Posted on 05/08/2003 12:18:35 PM PDT by ultima ratio
Why he’s writing on the Eucharist today
In Ecclesia de Eucharistia, released on Holy Thursday, Pope John Paul II says he seeks to ‘help to banish the dark clouds of unacceptable doctrine and practice’
By Russell Shaw
5/4/2003
Before the publication of Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Ecclesia de Eucharistia (on the Eucharist in its relationship to the Church), there was concern in Vatican circles whether it would be strong enough. As it turns out, it is a warm, faith-filled, sometimes moving document — and more than slightly tough.
In undertaking to "help to banish the dark clouds of unacceptable doctrine and practice" regarding the Eucharist, Pope John Paul has set himself a daunting task. The erosion of eucharistic faith and practice among Catholics in the United States and some other countries over the last four decades may be said to have reached crisis proportions by now.
It is reflected in the decline in Sunday Mass attendance. In the years around 1960, about 70 percent of American Catholics went to church on a given Sunday. The self-reported figure last year was 31 percent, but the actual figure may be lower — perhaps one in four — because some people tell pollsters they go to Mass but don’t.
Mass attendance in the United States nevertheless is considerably higher than in most countries in Western Europe. If the Church "draws her life from the Eucharist," as the encyclical says, this hardly signals a religious body in good health.
Not just symbolic
Another sign of trouble concerns belief in the Real Presence — the defined dogma that, in the words of the Council of Trent quoted by Pope John Paul, "the consecration of the bread and wine effects the change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord, and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of His blood."
A much-noted 1994 New York Times-CBS poll found most Catholics thought of the bread and wine as "symbolic reminders" of Christ rather than "changed into the body and blood of Christ." Other polls had similar findings. A 1997 poll among practicing Catholics in the Diocese of Rochester, N.Y., found only 35 percent believed in the Real Presence. Most thought Christ’s presence in the Eucharist was symbolic.
Reacting to such findings, the U.S. bishops in June 2001 reaffirmed the doctrine of the Real Presence. Now, Pope John Paul has done that again.
Ecclesia de Eucharistia, the 14th encyclical of his pontificate, was published on Holy Thursday in place of the letter to the priests of the world he has made it a custom to issue that day.
According to a Vatican source, the genesis of the document was the Pope’s wish to write an encyclical for the 100th anniversary of a 1902 eucharistic encyclical by Pope Leo XIII. The new encyclical also refers to Pope Pius XII’s 1947 Mediator Dei ("Mediator of God") and Paul VI’s 1965 Mysterium Fidei ("The Mystery of Faith").
Problem areas
Early on, the plan was for the encyclical to appear simultaneously with a "disciplinary note" on abuses in celebrating the Eucharist, prepared by the Vatican’s Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. Delays have pushed back the disciplinary note — now a joint project with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — to next October.
While the disciplinary note presumably will take an even stronger line against errors and abuses, the encyclical is notably strong in its own right. It praises the liturgical reform since the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), but comes down hard on unauthorized tinkering and says liturgy is "never anyone’s private property." A number of currently debated issues come in for examination.
• Ecumenical concerns. The encyclical contains a clear condemnation of ecumenical "concelebrations" of the kind reportedly planned by some Catholics and Lutherans during a congress in Berlin at the end of May. While again declaring "full sharing" with other Christians an indispensable goal of ecumenism, the encyclical rejects using intercommunion as leverage to hasten that day and says it is more likely to delay it.
"If this treasure [the Eucharist] is not to be squandered, we need to respect the demands which derive from its being the sacrament of communion in faith and in apostolic succession," it says.
• Intercommunion. It repeats the ban on Catholics’ receiving communion at communion services of non-Catholic denominations that lack validly ordained priests.
As for non-Catholics’ receiving Communion at a Catholic Mass, it says this is possible only in individual cases "to meet a grave spiritual need for the eternal salvation of an individual believer."
There are reports that British Prime Minister Tony Blair, an Anglican, may — or may not — have received Communion at a private papal Mass that he attended on Feb. 22 with his Catholic wife and children.
• Confession first. It reaffirms the tradition going back to St. Paul that a Catholic guilty of mortal sin should not receive Communion without first receiving the Sacrament of Penance.
"The two sacraments of the Eucharist and Penance are very closely connected," Pope John Paul says, quoting a prescription of canon law that "those who ‘obstinately persist in manifest grave sin’ are not to be admitted to Eucharistic communion."
