Who is at the table?
Mitchell, Nathan D.
DISPUTED QUESTIONS EUCHARISTIC PRESENCE THE EDITORS • INTRODUCTION 10 NATHAN D. MITCHELL • WHO IS AT THE TABLE? 10 PETER STEINFELS • SIGNS & NUMBERS 11 P.J. FITZPATRICK • SIGNS & DISGUISES...
...The transitus of Christ himself is recalled and affirmed as the single transitus in which the believing assembly participates through the medium of the eucharistic celebration...
...Andre Dubus, "A Father's Story" Traditionally, Catholic identity has been rehearsed in rituals that reach deeper than dogma-rituals characterized by a palpable, public "otherness...
...Reason is not purely abstract and transcendent after all...
...The central issue of eucharistic theology is not "how does Christ become present to us...
...In Persona Ecclesiae...
...but "how do we get to the table, and what happens to us once we're there...
...Critical discontent focuses especially on two points: (1) the reformed rite's presumed failure to provide participants with a sense of mystery...
...His books include Cult and Controversy (Pueblo, 1982) and Eucharist as Sacrament of Initiation (Liturgical Training Publications, 1994...
...Even among...Catholics who said they attended Mass every week or almost every week, 51 percent described the rite as strictly symbolic...
...still, such results are disconcerting, if not downright alarming...
...The prayer of the people was thought to have no real role in relation to the Real Presence...
...We can experience Real Presence anew only by renewing the covenant between Word and World...
...They agree, for instance, that the human person is not simply someone who "has" a body, but someone who is a body...
...the smack of kisses, gasps, and sobs...
...Thus Aquinas wrote that through the humble material realities of daily life, through the simple staples of bread and wine, through the concrete particularities of human life, you arrive, through sacrament, at the mystery of God which is the goal of faith, of grace, and of the whole sacramental economy...
...lifted objects of leather, wood, and food...
...Did the results represent what the liturgical renewal had envisioned...
...The reality of sacrament forces us to recognize that matter itself must bear the weight of glory...
...for] God has assumed it as his [sic] own body...
...And the most basic of these is not "how does Christ get to the bread...
...its control and reproduction...
...that language is not only revelation, but responsibility and grace as well...
...In time, of course, the church substituted claims of its own for those of the polis (especially in matters pertaining to women...
...It was no longer a neutral indeterminate outcrop of the natural world, whose use and very right to exist was subject to predominantly civic considerations of status and utility" (The Body and Society, Columbia University Press, 1988...
...Eucharistic Real Presence cannot be adequately described or defended unless the right questions are asked...
...Such options, in my view, are misleading...
...the heaping abundance of wheat, ivory, and tears...
...In my view, more fruitful avenues for revisiting the doctrine of Real Presence are opened by three areas of recent research: (1) the theology of the body...
...Karl Rahner argued that the "first" or "primary" liturgy that a church assembly celebrates is what he called "the liturgy of the world...
...In their moral, political, and social attitudes, Catholics are becoming indistinguishable from the rest of the population...
...In a word, the body is the whole human person in relation to God, world, and others...
...That strategy will inevitably shift when a community' s ritual schemes "can no longer effectively interpret and dominate the social milieu...
...They went to Mass, but once there often devoted themselves to acts of individual piety...
...Symbols cannot lead us "per nota ad ignota" unless we first consent to an absence, an irreducible "otherness," a mystery we cannot control or evade...
...The council changed that, but not without raising new problems...
...And Edith Sitwell wrote in "The Bee-Keeper": This Earth is the honey of all Beings, and all Beings Are the honey of this Earth...
...It is by remembrance that we meet the sacrifice of the cross...
...that God is celebrating the liturgy of the world-in us-through the length and breadth of creation...
...It has become fashionable over the past few years to insist loudly that the presiding priest acts "in persona Christi...
...The conclusion is inescapable...
...Nathan D. Mitchell is associate director for research at the Center for Pastoral Liturgy, University of Notre Dame...
...A new starting point for the systematic theology of Eucharist is needed, Kilmartin contends, one that begins with the lex orandi and takes seriously the ritual and theological dynamics of the eucharistic prayer...
...Any adequate account of meaning and rationality," writes philosopher Mark Johnson, "must give a central place to embodied and imaginative structures of understanding by which we grasp our world...
...Hence Vatican II' s insistence on "full, active, and conscious participation" by the people in eucharistic worship...
