Questions for the pope
Ranly, Ernest W.
WHO SHOULD CELEBRATE THE EUCHARIST? Questions for the pope ERNEST W. RANLY SACRAMENTAL EUCHARISTIC SPIRITUALITY is a major theme of three Holy Week letters of Pope John Paul II. (In 1979 he...
...To answer the question I quickly thought of the forty places (villages, mining camps, haciendas) in my "parish," scattered over seventy-five square miles of rugged mountainous terrain, with a total population of well over 30,000.1 am the only priest...
...But, oh, how different all this looks from within the realities of the church in Latin America...
...they want the Mass...
...How long can people go hungry...
...It is well known that the 1979 Holy Week letter to priests talked so warmly about the fraternal character of the priesthood and gave a detailed defense of the tradition of celibacy for FATHER ERNEST w. RANLY does full-time pastoral work in the Central Andes of Peru...
...The church "makes the Eucharist" and "the Eucharist builds up" the church...
...Therefore, the Holy Father is justly concerned to maintain the proper spirit of holiness and respect for all eucharistic services...
...As I see it, Christianity in Latin America (along with an underlying folk religion which will always persist) can go several ways...
...The religious prayer-leader of a community must be publicly recognized...
...Some were still prepared for First Communion...
...Power and authority are bestowed upon the person only in an official rite...
...Of course, the responsibilities of us—men and women— who are "ordained" into the pastoral-magisterium of the church are great...
...With all due respect to what passes as traditional teaching about the priesthood and the Eucharist, I wonder if the obvious contradiction between the Eucharist as the center of Christian life and the tragic lack of priests for immense parts of the Catholic world can remain just that: an impossible contradiction...
...The Holy Father describes at length the pastoral office of the priest...
...Surely, the Mass, too, is for some an empty, quasi-magical show...
...The role of priest is best understood as twofold: he is the builder of community and the prayer-leader of community...
...For many, the only sacrament was Baptism...
...The three letters are intentionally connected...
...Celibacy makes sense—in the terms of the pope's letters— for contemplatives, for religious and for missionaries...
...So much of our seminary/religious training was in the spirit of these papal letters...
...and then, at the moment that corresponds to the transubstantiation a deep silence, comes down upon them, a silence sometimes broken by a sob...
...Such places are not lacking in the world...
...So-called Extreme Unction was for the very few...
...A good part of Latin America fits this description quite accurately...
...In 1979 he addressed one letter to bishops and one to priests...
...It is a mode of Christian spirituality which has many5 positive values, especially for people of simple culture...
...Eucharistic worship constitutes the soul of all Christian life...
...But the cause for the lack of priests is not from external persecution, but because of historical, social, and ultimately ecclesiastical reasons...
...But through it all, there has remained a tremendous need and thirst for the Mass...
...Some strange aberrancies can occur in isolated Christian communities...
...The quality of prayer and the sincerity of total commitment by such Christians is little less than heroic...
...I am that contact person with my bishop, with the pope, and with the universal Catholic community making sure that we really are all one in faith and practice...
...Marriages were common, but far from universal...
...But again, for many reasons, this is not a sacramental eucharistic spirituality...
...And we in Latin America have, indeed, been reflecting on the situation...
...in 1980 a longer letter was addressed again to bishops...
...Only ordained male celibates may "efficaciously utter'' the words of transubstantiation over the elements of the Eucharist...
...AS CIRCUIT MISSIONARY, in the spirit of Saint Paul, I want to see myself primarily in the role of pastor-teacher...
...All this is said in reference to that famous formula of Vatican II that the Eucharist is the "source and summit" of the Christian community...
...The Eucharist and the church stand in mutual cocreative relations to each other...
...But if Christianity in Latin America is to continue to be a sacramental eucharistic spirituality (as the recent letters of the Holy Father seem to say is the only authentic Catholic spirituality) then some very basic changes must be made in the pastoral structures and practices of the church...
...It is here that we need—at times sorely lack—a sense of fraternity, coordination, consultation, and, above all, unity in doctrine and faith...
...So deeply do they feel the absence of a priest among them...
...priests of the Latin rite...
...The starting point for us is the local faithcommunity hungering for the Eucharist...
...Are we to continue to believe that "eucharistic worship constitutes the soul of all Christian life...
...The distinction between the common priesthood of the faithful and the sacramental priesthood of Orders has its place...
...The pope's letters refer to the threefold office of Christ as priest-prophet-king, or better, priest-teacher-ruler...
...Protestants, especially the more fundamentalist types, have come into the interior of Peru like a crusade...
...I suspected him (unfairly, perhaps) of that old prejudice that would lead him to say, yes, Latin Americans are Catholics, but they are not good Catholics, because, of course, they do not attend Sunday Mass...
...Therefore, for my own sacramental eucharistic spirituality I find the pope's letters to be very valuable...
...It can adopt a pentecostal spirituality, based upon a fundamental understanding of Scripture, with a personal relationship with Jesus...