Priests essential
Contrary to congregationalist theories circulating in some theological circles in recent decades, Ecclesia de Eucharistia insists that, although the congregation does join in the offering of the Eucharist, nevertheless "the presence of an ordained priest as its president" is essential for the sacrament to be valid.
Nor can the worshiping community provide an ordained minister for itself. "It is the bishop who, through the Sacrament of Holy Orders, makes a new presbyter [priest]," the encyclical says.
Pope John Paul commends Catholics who conduct Communion services in place of Sunday Mass as a "temporary" expedient in the absence of a priest. But there is no hint in the encyclical of ordaining women or married men as a solution.
Instead, the Pope says, a shortage of priests underlines the need to work harder for new priestly vocations, "without yielding to the temptation to seek solutions which lower the moral and formative standards of candidates for the priesthood."
Along with taking a strong line on abuses, the encyclical encourages eucharistic devotions and gives warm testimony to Pope John Paul’s own eucharistic faith. Recalling his daily celebration of the Eucharist since his first Mass on Nov. 2, 1946, in Kraków, Poland, he exclaims:
"Here is the Church’s treasure, the heart of the world, the pledge of the fulfillment for which each man and woman, even unconsciously, yearns. . . . Every commitment to holiness, every activity aimed at carrying out the Church’s mission, every work of pastoral planning, must draw the strength it needs from the eucharistic mystery and in turn be directed to that mystery as its culmination."
Traditionalists have complained about these anomalies for decades--but were considered scolds at best and pope-haters at worst. Others, like Archbishop Lefebvre, were hounded and persecuted for insisting these abuses were nothing short of scandalous and were destroying the Catholic faith. The Archbishop early on warned the Novus Ordo itself and the anti-Catholic agenda behind it was actively undermining the faith of millions while pushing the modernist agenda. For his trouble and his stubborn refusal to let go of Tradition, Rome sought to close down his seminary by starving it of bishops capable of ordaining traditional priests. It did so even at a time when the Econe was the sole surviving traditional seminary left in the world and while postconciliar seminaries steeped in dissent and homosexual vice were ignored by the Vatican and allowed to flourish. Yet Rome went after Lefebvre, though history shows it was the Archbishop who was right and the Pope who was utterly wrong. And he still is wrong, even in this encyclical when he falsely praises the liturgical "reforms" since Vatican II--though any truly objective observor will admit that those liturgical shifts were not reforms at all but revolutionary changes in defiance of Trent. The new Mass not only replaced the organically evolved ancient Mass with a protestantized fabrication, but it also undermined Catholic dogmas as well and produced an ecclesiastical catastrophe from which we have yet to recover. So even now the Pope gets it only half right by praising the new liturgy but condemning Eucharistic abuses--but half a loaf is better than none.
Question: The Episcopalian/Anglicans and Orthodox are non-Catholic but don't we recognize their priests as validly ordained?
Luther was only a priest, not a bishop, correct? So he would have been unable to create a valid lineage?
Orthodox, yes. Anglicans, no. There was considerable discussion in the 70s, which were totally ruined by the Anglicans starting to ordain women.
The Church finally decided that the Amgicans had destroyed the proper "form" necessary in their ordinations. Anglican priests who convert are ordained as Catholic priests, from our view this is their first and only ordination.
It is possible that some Anglicans are indeed validly ordained, but this can not be said with any certainty in general.
Luther was only a priest, not a bishop, correct? So he would have been unable to create a valid lineage?
Lutherans have never had a valid priesthood, they would even tell you themselves that they do not have "priests."
SD
Thanks:-)
Now, would this be considered invalid or illict but valid? Was Matthew Parker ordained by an excommunicated Bishop?
I was hoping you would get this implicitly, but yes, Luther was a priest. As were many of the first Lutherans.
They could not pass along this ordination validly. Nor did they want to. Any bishops who became Lutheran could have, but I am not aware of any Lutheran claim to have preserved apostolic succession.
As I said, Lutherans do not claim to have or need any special priests. So the idea of preserving a "valid priesthood" is anathema to them. They emphasise the common priesthood of all believers.
SD
I was hoping you would get this implicitly,
I'm working on the visions/prophecy thing but as of now I'm still fairly concrete;-)
A fundamental tenent of the Lutheran Church (all of them I assume) is that Holy Communion may be administered only by duly called and ordained clergy. It may be our Catholic brothers disagree with us on just who would fit this definition.
But then after Vatican I, some of the Anglicans got ordinations from the Old Catholic bishops, and those ordinations were valid.
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