THE LAST WORD
Byrne, Katharine
THE EUCHARIST AS PUZZLE fh« Eucharist In the West History and Theology Edward f. Kilmartin, $./. 1'urHc BojL. Thi- Z..' $41."5 42.'K' Jareslav Pelikan y favorite illustration of...
...Our conquest of the Balkans proceeds apace...
...As the readers of Christian Liturgy are well aware, Kilmartin was a better theologian than he was a stylist, and in places this book is rather heavy going...
...I presume that Edward Gaffney [Correspondence, March 26] would be equally sensitive about the free-speech rights of these scary demonstrators and website operators as he was about those of the American Coalition of Life Activists, but I see such a defense in either case as unconscionable...
...Nor do you explain why a Greater Albania for Albanians is "unacceptable and untenable...
...a threat, implicit or explicit, is not an idea in this sense...
...These may well be no more productive of the desired result and eventually as tragic as the loss of innocent life in Iraq...
...225), attributed to it four effects: remission of sins, deliverance from death, regeneration, and the bestowal of the Holy Spirit...
...Even after the Ukranian Greek church emerged from the catacombs in this decade, Rome did not challenge the Polish hierarchy when it sought to restrict our right to a married clergy there...
...But it is worth the effort...
...In Ukraine itself, Rome has limited the territorial jurisdiction of our archbishop-major to Western Ukraine, allowed Roman dioceses to be established in the east, and limited our church's presence there to an exarchate...
...As an editor and translator of Tertullian, Ernest Evans, has observed, "by the end of the second century, if not fifty years earlier, the doctrine of baptism (even without the aid of controversy to give it precision) was so fully developed that subsequent ages down to our own have found nothing significant to add to it...
...t.f...
...I apologize for all the criticism...
...160-c...
...Demonstrations, limited—usually—to hurling insults at parishoners attending Mass, have been common...
...CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 4) "precarious...
...Eastern theology, in its contacts and controversies with the West, was obliged to address the Western questions, and eventually even coined the Greek word metousiosis as a technical term literally translating "transubstantiation," a term that eventually found its way into more than one of the seventeenthcentury Eastern Orthodox Confessions...
...Jaroslav Pelikan is Sterling Professor Emeritus of History at Yale...
...A thoughtful examination of the life of the various Orthodox communities in this country suggests that it goes too far to claim that they have "survived the past millennium unscathed by the horrible battles and viruses afflicting the West...
...If the Supreme Court decisions cited by Gaffney justify such tactics as the ACLA has employed, then I would contend that the Court has erred (it does, you know, as its own reversals demonstrate...
...paul c. grisanti Bronx, N.Y...
...Among his many books are Mary through the Centuries (1996) and his five-volume The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine...
...This is not quite a "Greater Albania," since before this crisis Macedonia showed tremendous respect for its Albanian minority, who should stay in the Macedonian nation (though these days have not been Macedonia's finest hour...
...Therefore Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, and John Wesley were all agreed on it...
...The tensions that surfaced during the recent visit of the Ecumenical Patriarch, divisions among the various communities rooted in their ethnic heritages and the politics of Eastern Europe, growing disparities in liturgical practice from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and parish to parish, all these suggest that the Holy Spirit still has much work to do within the Orthodox communion in this country...
...As in Central America, no matter the hundreds of thousands of dead...
...john spradley Pagosa Springs, Colo...
...Again not the voice of the gospel or even of just-war principles but of empire speaks, using the convenience of Milosevic's ubiquitous evil to gloss over our considerable villainy...
...william h. slavick Portland, Maine Rites and wrongs As a Greek Catholic layman, I find James Morgan's letter [Correspondence, March 26] an altogether underCommonweal May 7,1999 standable Orthodox response to Jerry Ryan's "Back to the Future" [January 15...
...Yes, the Serbs have done the killing, but the NATO leaders are as guilty as Chamberlain of choosing a means to their end that put at risk the entire Albanian population of Kosovo because, collectively, NATO would not shed one drop of Western European or American blood...
...It is one of the supreme ironies of Christian history that the Sacrament of unity has become a principal source of division...
