"Eucharistic Controversies" by James Hitchcock

[As with my recent post of Fr. Meconi's essay, "A Christian View of History," this short essay by Prof. Hitchcock was not only a large factor in drawing me into Fr. Keefe's work, but has also found itself virtually consigned to the "memory hole." So, in order that his essay is more readily available than by scouring the Wayback Machine, I post it here for posterity.]

EUCHARISTIC CONTROVERSIES

by James Hitchcock

One of the great ironies of Catholic history is the frequency with which the Eucharist, the very act of Christian unity, has been the focus of contention and faction.

In this as in so many other things the Catholic Church, more than any other religion except Eastern Orthodoxy, regards correct belief as crucial to authentic faith. Modern sentimental liberalism urges that everyone be admitted to the Eucharist, almost indiscriminately, since participating in the Eucharistic act will itself overcome differences and forge unity.

But, while the Church does not of course require everyone to be a dogmatic theologian, it has always insisted that, to the degree each person is able, he must understand Catholic practice in orthodox ways. Thus an indiscriminately "inclusive" Eucharistic community would be a kind of lie.

One of the fiercest Eucharistic controversies came during the "Dark Ages," when the level of speculation in the West was generally low but when for the first time the Church had to face directly the claim that, when Jesus said "This is my Body," he was not speaking literally. Those tenth-century disputes ended by firmly enthroning Eucharistic realism in the Church, so that at every point the Church has taken great pains to defend that realism, as well as ancillary doctrines such as the sacramental power of the priesthood transcending the personal worthiness of the priest himself.

The Reformation of course divided Christianity a dozen ways on this matter, of which the Protestant-Catholic split was only one instance. Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli aborted a possible theological alliance by failing to agree on the meaning of "This is my body," and there developed a spectrum of Protestant beliefs ranging all the way to the Quaker refusal to celebrate the Eucharist at all, as a merely "carnal" understanding of God.

One of the saddest features of post-Vatican II Catholicism is the way in which the Eucharist, once the great transcendent act in which the most socially diverse Catholics could submerge their identities, has now itself become a focus of contention and division. There is now the "Tridentine Mass," the "Novus Ordo Latin Mass," the ordinary vernacular Mass, the "folk Mass," and those celebrations with numerous varieties of improvisation by celebrants and worshippers. In this as in other matters, there is no longer one faith, and what various groups understand the Eucharist to be is fundamentally in conflict one with another. Beyond all statistics of numerical decline, beyond all disputes over morality or the role of women, this Eucharistic division is the single most important indicator of the unhealthy state of post-conciliar Catholicism.

Traditional Eucharistic piety, and much of traditional theology as well, has been criticized as narrow, static, and legalistic, all of which was true in some respects. At its worst the old Eucharistic understanding was preoccupied with obedient conformity and rubrical correctness, able to find Christ solely in the act of priestly consecration and its aftermath. It is this narrowness which reformers had been trying to remedy ever since the beginning of the liturgical movement in the nineteenth century.

But, as with so many other post-conciliar developments, "reform" has proceeded not by broadening and deepening authentic understanding but by truncating it through a shallow and restricted rationalism.

Polls show that two thirds of Catholics do not believe that Jesus is bodily present in the Eucharist, a figure which probably represents not so much conscious dissent as mere ignorance. What has replaced orthodox understanding is a rational reductionism into which all but confirmed atheists might enter - Jesus is present in the Eucharistic community through the individuals who comprise it, whose unity is itself his presence. The bread and wine symbolize this unity.

An authentic Catholic understanding, which has always been available to those who sought it, does understand that Jesus is indeed present in the Eucharist in multiple ways, among which is his presence within all baptized believers, a presence which is especially powerful when those believers gather for Eucharistic worship. He is also present in the words of Scripture, which are not to be read merely as lessons to be learned but as living words able to penetrate the soul of the hearer and transform it. He is, above all, uniquely and entirely present in an immensely heightened and intense way in the Eucharistic elements themselves.

The relationship of these various modes of presence to one another is itself part of the inexhaustible mystery of the Eucharist.

The Eucharist is indeed, as reformers insist, an action rather than a static reality. It is the action of God within the worshipping [sic] community, making Christ wholly present in real and profound ways. Thus the kind of Eucharistic piety which saw Jesus as the "prisoner of the tabernacle," or which thought of him as absent from the assembly prior to the consecration at each Mass, was indeed misguided.

The classical liturgical movement, as it existed until the time of the Council, as well as the work of various modern theologians, sought to retrieve the widest and deepest possible understanding of the Eucharist, an understanding far more demanding in terms of informed faith than the old piety required. Instead, however, liberal Catholicism has mainly issued forth in such things as the theory of "transignification," which are shallow, rationalistic, and merely subjective.

But the post-conciliar period has also brought forth a neglected classic of Eucharistic theology — Father Donald J. Keefe's Covenantal Theology: the Eucharistic Ordering of History — which is as rich and profound a work on the subject as the twentieth century has produced. Only a rash individual would claim to understand all of it, but it provides the basis for a genuine reconstruction of Eucharistic understanding.

James Hitchcock is professor of history at Saint Louis University.