...We work in pastoral teams with North American women religious and Peruvian lay people...
...ALL THE THEOLOGICAL training long associated with the Latin rite priesthood more properly belongs to the pastoral-teaching office than to the Eucharist itself...
...Sociologically, factually, there is no other alternative...
...We older Latin rite priests need the Eucharist and it is good that the pope, in his fatherly way, has reminded us of that...
...Think of the places where people anxiously await a priest, and where for many years, feeling the lack of such a priest, they do not cease to hope for his presence...
...For the present discussion, we simply set this aside...
...Now, as a matter of fact, time permits little more than a superficial sacramental ministry...
...The role of ruler can be described as legal administrator for the church...
...But when we suggested that now these lay groups should have their own religious services on Sunday in place of a Mass they looked dumbfounded...
...In the scheduled visits to our forty communities the principal task should be that of instruction, correction, proper formation in the faith—in a word, evangelization...
...But within a village community, where a married person is known and respected for virtue and prudence and who now is accepted as the natural religious leader, surely that person should be designated officially as the one to preside at the community's Eucharist...
...Eucharistic worship is the center and goal of all sacramental life...
...In the three letters there is maintained repeatedly the essential difference between the ministerial or hierarchical priesthood and the common priesthood of the faithful...
...Two-hundred-fifty to three-hundred people attend this Mass...
...But we cannot expect simple people to articulate just what the Eucharist means for them...
...Some good competent, respected lay leaders are emerging...
...The sacraments give the lives of Christians a sacramental style...
...When I last visited my home parish in rural Ohio, the pastor asked me what percentage of my "parishioners" attended Sunday Mass...
...IT WOULD seem that a new way of relating priesthood and Eucharist is needed...
...Confirmation was rare...
...This is the priest as teacher, the church—in that catchall, worrisome word—as magisterium...
...Where the movement of basic Christian communities is strong another distinct type of Christian spirituality is currently being born in Latin America...
...Others have Masses every two weeks or once every month...
...Living Christian communities, with leaders of tried and tested virtue, are deprived of the Eucharist...
...We have encouraged small groups to come together, to read the Scriptures, pray, sing, reflect together...
...4 July 1980: 401...
...It concludes: "Let us do all we can to ensure that the Eucharist may become an ever greater source of life and light for the consciences of all our brothers and sisters of all the communities in the universal unity of Christ's church on earth...
...Can the spirituality of Christian praxis among the basic communities survive without a more direct contact with the Eucharist...
...But it...
...And in Rome the Holy Father writes warm personal letters encouraging a return to sacramental eucharistic spirituality...
...The spiritual drawing together of the people of God in the Eucharist "expresses the church and brings her into being...
...Reference here is to the actual local people-community...
...It is ironical that the church is more willing to allow lay persons to be catechists, teachers and reflectors upon the Scriptures than to administer the Eucharist...
...One village has its weekly Mass on Monday afternoon...
...But neither need it be that I alone am the official hierarchical pastor-teacher...
...The contradictions between the spirit of the pope's letters and the realities in Latin America are so glaring that one wonders at times if we all live in the same world...
...These letters are addressed to bishops and priests in a most special way, exhorting them to retain that eucharistic spirituality which is accepted as that which gives them identity as priests...
...That which is handed down—the rite of faithfully remembering what Jesus did—is easily repeated by the simple people of faith...
...But our people are Catholic...
...SEVEN YEARS AGO, seeing the almost total lack of local priests here in the Central Andes of Peru, we deliberately proposed the strategy of forming a lay, Peruvian church...
...it is, indeed, a matter of rubrics, but simple faith and proper rites go together very easily...
...And through it all, there has always persisted a folk religion of the popular cultures, with myriads of saints, statues, shrines, processions and local customs...
...They teach a very personal spirituality: a personal conversion to Jesus as their Savior, a simplistic-personal reading/prayer of the Scriptures, and group services of enthusiastic singing with fervent preaching...
...But the more simple cultures in Latin America and the movements towards basic Christian communities give us living examples of people living, working, sharing together as persons in community...
...As few as these priests are, because they are publicly bound to celibacy, they can be the only ministers of the Eucharist...
...He re-emphasizes some basic teachings touching upon the essential sacrificial character of the Eucharist...
...Will not faith eventually grow weak and die for lack of spiritual nourishment...
...it is a case of feeding the spiritual hunger of the world...
...A priest, then, is chosen from among his people, ordained for the things which pertain to God, and—in a Christian settingoffers the sacrifice of Christ within their midst for the forgiveness of sins...
...And always he wants the Eucharist to continue to be the special sign of unity of the church...
...They only know—in the words of Monika Hell wig—that great hunger of the soul for Christ their spiritual bread...
...The 1980 letter calls for a respectful return to a number of traditional eucharistic devotions...
...It is not a case of convincing ordained priests that their ministry is important...
...I 4 July 1980: 399 answered: "Less than one percent of our people attend Sunday Mass...