...0 bright immortal Lover That is incarnate in the body's earthO bright immortal Lover Who is All...
...Liturgical "otherness" should not be mistaken for high-church ritualism, nor should Catholic identity be confused with a retro-ideology that seeks, in Adrian Cunningham's trenchant phrase, to "resacral-ize reaction...
...Until recently, the hard sciences seemed to treat the body as a liability, a subjective source of feeling and fantasy irrelevant to "objective" standards of research...
...Kilmartin summarizes the point this way: The transitus ["paschal passage"] of the assembled community to the Father is expressed liturgically through the Eucharistic Prayer...
...From the start, some Catholics steeped in the Tridentine Latin Mass found the new vernacular rite bewildering, and their complaints have echoed through the succeeding three decades...
...but "who is at the table, and how did we get there...
...Among medieval theologians, Christology triumphed: the "essential moment" of eucharistic consecration was identified, strictly and exclusively, with the liturgical recitation of Jesus' words (the "words of institution...
...all this is what the liturgy of the church points to...
...Under such conditions, Kavanagh commented, "the liturgy becomes perceived by many as less an obedient standing in the alarming presence of the living God in Christ than a tiresome dialectical effort at raising the consciousness of middle-class groups concerning ideologically approved ends and means" ("Liturgical Inculturation: Looking to the Future," Studia Liturgica, 20:1 [1990...
...It is to this liturgy, "smelling of death and sacrifice," that all the church's ritual actions return...
...The human body-its origins and destiny...
...The richness and complexity of Kilmartin's argument cannot easily be summarized, but it may be useful to draw attention to three points: • Presence...
...Some years ago Aidan Kavanagh warned against an encroaching embour-geoisement of the liturgy, the signs of which are visible everywhere-in the "ministerializing" of the middle-class laity, in the celebration of politically correct values (meeting, joining, speaking out, creating community), in the creation of churches that look like shopping malls...
...Human understanding is incarnate...
...Rather, we go to the event, are made present to it...
...Body...
...but "how do we become present to Christ...
...It is by reason of the ecclesiological nature of the Eucharist that the priest offers for the whole church," concludes Kilmartin, "not immediately because he offers in the person of Christ...
...faded photos that gather our lives like walls...
...Or did renewal end in a banalization of the sacred mysteries...
...We become one with Christ's body only by joining ourselves to the Spirit-filled body of believers through grace, faith, and the paschal sacraments of initiation...
...The Prayer of the Assembly...
...The movement," Kilmartin notes, "is not from the historical event of the cross to us...
...the sound of the words "night" and "good-by...
...the roar of water passing across bone...
...they also believe in the body's final transformability...
...If Jesus offered himself "once for all," is the language of eucharistic sacrifice meaningless...
...The significance of this prayer is precisely ecclesiological, for in it, the church comes to be, enacts and defines itself...
...Thus for Aquinas (and for the theological tradition he represented) every symbol is an invitation to self-transcendence...
...But at the same time, that mystery of Christ' s-body-become-a-people redefines matter and reconfigures our perception...
...Every sacrament launches a search, a process of discovery through which we reconnect with something absent, something missing, something unknown, something (in short) transcendent...
...This insistence may be valid, but it misses an equally important aspect of ministry, viz., that the priest acts "in persona ecclesiae" a point long recognized by our best theologians...
...Indeed, as Aquinas knew, the presence of the former is precisely for the sake of the latter...
...A New York Times/CBS News poll conducted in April 1994, found that "almost two-thirds of American Catholics believe that during Mass...the bread and wine can best be understood as 'symbolic reminders of Christ' ratherthan as actually being changed into Christ's body and blood...
...But the basic principle had been established: the body's integrity is strictly God-given and intrinsic...
...Thomas Aquinas understood this well, and so insisted that the ultimate intent (the res) of celebrating Eucharist is not to produce the sacred species for purposes of reservation or adoration, but to create that united body of Christ which is the church...
...There, God is met as One who suffers with us, as One who forgives a thief on the cross...
...Should the postconciliar liturgy be blamed for this decline in traditional belief about Real Presence...
...Catholic sacramental tradition operates on the principle that we can encounter God by encountering the human...
...they call us to the threshold of presence by first leading us through an abyss of absence...
...Nor is resurrection the exclusive province of Christology, for it also affirms, as James Keenan says, that "through their corporeality, believers are related, and thus can be caught up in Christ, who transforms that corporeality...
