of sanctifying grace.  Because she was perfectly disposed she received not just a spiritual but a physical participation in the divine life of the Trinity.  The difference is not just one of degree however.  According to Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange, Christ gives Himself so that we might live by Him, but in Mary He not only did this but also deemed to live by her and receive life from her. 

We ought to imitate her disposition as Christ seeks to unite His flesh with ours.  We ought to conceive in our hearts the “Son of God the most high” (Lk 1:32).  The Magnificat (Lk 1:46-55) is the template of after Communion  thanksgivings.

Mary, the Perfect Communicant

Our Lady is more than just a model Communicant through the Annunciation.  She is the perfect communicant because she received Our Lord most perfectly in the Eucharist.  We can often abstract Mary’s life so much that we forget that she lived as a Christian just as we did.  After the Ascension, she lived with a priest and would have received the Eucharist regularly from the hands of St. John.  It is her reception of the Eucharist, first prepared for by her fiat at the Annunciation, that was perfected in Ephesus with St. John.  It is this we must study and seek the grace to imitate.

Not all receptions of the Eucharist are the same.  The Eucharist contains ex opere operato sanctifying grace.  In fact, because it contains the source of all grace, Christ Himself, it contains enough grace through a single reception to perfectly sanctify the communicant.  What stops this from happening is the personal disposition of the recipient.  The more fervently one hungers for the Eucharist, the greater the infusion of Divine life through sanctifying grace. 

Having actually participated in the sacrifice on Calvary, she knew more than anyone what was being offered, even if in an unbloody manner, on the Altar.  Having made the oblation with Christ, she could continually make that same oblation in a spirit of adoration, thanksgiving, reparation and thanksgiving (the 4 principal purposes of the Mass according to Pope St. Pius X).  Furthermore, as Venerable Mary Agreda tells it in Mystical City of God, after being told by Our Lord about His enduring presence in the Eucharist,

“she burned with the desire of seeing this Sacrament instituted, and if She had not been sustained by the power of the Almighty, the force of her affection would have bereft Her of natural life…Even from that time on She wished to prepare Herself for its reception, and asked Her Son to be allowed to receive Him in the holy Sacrament as soon as it should be instituted. She said to Him: ‘Supreme Lord and life of my soul, shall I, who am such an insignificant worm and the most despicable among men, be allowed to receive Thee? Shall I be so fortunate as to bear Thee once more within my body and soul? Shall my heart be thy dwelling and tabernacle, where Thou shalt take thy rest and shall I thus delight in thy close embrace and Thou, my Beloved, in mine?’  The divine Master answered: ‘My beloved Mother, many times shalt thou receive Me in the holy Sacrament, and after my Death and Ascension into heaven that shall be thy consolation; for I shall choose thy most sincere and loving heart as my most delightful and pleasant resting place.’”

In short, the Eucharistic Presence of Our Lord would have been one of those things “she held in her heart”, especially because she knew what a great consolation it would be.  You can imagine how difficult it would be for Our Lady having spent every day save three with Our Lord for 30 years, having seen Him often during His three years of public ministry, to no longer have Him present with her.  With that in mind her hunger to receive Him the Eucharist must have exceeded all the saints throughout history combined. 

Likewise when Our Lord “earnestly desired” to give the Church the Eucharistic sacrifice, He was expressing a great desire to unite Himself to each one of us individually, but none so much as His Mother.  He knew that the Eucharist would not only sustain her, but would unite Him to her in a deeper and deeper way with each fervent reception.

This is why Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange says that “Each of Mary’s Communions surpassed the preceding one in fervor and, producing in her a great increase of charity, disposed her to receive her next Communion with still greater fruit. Mary’s soul moved ever more swiftly Godwards the nearer she approached to God; that was her law of spiritual gravitation. She was, as it were, a mirror which reflected back on Jesus the light and warmth which she received from Him; concentrated them also, so as to direct them towards souls” (Mother of the Savior and the Interior Life).  It is this same habit, the habit of receiving Our Lord with greater love and devotion at each Mass, that we must strive after.  Let us sit at the foot of Our Mother Mary and ask that she obtain for each one of us this most important grace.  As Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange put it, “In everything she was the perfect model of Eucharistic devotion. If we turn to her she will teach us how to adore and to make reparation; she will teach us what should be our desire of the Blessed Eucharist. From here we can learn how to pray at Holy Mass for the great intentions of the Church. and how to thank God for the graces without number He has bestowed on us and on mankind.”