...In the 1979 letter to priests the Holy Father related this touching tale...
...The letters repeatedly recall that the Eucharist is the symbol of the church's unity and it must be allowed to effect that same unity...
...We have one scheduled Sunday Mass at the biggest center of population...
...In a Catholic setting, then, some "ruler'' such as the bishop, after a proper scrutiny to see that it is indeed Christ who is choosing this priest from within the community, lays hands on the person and anoints the person's hands—all those very holy, symbolic, traditional rites which the Holy Father so ardently wants to maintain...
...I think the Holy Father is correct...
...Now at last the builder-and-prayer-leader of the local community can preside at the Eucharist, the "source and summit" of the Christian Community...
...Did he want to hear more...
...But they would be no greater nor more difficult if we were ministering, caring, nurturing genuine eucharistic communities, instead of ministering to communities who want to be Christian but who lack that' 'eucharistic worship (which) constitutes the soul of all Christian life.'' But for the moment, we live and work in an ecclesiastical Catch-22...
...By common knowledge (I never saw a scientific study on the topic) 80 percent of Latin American diocesan clergy live in concubinage...
...Well, yes, indeed, such places are not lacking in the world...
...Let us try some imaginative variations on some very traditional themes...
...The Eucharist has always been at the center of the life of Christ's disciples...
...This is a spirituality of social/ political praxis, based upon prayerful reflection on the Sacred Scriptures...
...As a missionary, I really am not a living part of any one of our forty communities...
...At times we can actually witness that sob of the people, pleading for a priest to offer Mass...
...They help me recall so much of my Catholic past: Holy Hours, Corpus Christi processions, Forty Hours Devotions, and many, many Masses...
...other communities have Mass only once or twice a year for special feast days...
...is not a sacramental spirituality and certainly not a eucharistic spirituality, since many of the Protestant missionaries roundly condemn the Mass with arguments as old as the early Reformation...
...so ardently do they desire to hear the words that only the lips of a priest can efficaciously utter...
...So if one of you (priests) doubts the meaning of his priesthood, if he thinks it is "socially" fruitless or useless, reflect on this...
...Their spiritual and pastoral intent must be sincerely appreciated before an attempt is made to understand and apply any forthcoming decrees...
...He was visiting professor in mission theology at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago last winter...
...It belongs to the magisterium to preserve unity and orthodoxy in the very handing down of the tradition...
...My experience in Latin America gives me fresh perspectives on the pastoral-teaching office of the church...
...The Eucharist is an act of faith, of reverence, or proper remembering...
...As a celibate, I give witness that I belong to the Kingdom of Heaven which is somehow transcendent to human families and local communities...
...Statements such as these may seem like truisms to many Catholics...
...One should study carefully what passed until very recently as popular Catholicism in Latin America...
...Members of our pastoral team, especially the well-trained religious women, could be (should be) publicly and officially mandated as forming an integral part of the church's hierarchical pastoral-teaching office...
...So much do they desire eucharistic communion...
...And sometimes it happens that they meet in an abandoned shrine, and place on the altar a stole which they still keep, and recite all the prayers of the eucharistic liturgy...
...Such religious leaders slowly, naturally, but inevitably emerge...
...I am a priest of the Latin rite: ordained, male, celibate...
...Only the sacramental priest called by Christ (and not by the community) from among the people, by the power of ordination, can serve as "priest" at the Sacrifice of the Eucharist...
...Or Christianity may continue to emphasize the praxis-orientation of the basic communities with a historical/political reflection based on Scripture...
...Some Protestants have, as we have seen, a valuable tradition of a Christian spirituality which includes neither the sacraments as such nor the Eucharist...
...Yet thrpughout the letters, the application is made for the faith and spirituality of all Christians...
...In this context, celibacy does make sense...
...The formation of basic Christian communities has moved very slowly...
...While the papal letters emphasize priestly collegiality and fraternity as centering on the Eucharist, I see much more the factual unity and collegiality of the church in its teaching role...
...The Commonweal: 400 industrialized, urbanized world has forgotten what the sociologists define as genuine person-to-person community...
...Their immediate efforts are seemingly quite successful...
...I suspect that if the text of these three papal letters were given to basic communities in Chile, Brazil, or elsewhere-, they simply would not understand the real issues...
...If the priest is to be builder and prayer-leader of such a community, making it thoroughly a Christian community, than he (she) must be originally a member of that community...
...By special privilege, the major houses of my own religious institute have Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament every day...
...To have a Scripture-song service without a priest is to do what the Protestants do...
...As a Catholic, I was brought up on a eucharistic spirituality and I confess to needing it to this day, even while dabbling in TM, yoga, some charismatic prayer meetings, and more Scripturally-oriented meditative styles of prayer...
...For many, what should have been sacramental spirituality had degenerated into a seemingly empty, quasi-magical sacramentalism...
Vol. 107 • July 1980 • No. 13
