The Panic about the Eucharist

During this past summer I virtually attended the Notre Dame program "Will They Come Back After COVID?: Disaffiliation, Affiliation, and the Liturgy." 

The leader was Timothy O'Malley a  young lay theologian who is head of the ND McGrath Institute. His views are expressed in these two articles: 

The Difference Between Liturgical Naïveté and a Eucharistic Culture of Affiliation

What's at Stake in the Debates Swirling Around Eucharistic Coherence?

Peter Steinfel's references O'Malley articles in his argument that the bishops need to focus upon the meaning of the Eucharist rather than upon Eucharistic Coherence in his article in this month's Commonweal.

The Bishops, the Eucharist, and Abortion Separate Challenges

You are welcome but not required to read these three articles. If you find any interesting you may want to make your own post.  They are linked here to give you context for the big fish article by Cupich.  Why should I criticize a theologian, or even Steinfels when I can criticize a cardinal archbishop? 

Cardinal Cupich  has responded with the following article which I assume will appear in next month's Commonweal as well as being online now.

A Strategy for Launching a Eucharistic Revival: 

A response to Peter Steinfels

From all the online conversations at the six week summer program priests and pastoral staff are in a panic that many people who have left because of the pandemic will never return  (actually they may have found parishes on the other side of town, or of the country, or of the world) while others (including myself) have become very comfortable worshiping at home and feel no urgent need to return to physical presence at the Mass. 

Hence now they seem to think we need to have a big revival about the importance of the Eucharist.  I think it is all terribly misguided, and will make things worse rather than better.  

In a subsequent post I will argue from The Vibrant Parish Life Survey of the Diocese of Cleveland  (done in April 2003 with 129 participating parishes and 46,241 total survey responses) that Masses that are "prayerful, reverent and spiritually moving" were at the top of the list of the people in importance but #21 out of 39 items in being "well done."  In other words the big problem is NOT that people don't value the Mass but that they find its celebration is often mediocre.  Surely we have all encountered our share of poor liturgies.

O'Malley, Steinfels, and Cupich and many of the people I encountered this summer are treating the people in the pews as if they were dumb, ignorant, and lazy. The people are NOT. Before the Vibrant Parish Life study I thought my dissatisfaction with the Mass was that I knew too much about liturgy and set too high standards.  However the people of my parish (which was a part of the study) had the same views.  Put bluntly our celebrations of the Eucharist are often mediocre, quite literally of all the things we do in the parish, the celebrations come in the middle of the list of those being well done. People think we do a great job at buildings, being pro-life, religious education. However they think we are mediocre not only at doing liturgy but also doing community.

O'Malley wants to create a culture of Eucharist Affiliation. Those words were well chosen. People want great liturgy and great communities. The problem is clericalism, the self satisfaction of clergy and lay pastoral leaders with mediocre liturgy and mediocre communities.  They want to blame it all on the people. Italics in what follows are quotes from Cupich.

The Imperative of Worship

“In Catholic tradition, the Eucharist is the central act of worship that sustains the life of faith. Worship itself, however, is often marginalized in a culture that is driven by deep-seated commitments to individual freedom, self-fulfillment, and self-expression…. if we don’t worship God, we will worship something else, and perhaps, tragically, we will worship ourselves. “

According to one extensive study, the weekly attendance of Catholics fell from 41% in 2007 to 39% in 2014. In both years there were about 40% of Catholics who attended monthly or infrequently, while about 20% attended seldom or never. HOWEVER , 58% of Catholics prayed daily in 2007 and 59% prayed daily in 2014. Among weekly Mass attenders, 83% prayed daily. Among monthly Mass attenders, 51% prayed daily. Among those who seldom or ever attended Mass, 38% still prayed daily!

1. It is time for church leaders to recognize that while we Catholics have a lot of difficulty with the institutional church and church leadership most of us pray daily including many people who go to Mass infrequently or even rarely. Most of us do not have problems with God.  Church leaders need to reform themselves before they try to reform us. We need better homilies, better music, etc. 

2. It is time for church leaders to recognize that liturgy is more than the Mass, it also includes the Liturgy of the Hours.   Why continue to restrict the LOH to the private prayers of the clergy or the choral offices of some religious?  We need to promote the liturgy of the hours as worship that the average Catholics can engage in wherever we are, either alone or in groups.  

The Eucharist as a Matter of Life and Death 

Americans might be able to comprehend the great importance of worship, but to characterize the Eucharist as a matter of life and death may seem to be an excessively dramatic description.

Yes, Cardinal, this is an inappropriately as well as excessively dramatic statement. 

Throughout the world because of our unwillingness to have a married priesthood, huge numbers of Catholics experience the Eucharist only a few times at year, or perhaps monthly at best. In many times and places of persecution, Catholics have had access to the Eucharist only occasionally and sometimes at great peril. For many centuries, although Catholics were obligated to attend Mass on Sundays and holy days  they were not encouraged to go to communion regularly.  

In response to the accommodation of the early Church to the empire, monks withdrew to the desert, and virgins stayed in their homes. The desert solitaries often did not attend the Eucharist for weeks, months, years, or even decades!  Yet they were regarded as saints. People come out from the cities to them rather than asking why they didn’t come to the city for Eucharist.  