Keeping Your Hands Off

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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.

Jumpstarting Reform

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In the opening chapter of his short book, Letter to a Suffering Church, Bishop Robert Barron calls the scandal within the Church “a diabolical masterpiece”.  The Bishop’s point is that everything that has happened within the Church over the last half century has been clearly and methodically planned out such that the sulfuric stench cannot be overlooked.  Bishop Barron only mentions this insight in passing as he attempts to instill hope in those who have suffered greatly as a result of the latest scandal. It is befitting, however, if we are to fully come up with a plan of reform, that we linger just a while longer on this fact.

First, we must admit that as ghastly as the abuse crisis has been, from within the satanic strategy, it is but a means to the devil’s overall plan to destroy the Church.  What this means is that if we focus only on the abuse crisis then we will be putting a band-aid on a bullet wound.  This is not to say that we do nothing about it or that we do not address it directly—band aids are necessary treating wounds, but only after the source of the wound is treated.  And the source of this wound in the Church is exacerbated by the fact that we deny that someone is actively working to destroy the Church.  It is the steady refusal over the last half century to admit of the Church’s militancy.  The Church is not a field hospital, but an army.  It may have field hospitals, but it is not the Red Cross.  It is an army because it is at war and its battleground is dominion of human souls.

Breeding Soft Soldiers

This repeated refusal to admit of the Church’s militancy has not changed the fact that she is Militia Christi, but it has made the soldiers soft.  The Church may be feminine, but she is not effeminate.  There is no more visible sign of effeminacy than sexual vice, especially of the kind that many clerics are accused.  But this softness affects not just the clergy but the laity as well.  We are the “soft generation” that is doomed to be the “lost generation” if we do not tighten up formation.

Notice that I did not say the softest generation, for there are far too many generations in the Church who have fallen prey to softness.  Church historian Roberto De Mattei describes the story of the Sack of Rome in 1527 as a “merciful chastisement” because reform in the Church had stalled and it served to jumpstart it. “The pleasure-seeking Rome of the Renaissance turned into the austere and penitent Rome of the Counter-Reformation.”  His point, although only implicitly made, is that chastening, either divinely or self-inflicted, is always a necessary pre-cursor to reform.  Softness must be rooted out one way or the other.

Like any army, once the enemy is clearly identified, a battle plan must be drawn up.  Since this is first and foremost a spiritual battle, we must use spiritual weapons.  Every renewal in the Church has come on the heels of a small remnant that committed to using these weapons and specifically aiming them at the enemies of the Church.  When the Church becomes soft, it is these three weapons, prayer, penance and mortification that are eschewed.  So, if we are to re-enter the fray, we must grasp the hilt of these three swords and wield them against our enemies.

Prayer

The mention of prayer is not meant to insinuate that people are not praying.  It is to direct our prayers towards a very specific intention—to strengthen and protect the Church from her enemies.  This intention is best fulfilled by praying with the Church in her two “official” prayers—the Mass and the Liturgy of the Hours.

I have written many other times about the necessity of regularly, that is daily and not just weekly, participating in Mass so I won’t belabor the point yet again but lead with a simple question: what sacrifice in your life do you need to make so that you can become a part of Christ’s saving mission begun at Calvary and continuing at the altar of your local parish?  The Eucharist is an infinite source of grace that Christ is just waiting to pour out upon those who offer it with Him.

The second form of prayer is one that I have not discussed much in the past and that is the Divine Office.  Commonly called the Liturgy of the Hours, it is the prayer of the Church that is offered seven times a day.  Seven is no arbitrary number, but the Church’s answer to the fact that “though the just man falls seven times a day, he will get up” (Proverbs 24:16).  This getting up and returning whole-heartedly to God by singing to Him His songs of praise in the Psalms and Canticles and recalling His saving acts throughout history.  The Liturgy of the Hours are by their very nature penitential and thus perfectly suited to our times.

Those in the clerical state are required to pray the Liturgy of the Hours under the pain of sin.  Many unfaithful priests do not.  The laity can pick up the standard voluntarily and run with it, keeping those unfaithful priests, many of whom are directly responsible for the sad state of the Church, in their intentions.  And because it is a free gift and not required it is most pleasing to God, even if due to our state in life it requires a great sacrifice to pray seven times.  Desperate times call for heroic sacrifice.  If it seems daunting find someone who can pray it with you or teach you, or read one of the recent books written to draw the laity into the Divine Office.