...Responses to the postconciliar liturgy and its impact on American Catholic identity seem increasingly polarized, perhaps because, as Richard Gaillardetz has recently argued, our national quest for transcendence has been privatized (angel-mania, "transcendence without community"), even as our quest for community has been vandalized by ideologies of pseudo-intimacy ("community without transcendence...
...Easter is about both "what happened to Jesus" and "what happened to those who believe in him...
...Thus, the larger meaning of the whole eucharistic prayer-its acts of praise, remembrance, and intercession...
...2, ad 2...
...There, God is met in the confused impurity of the human condition-in the weight of mineral...
...Caught in this cultural crossfire, many Catholics feel compelled to choose between rival options: a liturgy characterized by solemnity, awe, and splendor (sustained by a "high" theology of Real Presence) versus a liturgy characterized by human warmth, sentiment, and ritual impoverishment or squalor (sustained by a "low" theology of Eucharist as "commemorative meal") ("North American Culture and the Liturgical Life of the Church," Worship, 86:5 [1994...
...It is precisely this quality of otherness, of distinctive difference, that many observers feel the post-Vatican II liturgy of the Roman rite has forfeited...
...That, of course, is the great paradox of symbols...
...Thus, while the late medieval ritual corpus did effectively acknowledge and advance claims of a transcendent unity between church and society, between priestly mediation and access to God, those claims were largely shattered by the advent of the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution...
...We Christians are, therefore, the most sublime of materialists...
...The contemporary theological effort to recover the consecratory meaning of the whole eucharistic prayer has been significantly advanced by the work of the late Edward Kilmartin, S.J...
...Christian teaching about resurrection thus focuses not on an "immortal soul," but on a human body that forever enacts human existence, personality, and relatedness...
...But the very effort to clarify eucharistic conversion raised intractable problems of another sort...
...Thirty years later, Catholics are increasingly asking whether their understanding of the Eucharist has been diminished even as attention has been focused on it...
...2) the prayer of the assembly...
...it is rather the ritual, cultic means by which we enter newly into Christ's presence and work...
...Liturgical activity does not so much "render present" Christ and his saving work...
...it is not an "entitlement" granted by the state or erected by religious authority...
...Initiation (Liturgical Training Publications, 1994...
...In the eucharistic prayer, we become present to Christ in his paschal mystery, in his historical saving work...
...its sexual and po- litical significance-is a lightning rod for Catholics today...
...Indeed, as the New Testament shows, it was precisely the early church's empirical experience of Christ's continued presence and activity in the Spirit that made Easter faith possible and plausible...
...As Catherine Bell has said, "an ethos of timeless continuity based on the exact repetition of unchanging tradition is only one strategy of ritualization...
...Nowhere is the need for such restoration more evident than in the relation between the ministry of the ordained priest and the eucharistic celebration...
...That is why, with a keen sense that the following articles are far from the last word- that all but saints and mystics must speak haltingly and tentatively about this profound mystery-we have devoted this annual theology issue to "Eucharistic Presence...
...All this is what the liturgy of the world celebrates...
...By all accounts, the liturgical changes were implemented hastily, sometimes by fiat and with little preparation, sometimes in a mood of giddy innovation far from the intention of the reform-a return to the church's earliest traditions...
...Aquinas unambiguously recognized that the very nature of Eucharist (hence of ministry, hence of Real Presence) is ecclesiological...
...In short, Christians confess not only a conversion of heart, soul, and mind...
...and (3) the liturgy of the world...
...In support of their view, medieval glossators were fond of citing patristic authorities, especially Ambrose, who in his sermons to the newly baptized seemed similarly to insist on the consecratory power of Christ's words (the verba Verbi...
...muffled snow...
...Reclaiming the doctrine of Real Presence thus requires that ecclesiology be restored to a eucharistic synthesis that for centuries has been almost exclusively Christological...
...We recognize and believe that this matter will last forever, and be glorified forever...
...Theological principle (lex credendi) gradually overruled liturgical praxis (lex orandi...
...Where liturgy is concerned, this means a growing alienation from precisely that sense of collective identity and collective responsibility which the liturgy might be thought to rehearse" ("The Notre Dame Study of Catholic Parish Life," Worship, 60:4 [1986...
...Moreover, the argument that the unintelligible mumblings, gestures, and silences of the late medieval and Tridentine liturgies provided "ordinary" people with a stable center of "sacred meaning" in a cruel, preindustrial world sheds no real light on the ritual poverty of believers in the late twentieth century...