...It seems not to be, thanks to the courage of leaders like Costas Simitis in Greece, but more to continent-wide revulsion, shared far beyond Europe, at the treatment of Kosovars...
...But there's one more conclusion this observer of Mitteleuropa wants to share, and I didn't always feel this way...
...The ideal exercise of free speech lies in the exposition of rational arguments...
...Milosevic's "willful arrogance" in 1989 may have initiated the present horror, but you do not explain to what you refer...
...The primary locus of Orthodox eucharistic teaching was and is the Divine Liturgy, in which, by contrast with the Latin West, it is the invocation of the Holy Spirit in the Epiclesis, not the words of Institution by themselves, that is seen as bringing about the eucharistic miracle: "O Lord, who didst send down Thy Most Holy Spirit upon Thine Apostles at the third hour: Take Him not from us, O Good One, but renew Him in us who pray to Thee, and make this Bread the precious Body of Thy Christ, and that which is in this Cup, the precious Blood of Thy Christ, making the change by Thy Holy Spirit...
...For by applying to the Thomistic and Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist the fifth-century principle of Saint Prosper of Aquitaine that the rule of prayer (lex orandi) establishes the rule of faith (lex credendi), this book succeeds above all in restoring the doctrine of the Trinity to its central and normative position also for sacramental teaching...
...and the arduous but also extremely delicate task of putting it into publishable condition was carried out by his Jesuit confrere, Robert J. Daly—always a delicate task, as I too have had reason to know, because the editor is torn between the conflicting duties of making the manuscript presentable and of not doing violence to the author's intentions...
...Commonweal 3O May 7,1999...
...Determination to impose the Rambouillet terms designed to stop both Serb repression and KLA violence in Kosovo, without being prepared to send in ground troops if Milosevic refused to yield Serb control and stepped up his repression, was criminal...
...By contrast, the first full-scale discussion of the doctrine of the Eucharist in the Catholic West did not come until the ninth century, after it had been celebrated millions of times for more than eight hundred years—longer than the time that separates us from Thomas Aquinas—when two Benedictine monks at Corbie, Radbertus and Ratramnus (whose names are similar enough to generate endless confusion), exchanged treatises on the question of whether the Body of Christ that was on the altar was identical with the Body of Christ that was born of the Virgin Mary...
...On the whole, the editor has succeeded in that task, although at times he does seem to have gone rather far in the direction of reconstructing what his colleague might have written rather than merely refurbishing what he actually has written...
...At Father Kilmartin's death the book was left unfinished (a sign of the times: not in manuscript, but on his laptop...
...The website displays of the ACLA have exceeded, in my judgment, the limitation implicit in the principle of free speech...
...Indeed, I am beginning to perceive in some protest demonstrations the emergence of a latent tendency to degrade the human dignity of those protested against...
...For sake of discussion, imagine the following hypothetical situation: An extremely radical "religious" group has decided that what goes on in Catholic churches is blasphemy and must, in the name of God, be stopped...
...The CIA predicted war as a consequence...
...And it is still going on...
...Before the first shot was fired, figuratively, Serbia, in resisting the march of empire, had become the Balkans' bogeyman...
...That Eastern emphasis was repeatedly and vigorously disputed by the West, but in the revision of the liturgy Commonweal 16~ May 7,1999 after the Vatican II there has been significant movement in the direction of a "double Epiclesis," praying that the Holy Spirit may come upon the congregation and upon the elements of the Sacrament...
...5 42.'K' Jareslav Pelikan y favorite illustration of the different ways and different rates of the development of various Christian doctrines has always been the contrast between the Western doctrine of baptism and the Western doctrine of the Eucharist, which, at a first superficial glance, one would expect to have developed together as part of the general doctrine of the sacraments...
...The right-wing nationalist governments of Slovenia and Croatia, declaring independence, opened their economies to U.S...
...Enumerating the gifts conferred by baptism, the "father of Latin theology," the North African Tertullian (c...
...Seven priests have been assassinated and an additional fourteen such murders have been attempted...