Penance and Mortification

These two terms, penance and mortification, are often used interchangeably.  Grasping the distinction is important only insofar as it relates to our intention.  Penance is reparation for sins committed, mortification is like pre-pentence in that it is aimed at rooting out the weaknesses that cause us to sin and have to do penance.  In practice they should go hand in hand.

Sins of the flesh and the demons who specialize in them are specifically targeted by fleshly penance and mortification.  “These can come out only with prayer and fasting”.  Fasting is the “fleshly” penance par excellence because it trains the Christian soldier to control all of his fleshly appetites.  It is the antidote to the softness that has hamstrung the Church.  It is no wonder that we no longer hear about it from the pulpit or that the Church does not require it more often than twice a year.  We need to be giving more and offer it in reparation for the Church’s soft sins.  The upcoming battle will require tremendous sacrifice and only those who have trained themselves to forego what is necessary in favor of the “one thing that is necessary” that will persevere.

There are many ways to fast and all are good.  The point is to start by making sacrifices at each meal and add from there.  You will find a method that fits with your state in life.  The method that St. Thomas recommends amounts to skipping one meal a day and that principle seems to work well although the combinations are endless.  One that works very well for the laity because it is the least disruptive to family life is from dinner to dinner.  You eat dinner on day 1 and then eat only two tiny meals during the day and then have a full meal at dinner the next evening.  The point is not to kill yourself but to offer something to Jesus.  When this intention is kept in mind, you will find that your desire to be generous with Jesus quells any hunger pains.   

There are other bodily mortifications and penances that are helpful, especially when we think about those practices that make us soft—cold showers, sitting upright in a chair with both feet on the floor, setting AC/heat at a level where you are slightly uncomfortable, rocks in shoes.  The point is to directly attack our need for comfort in a spirit of penance.

St. Paul was perhaps the greatest cultural reformer and a pillar of the Church.  One could argue that his success was attributed to the fact that he had a clear understanding of who he was fighting against and armed himself spiritually for the battle.  “Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against…the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Eph 6:12).  If we want to jumpstart the reform of the Church, then we should likewise enter into the spiritual battle.

 

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.

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.

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.  

The Imitation of Christ

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The story of St. Ignatius of Antioch is well known.  Martyred in the early second century, the disciple of John the Evangelist turned himself over to the Emperor Trajan while the latter was visiting his diocese of  Antioch.  Why he turned himself over, whether for an opportunity to preach the Faith to the Emperor or as a ransom for his sheep that were being attacked by gnostic wolves or even both, is not known.  What is known is that the Emperor had him sent to Rome to be a part of the “entertainment” of the Roman Circus.  Along a truly prolonged Way of the Cross from Antioch to Rome, the Bishop of Antioch wrote seven personal letters to the churches that he passed through including a moving letter to the Romans asking them not to hinder his martyrdom in any way.  His letters have been preserved in their entirety for us and offer us an important glimpse into the life of the early Church.  But even more valuable is the spiritual patrimony the sainted Bishop left in what each of these exhortations  have in common—a deeply moving Eucharistic spirituality.

Ignatius’ Faith

St. Ignatius offers us one of the earliest professions of faith in the Real Presence.  In his letter to the Smyrnaens he declares that “the Eucharist is the Flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins and which the Father in His loving-kindness raised from the dead” (7).  While statements such as these abound throughout the each of the letters, it becomes clear that this is no mere intellectual assent on the part of St. Ignatius.   Instead it is a real faith; a faith that sees Jesus in the “breaking of the bread” and knows Him through it.  For Ignatius, the Eucharist is simply the visible presence of the Son of God, no less real than His presence as Jesus of Nazareth was some 70 years prior.

How do we know this?  Because he repeatedly expresses his desire to be martyred in Eucharistic terms.  Summarizing his desire in his last letter to the Romans he says, “I write to the Churches, and impress on them all, that I shall willingly die for God, unless you hinder me. I beseech of you not to show an unseasonable good-will towards me. Allow me to become food for the wild beasts, through whose instrumentality it will be granted me to attain to God. I am the wheat of God, and let me be ground by the teeth of the wild beasts, that I may be found the pure bread of Christ” (4).  In short St. Ignatius desired to imitate Christ—not just His bodily crucifixion—but in the manner he knows Him, the Eucharist.  And in this regard, the Saint offers us a stirring example of how to imitate Christ.