...As Karl Rahner wrote in a homily on the Ascension, 'The Ascension is a festival of the future of the world...for the Lord has risen for ever...
...As Mary Collins has noted, it means that "we must rethink the familiar grammar for the symbol Body of Christ as its relates to resurrection belief, to the Spirit-filled church, and to the sacrament of the Eucharist" ("Eucharist and Christology Revisited: The Body of Christ," Theology Digest, 39:4 [1992...
...Tensions between Christological and ecclesiological aspects of the Eucharist have dominated Western thinking about Real Presence for centuries...
...THE EDITORS WHO IS AT THE TABLE...
...But today that view has changed...
...The Eucharistic Prayer...
...The sacral, transcendent character of Christian worship does not, after all, rest upon an arbitrary ensemble of acts and artifacts (incense, orphreys, genuflections, plainchant...
...They reduced the whole problematic to an imaginary "central space" within the Prayer, with the result that the eucharistic words of Christ were poised in the air without access to the other elements of the structure ("The Catholic Tradition of Eucharistic Theology: Towards the Third Millennium," Theological Studies, 55 [1994...
...That concern was given new urgency by a New York Times poll last spring suggesting a dramatic departure among Catholics from the traditional doctrine of transubstantiation (see page 11...
...That is why Aquinas understood that the final meaning and ultimate intent of the Eucharist is precisely "the unity of that body which is the church...
...that those meanings are celebrated through rituals of civility...
...Reclaiming Real Presence Nathan D. Mitchell Ritual allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular to perform the spiritual as dancing allows the tongue-tied man a ceremony of love...
...As scholars like Peter Brown have demonstrated, theology's emphasis on the body's intrinsic worth liberated it from the claims of the polis (that is, from utilitarian control by the state, by cultural or sociopolitical forces): "Christian preachers endowed the body with intrinsic, inalienable qualities...
...Easter meant not only that "Jesus is risen," but that through the Spirit's power the body of Christ has become a people...
...For if bread and wine can trigger access to a risen life, then the whole world must have burst into flame...
...2) the apparent decline, even among devout churchgoers, of belief in the Real Presence...
...These are questions that a Buddhist might argue "do not lead to edification," but they have dominated Western theology for more than a millennium...
...The body of Christ that is at the table (that is, the church, the ecclesia) must be understood as an essential partner in the liturgical act, and not merely as a passive recipient of Christological benefits...
...It is the supreme meeting place between God and humanity...
...the light of honey...
...Of course, one poll does not establish the extent to which Catholics have ceased to believe in the "real" and "substantial" change that takes place in the Mass...
...For example, if Christ is risen, glorified, and impassible, can his natural body be "located" anywhere else than heaven...
...Keep in mind that though a single voice proclaims it, the eucharistic prayer is not an individual's possession but the assembly's act, as articulated by its presiding minister...
...In other words, cultural assimilation appears to be occurring at the expense of a distinctive Catholic identity...
...Today, both critics and sympathizers of the conciliar reforms voice concern about the fate of eucharistic piety and understanding...
...its prayer that the Spirit transform both gifts and people...
...The primary liturgy through which Christians experience the Real Presence of God in Christ is nothing more or less than "the liturgy of the world...
...the event is not withdrawn from its historical context and made to come to us...
...One of the great achievements of Vatican II was to restore the Eucharist to the center of the church's life...
...By that he meant the fact that the world itself is always and everywhere grasped at its roots by God's' s presence or grace...
...In the Eucharist, two bodies meet: The risen body of Jesus (present now "sacramentally" and "substantially") and the "corpus Christi quod est ecclesia...
...Similar fears were voiced by the late Mark Searle, whose research led him to conclude that Roman Catholic worship is in danger of becoming a casualty of cultural assimilation: American Catholics are in process of becoming more characteristically American than characteristically Catholic...
...Catholic sacra-mentalism can be recovered only if we recognize afresh that human history is a history of meaning...
...Thus, for example, Thomas Aquinas could write that the priest "performs a deed of the entire church in consecrating the Eucharist, because it is a sacrament that belongs to the whole church" (Commentary on the Sentences, Bk...
...In fact, for believers "sacraments" are humble landmarks, "small signs" of the fact "that this entire world belongs to God...
...In a word, the priest can "offer Mass" in the first instance because he is a member of the believing assembly...