...All of that is the historical—and the ecumenical—context (and content) of this quite remarkable book by the late Jesuit theologian, Edward J. Kilmartin (who died on June 16,1994), previously known chiefly for his Christian Liturgy: Theology and Practice, Part I, Systematic Theology of Liturgy, which was published in 1988...
...Cash rewards have been offered for the prevention of blasphemies but two hundred churches have been bombmed or torched...
...STOCK Arlington, Va...
...A major cause, however, was the 1991 U.S...
...It is time for Rome to implement the eccelsiology so beautifully articulated in the pope's encyclicals...
...Empire speaks After Commonweal's readiness to sacrifice a generation of Iraqi children to a still-failing embargo that church leaders have strongly condemned, one expected approval of the air attacks on Serbia and Kosovo [editorial, April 9...
...What if...
...Subsequently our meddling in Bosnia in support of Muslim domination triggered violence there...
...After all, even the Council of Trent spoke of transubstantiation not so much as a dogma in itself as rather a "convenient and appropriate" term for the dogma...
...However much an Orthodox Christian might be attracted to the ideal of the papacy, and however much he or she might admire the good intentions reflected in John Paul II's Ut unum sint, there is little in Rome's actual conduct that suggests papal power in a united church could be exercised in accordance with the model of Gregory I. The sad story of my own Ukrainian Greek Catholic Particular Church offers little encouragement...
...Not only for professional historians of doctrines and ideas, nor even for professional theologians alone, but for anyone willing to invest in a careful and solid historical-systematic analysis, The Eucharist in the West provides the resources for any serious Christian, regardless of denomination, to ponder the central act of Christian worship and devotion...
...Foreign Operations Appropriation Law which cut off all aid, trade, credits, Commonweal 18 May 7,1999 and loans to an economically unstable Yugoslavia until elections were held in each of its six republics, on which occasion we would (and did) provide funding for "democratic forces...
...Shunned by the Roman rite hierarchy and clergy when they arrived in America, and stripped by Rome of their historical right to a married clergy, many Greek Catholics in this country were driven from communion with Rome...
...Two of the most important and influential of all the Western so-called "ecumenical councils," the Fourth Lateran Council under Pope Innocent III in 1215 and the Council of Trent at its thirteenth session in 1551, attempted to achieve closure by giving "transubstantiation" an official standing in their decrees, but neither of them managed to still the controversy, even within Roman Catholicism, not to say within Protestantism...
...investment...
...We are well on the way to effecting the ruin of the one large Yugoslav republic that resists our economic control...
...your editorial comes to a conclusion about this military action that I agree with wholeheartedly...
...Recognizing the improved standard of living the Yugoslav federation had brought, Serbs overwhelmingly favored maintaining the federation and opposed further privatization or other capitalist inroads in their economy...
...And we know what happens to the Castros, Sandinistas, FMLN, Zapatistas, and anybody else who dares to put their national economic interests before ours...
...We now effectively control the commercially important Danube River...
...Kosovo should be allowed to join Albania...
...Let Serbia have the small portion of Kosovo which is historically and spiritually significant...
...As Albania tries to build its democracy, often succeeding, there is very little to fear from a stable, larger Albania...
...give Albania the rest...
...I revere the principle of free speech but see its basis in the desire to provide for the free play of ideas...
...Websites have displayed addresses of Catholic churches and featured "wanted" posters displaying photos of pastors (including "marking off" of those who have been murdered...
...And despite having had the benefit, in every century from then until now, of at least an ample measure of what Evans calls "the aid of controversy to give it precision," the development of the Western teaching on the Real Presence has defied settlement...
...A concluding thought: It is clear from Morgan's letter that Catholics do not have a monopoly on the tactics of arguing from the standpoint of the ideal to which their church ought to aspire...
...The two twentieth-century Roman Catholic eucharistic theologians with whom Kilmartin engages most directly are the Benedictines Anscar Vonier and Odo Casel, but he goes beyond both Vonier's interpretation of "sacrifice" and Casel's interpretation of "mystery" to make the case for seeing the Real Presence as the doctrine, but transubstanCommonweal 1 ¥ May 7,1999 tiation as one way of formulating the doctrine...
Vol. 126 • May 1999 • No. 9