The Imitation of Christ

At the heart of the Christian life is the imitation of Christ.  We are to “put on Christ” and to be more and more conformed to His likeness by imitating His virtues.  The problem however is that we did not witness His specific acts of virtue.  We know of them, but we do not necessarily know what they looked like, making imitation difficult.  Imitation without sight is very difficult, if not impossible.  Perfection is found in the details.  It is impossible except for one thing.  We do witness Christ’s virtues.  We witness them each and every time that we encounter Him in the Eucharist.  And this is what St. Ignatius found.  He did not see Christ in His human nature, but he did see the same Christ in His sacramental garb.  He didn’t just see Him, but He witnessed His actions.  He did not see the Eucharist as a poster of Jesus, but a living and acting Person.  And seeing Him this way, Ignatius desired to imitate Him.

St. Peter Julian Eymard, the great saint of the Eucharist, writing centuries later summarizes what Ignatius intuitively grasped. 

“This Eucharistic manifestation must be the starting point of all the actions of our life.  All our virtues must come from the Eucharist. For instance, you wish to practice humility: see how Jesus practices it in the Blessed Sacrament. Start with this knowledge, this Eucharistic light, and then go to the Crib if you wish, or to Calvary. Your going thither will be easier because it is natural for the mind to proceed from the known to the unknown. In the Blessed Sacrament you have our Lord’s humility right before your eyes. It will be much easier for you to conclude from His actual humility to that of His birth or of any other circumstance in His life…Let our sole spiritual concern be to contemplate the Eucharist and find in it the example of what we have to do in every circumstance of our Christian life.”


(The Real Presence, 35).

St. Peter Julian says we start with the known, Christ’s virtues in the Eucharist, and then proceed to the unknown, His virtuous acts throughout His earthly sojourn.  In a very real way, the Eucharist is given as a display of those virtues so that we may imitate them.  Not only that, but through the Eucharist, we commune with Christ and His same virtues are infused into us.  So it is not just that we imitate Christ under our own impulse, but the Eucharist empowers us to do so.  And this is why St. Ignatius saw himself not just as imitating Son of God made man, but Son of God made man made Eucharist.

All of Christ’s virtues are on display and available to us, but there are three that are most manifest and worthy of particular mention.  It is not an accident that these three are the same three upon which the spiritual life hinges: humility, meekness, and poverty.

Just as Our Lord made Himself subject to the laws of human nature in order to come to us, He now makes Himself subject to the laws of food in order to do the same.  He is the absolute model of humility in the Eucharist.  He suppresses His divinity even more than He did during the Incarnation; for who could believe that the God of the Universe would make Himself food!  He becomes lifeless and motionless.  He allows Himself to become a prisoner and makes Himself so tiny that He becomes “trapped” in even the smallest particle.  He does not shout out His presence and allows Himself to be completely forgotten, even by those closest to Him.  He can be carried away wherever someone else wills, even to places where He does not will to go.  See for yourself if Our Lord does not put flesh to the Litany of Humility in His Eucharistic abasement! 

It is His humility that yields the fruit of His meekness.  “The meekness of Jesus,” St. Peter Julian says, “scored its greatest triumph in His virtue of silence.”  He “suffers” in silence as He is ridiculed and mocked.  The “bruised reed He will not break” when He suffers sacrilege by those who receive Him unworthily or by those Prelates who allow or even encourage repeated sacrileges.  The “smoldering wick He will not extinguish” when the King of the Universe is met by indifference and laxity in approaching Him.  He waits patiently inside dark and empty churches for visits from those who love Him.

The Eucharistic Poverello  appears with absolutely nothing but Himself.  He suppresses all the powers of His glorified humanity and paralyzes His human powers.  He chose what was poorest and most simple, bread and wine, for His garb.  Then He “traps” His divinity inside their appearance.   His throne is tiny, so much so that many people don’t even acknowledge it.  He is not just poor because He has nothing, but because He shed it all to make us rich.  He gives us something of our “own” so that we have something to give to God.  That is true poverty.

The imitation of Christ is the summation of the spiritual life.  Let us learn to imitate Him by imitating Ignatius imitating the Eucharistic Jesus!