...That is why the liturgist Aidan Kavanagh has described the celebrating church as "the body-of-Christ-become-a-people," and why Karl Rahner argued that the Eucharist creates church...
...As Steinfels notes, complex beliefs cannot be measured very accurately by standard polling procedures...
...Does history repeat itself in sacraments...
...Real Presence is an essential aspect of eucharistic theology in the Catholic tradition-but "resacralizing reaction" will not reclaim it...
...In a profound sense (as Caroline Bynum has shown in her studies of medieval Christian women), the body is the self...
...One must remember, too, those medieval rites which promoted such a "powerful sense of community" also championed an ecclesiastical polity that was aggressively authoritarian and (to quote Gaillardetz) "repressive of the rights of many, particularly women...
...garlic and sapphires in the mud...
...In short, the basic eucharistic question is not "who is on the table...
...In a pivotal article published posthumously last summer, Kilmartin argued that the theologians who created the Western scholastic synthesis...
...the red noise of bones...
...Kilmartin suggests that these are precisely the wrong questions...
...The sacramental principle thus affirms what Catholic poets have always known: as Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, "The world is charged with the grandeur of God...
...Still, contemporary scholars have reached consensus on a surprising number of points about the body's meaning in Christian tradition...
...All these views have a direct bearing on eucharistic theology...
...FITZPATRICK • SIGNS & DISGUISES 18 PAUL BAUMANN • WHERE SYMBOLS REALLY MATTER 21 JOHN GARVEY • ROBERT SOKOLOWSKI'S 'EUCHARISTIC PRESENCE' 26 Nothing is more important to the health and future of the church than an authentic understanding of the Eucharist...
...So in the Eucharist, the known material quantities of bread and wine draw us into the paschal mystery of Christ's body and blood-yes...
...The answer may well depend on how one responds to the first point: Are the reformed rites able to "bear the weight of mystery"-or not...
...had no grasp of the literary structure and theological dynamic of the Eucharistic Prayer and accompanying symbolic action...
...Since at least the ninth century, theologians have struggled to explain the exact nature of the change (or "conversion") that the species (the bread and the wine) undergo in order to accommodate this presence...
...Theology takes such speculation a crucial step further by asserting that history's meanings and goals will be achieved only in a transfigured world of glorified bodies...
...In principle, the Eucharist always occupied that center, while, in practice, a panoply of devotions often displaced it from the hearts and minds of ordinary believers...
...At the same time the Holy Spirit is identified as the mediation of the presence of Christ to the church and the church to Christ...
...q. 2, art...
...This second point was reported recently by Peter Steinfels in the conclusion of a four-part series on Catholics in America ("Future of Faith Worries Catholic Leaders," New York Times, June 1, 1994...
...The body of Christ offered to Christians in consecrated bread and wine is not something but someone...
...Still, the latter have played their part...
...its character as ritual deed of a faith-filled assembly-was reduced to insignificance...
...In the Eucharist, Christ is present not as an "object" to be admired but as a person (a "subject") to be encountered...
...We arrive at mystery, at Real Presence, at God, only by embracing the human with all its poignancy and terror...
...the thunder of flesh...
...They simultaneously give and take away...
...The root of all matter has been transfigured...
...It arises from the ability to perceive "heaven in ordinarie," God's abiding presence in a wounded world...
...hence it is the task of modern science to "put the body back into the mind" (The Body in the Mind, University of Chicago Press, 1987...
...But most Catholics accepted, even embraced, the new rite, with its theologically dramatic emphasis on the active role of the community...
...Eucharistic theology in the West has been preoccupied with the question of how Christ becomes present in the elements of bread and wine...
...The movement by which we meet a 'passed' event is called memory...
...The Liturgy of the World...
...IV, d. 24...
...And whatever changes have occurred may reflect practical failures in preaching, catechizing, and celebration of the liturgy as much as any confusion or inadequacies in our theological understanding...
...One cannot help feeling that the call to resacralize worship is sometimes a "code" for recreating a culture in which aging white males of European origin call all the shots, make all the rules, and determine all the parameters of legitimate discussion...
...And God causes this "liturgy of the world" to be celebrated throughout the length and breadth of the world's history...
...The body is not merely an "object" (a machine, a tool, a "husk" or prison) but a subject...
...Roman Catholic eucharistic tradition thus insists that the Christological cannot be separated from the ecclesiological...
...The implications of this point are vast...
...The body of Christ is not only "on" the table but "at" the table...
Vol. 122 • January 1995 • No. 2