When I was growing up it was very difficult for the steelworkers in our town to attend Mass as well as my grandparents who were dairy farmers. Of course many Protestant denominations depend mostly upon services of the Word. 

So lets be realistic about the limitations of the Eucharist. It is important, but so is baptism. We must get beyond the clericalism that has little or no respect for baptism.  By our baptism we have died and risen with Christ. The paschal mystery is something that encloses our entire life, it is not limited to Mass.  So I am certain that God  has provided in many circumstance for those who for various reasons do not have access to the Eucharist. I have seen that in the lives of my father and my grandparents. 

A friend of mine who earned a degree from the local seminary listened as the priest spoke about how the Holy Thursday Chrism Mass with the bishops, all the priests and deacons was an image of the heavenly kingdom, then she put up her hand and said “if that is what heaven is going to be like, I not sure I want to go.”   Rather than idealizing the Eucharist we need to face some the problems of clericalism we have, especially the pervasive mediocrity that it promotes.

The Eucharist as Summons to Participation

At best, active participation seems to mean having a particular role to play in the liturgy (greeter, server, lector, Communion minister). The full and conscious participation that means internally joining ourselves to the death and resurrection of the Lord celebrated in the Eucharist seems to have eluded many Catholics.

So instead of being dissatisfied with mediocre celebrations of the Eucharist we should keep quiet and just internally appreciate the Mass as the death and resurrection of Christ as if the Mass was the only opportunity for us to do so and we are required to acknowledge that it is from God no matter who terrible the ministers are.  What I miss most about not going in person  to Mass is not internal but external, the opportunity to sing with many others. What would get me back in the pews once the virus is gone would be more opportunities to sing, especially to sing the liturgy of the hours. I would gladly go Saturday night to sing Vespers followed by Matins as the Russian Orthodox do (they call this the All Night Vigil- you might have heard some classical music settings for this service). and then the Eucharist on Sunday Morning.  Note that it is music not the Eucharist which is summoning me to participate. Otherwise I am content to get another cup of coffee to keep me awake during the homily.

From the Sacrifice of Jesus to Our Sacrificial Living

Too few Catholics truly grasp that the Eucharist necessarily leads us out of the liturgy into ordinary life, where we enact what we have celebrated. Our context may be marriage and family, the workplace, the wider community, and even the natural world itself. More commonly, people tend to view the Eucharistic celebration as self-contained, whose lessons and imperatives can be safely left in church until next Sunday.

Well perhaps if more Catholics celebrated the Liturgy of the Hours, often termed the sacrifice of praise, they would find their lives being transformed, especially if the hours were to be celebrated in the contexts and with the people with whom we are living and working. Again the whole model is very clerical in which the laity make the Eucharist so important that it dominates their whole lives. This just places completely unrealistic expectations upon both the Eucharist and the clergy.

Pope Francis wants us to free Christ from being imprisoned in the Church and find him by serving even the people who at the margins of the Church and society.  At one point in my life I choose to continue to serve the mentally ill rather than going to work for the Church. I asked what Jesus would do. Serving the mentally ill was the obvious choice. It would have be nice if my parishes had been appreciative and supportive of that, however they were all just interested in themselves.  They wanted me to be interested and supportive of them without being interested and supportive of my life and vocation. Thankfully now that we have Francis we can recognize how clerical that all was and remains.

The Eucharist Is the Sacrament of the Lord’s Abiding Presence

without the proper context, Eucharistic adoration can privatize one’s relationship to the sacrament and to the Lord himself. Although the prayer associated with adoration can and should be personal, it cannot be merely private and authentically Eucharistic at the same time.

A part of this approach is a revival of pious practices like Eucharist adoration, the rosary, etc. rather than developing the Liturgy of the Hours as the prayer of all baptized Christians, one that we can do in our daily lives and one that we can share with other Non-Catholic Christians. Of course Cupich wants these old devotions to be communal and related to the Eucharist, i.e. mainly done in church and then perhaps taken home.

I want a liturgy of the hours that is both personal and communal, and done not only in our homes but also our work places, neighborhoods, civic areas, and parks. And I want it done mainly by lay people without the participation of the clergy. Why? 

Most of the reform of the church has taken outside the parochial and diocesan structures by religious orders. From the very beginning monks developed their own liturgy of the hours around the psalms, and they did not invite the clergy to celebrate morning and evening prayer as was done in the cathedrals. Nor did they imitate the cathedral liturgies. 

By the time of Benedict the monastic and cathedral liturgies of the hours had fused into one.  Saint Benedict in his rule had much to say about the Divine Office, including that nothing was to preferred to the Opus Dei. Little was said about the Eucharist; however his rule discouraged priests from joining.  

In the religious orders the Divine Office developed from the choral office into the breviary of the Franciscans, Dominicans and Jesuits. That made them both more clerical and flexible.  Now is the time to free the breviary from the hands of the clergy and deliver online a sung virtual divine office available to anyone with an electronic device. 

The center of church reform for the future needs to be lay communities centered on a virtual divine office not parishes or religious orders centered on the Eucharist..