On the Heresy of Marriage

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In a previous post, the logical and theological necessity of the Development of Doctrine was discussed.  One of the points made was that corruption of doctrine, normally what we label as heresy, always leads to a dead end and ends up destroying the very doctrine it was trying to explain.  But there is a sense in which heresy also can be an impetus for the development of authentic doctrine by “forcing” the Church to elaborate more fully on the doctrine in question.  History is replete with examples, but we are faced with a prime example today in the attack within the Church on the Sacrament of Marriage.

We do not need to go into the details of the attack specifically other than to say the widescale acceptance of contraception, remarriage, and even gay marriage within the Church all signal an attack on the Sacrament itself.  Part of the reason why the response has been so slow is that there is still a lack of clarity within the theology of the Sacrament of Marriage.  St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body was a beginning, but it remains just that—a beginning.  His teaching is so dense that there remains much work to be done to clarify and expound on what he hoped to accomplish.  This essay is an attempt to move the discussion forward by clearing up some common misconceptions.

Natural Marriage vs Sacramental Marriage

The first distinction is between natural and Sacramental marriage.  Marriage by its very nature is something sacred because it is ordered towards the co-creative action of procreation.  Even in its natural state it acts as a sacrament (note the small s) pointing to God’s covenant with mankind.  But this natural state of marriage is different not just in degree but in kind from Sacramenta Marriage.  So often people see the Sacrament as something added on to natural marriage but in truth it is a different reality.  It is a different reality because it has a different end.  Natural marriage is for the propagation of the species, Sacramental marriage is for the propagation of the Church.  Natural marriage is for the mutual help of the spouses, Sacramental marriage is for the mutual sanctity of the spouses.

Because natural marriage and Sacramental Marriage (for ease we will call it Matrimony moving forward) are distinct realities we must resist the temptation to lump them together.  It would be akin to not seeing bread and wine as essentially different from the Eucharist.  They may look the same from the outside, but the interior reality makes all the difference in the world.  Matrimony is not just a Catholic way of getting married, but instead its interior life becomes a cause of grace in the souls of the spouses.  In other words, its sacramentality is a direct participation in the mystery of Redemption.   

The Fruits of the Sacrament

Failing to grasp this and thinking that something like divorce is possible is not just to disobey a commandment of Christ.  Instead it is a denial of the Sacrament and threatens the entire Sacramental structure.  Matrimony, like all Sacraments has specific fruits.  The first fruit is the unity of the spouses.  Rather than trying to “hold it together”, Matrimony is a cause of their unity.  They are bound together as Christ is bound to the Church and their union continually approaches this ideal.  And in so doing, it brings about the thing it signifies by uniting them closer to Christ as members of His Church. 

Secondly, the Sacrament also bears the fruit of indissolubility.  As St. John Paul II puts it in Familiaris Consortio, “the indissolubility of marriage finds its ultimate truth in the plan that God has manifested in His revelation: He wills and He communicates the indissolubility of marriage as a fruit, a sign and a requirement of the absolutely faithful love that God has for man and that the Lord Jesus has for the Church” (FC, 20).

The Church uses the term fruit very purposefully.  For fruit comes about when a tree is matured and it is always sweet once it is ripe.  The fruits of Matrimony are felt more deeply as the marriage matures.  Lacking this maturity, the fruit often tastes bitter.  In other words, the gifts of unity and indissolubility do not guarantee that things will be easy, even if they guarantee they will be possible.  Before the fruits are matured the couple will have to have their faith purified.  His commands—“you shall not divorce and remarry another”—are not made in a vacuum, but instead ought to be read as promises—“because of the power of the Cross you shall not divorce and remarry another.”  As an they grow in faith in God, their faithfulness to each other increases likewise.  The fruit day by day matures until it becomes sweet.

Even tolerating divorce and remarriage is not just a practical issue but has theological consequences as a denial of the power of the Sacrament.  It says that the Sacrament really doesn’t do anything and ultimately Matrimony is no different than natural marriage.  To deny this ultimately is to deny the power of the Cross to save.  And this is ultimately why we are facing a heretical crisis.  Marriage in all appearance is impossible.  Matrimony however is not because “nothing is impossible for God.”  It is, as JPII put it, “permanent reminder to the Church of what happened on the Cross” (FC, 13).  The Church is facing a great modern heresy about the Theology of Marriage and the Faithful must respond in both their living and understanding of Matrimony as a Sign of Contradiction.