Becoming Coherent

Readers following the USCCB saga will no doubt have learned that yesterday the bishops overwhelmingly voted to move ahead with their plans to begin a Eucharistic teaching document, approving the plan 168-55 (with six abstaining from the vote.)

Debate over this at USCCB gives one a glimpse at what is at play, with an attempt, headed by St. Louis Archbishop Mitchell T. Rozanski & seconded by Joseph Tobin, to extend discussion on whether or not to create this document essentially indefinitely. Bishops opposed to this effort categorized it as a “filibuster” and a “delaying tactic,” with various arguments. So now the work on drafting the document, which is primarily a teaching document, will commence.

To which we say: Deo gratias.

There is a most important context here. If one pans back from the most immediate and sensational aspects, such as the issue of Joe Biden, we uncover the unholy void from which his errors crawled.

Can there be any doubt whatsoever that clarity of teaching on the Eucharist has been missing for decades and is needed most desperately in our country at this moment? The shocking Pew Research study of 2019 which found that 7 in 10 Catholics do not believe in transubstantiation and the Real Presence lays bare the gravity of the situation.

Even before the presidential election, Bishop Robert Barron of Los Angeles had already proposed a plan for “Eucharistic Revival.” Andrew Cozzens, an auxiliary bishop of Minneapolis/St. Paul explained extensively how this will be undertaken, and has discussed the 3-year plan. This plan was also presented at the recent USCCB meeting.

However, the lack of “Eucharistic Coherence” we are facing is not only a matter of teaching, but one of praxis: our actions as a Church, particularly those surrounding the Eucharist, our “source & summit.” Some bishops, such as Bishop Olmstead of Phoenix, whose exhortation “Veneremur Cernui” we covered in a previous post–are already ahead of the curve in their calls for deepening Eucharistic reverence in concrete ways.

Indeed, it might be argued that praxis is the only form of teaching that some people will ever experience, and therefore, in practical terms, the best. We cannot be coherent if we teach one thing on paper but live a different reality. We do not just know the truth intellectually, we experience it and we live it.

Such a coherent praxis includes but goes far beyond forbidding the likely sacrilegious communions of the Bidens and Pelosis and Cuomos. Where it has been communicated that Eucharist is nothing more than a table of gathering at which “all are welcome,” a symbolic meal of friendship and inclusion, we are failing to tell the truth through liturgy. When we do not tell the truth–and, as the saying goes–the whole truth and nothing but the truth, people fail to discern the Body of the Lord. And when people fail to discern the Body of the Lord, a plethora of grave evils occur.

All are invited (and must be, more explicitly to be sure), yet what does our approach of this mystery entail? And why have those with teaching authority failed to communicate this clearly?

Does not the Scripture speak of the King’s great feast, to which some of the guests will not come, and to which others will arrive improperly clothed?

Then he said to his servants, ‘The feast is ready, but those who were invited were not worthy to come. Go out, therefore, into the main roads and invite to the feast whomever you find.’ The servants went out into the streets and gathered all they found, bad and good alike, and the hall was filled with guests. But when the king came in to meet the guests he saw a man there not dressed in a wedding garment. He said to him, ‘My friend, how is it that you came in here without a wedding garment?’ But he was reduced to silence. Then the king said to his attendants, ‘Bind his hands and feet, and cast him into the darkness outside, where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth. Many are invited, but few are chosen.”

Matthew 22: 10-14

Origen explains:

“The marriage-feast of Christ and the Church is filled, when they who were found by the Apostles, being restored to God, sat down to the feast. But since it behoved that both bad and good should be called, not that the bad should continue bad, but that they should put off the garments unmeet for the wedding, and should put on the marriage garments… mercy and kindness, for this cause the King goes out, that He may see them set down before the supper is set before them, that they may be detained who have the wedding garment in which He is delighted, and that he may condemn the opposite.”

Not a single one of us deserves the supreme gift of Christ in the Eucharist. Yet, we are persons made in the image of God, and He gave us the ability to respond to Him, to accept His grace and to ready ourselves to be sustained by this Bread of Angels. So He can say to us: “Put on your wedding garment.” He can require that we prepare ourselves to become that which we receive, as the Fathers of the Church put it. “The good and bad are called, not that the bad should continue bad, but that they should put off the garments unmeet for the wedding, and should put on the marriage garments.”

There is work interiorly & exteriorly that every communicant must do before approaching the Eucharist. This is part of what we mean when we say we must be “properly disposed” to receive the sacrament.

Our liturgy points us to this reality. There is the sense of the Eucharistic fast: we arrive with empty bellies, signifying that all earthly things are secondary to this sacred act, and that we lay them willingly aside; we are God’s temples. There is the sense of confessing our unworthiness in humility, which we do in the very words of Mass: “Lord, I am not worthy …” There is the sense in which we acknowledge the necessity of reconciliation with God and rest of the Church, also reflected in the Mass in the penitential rite and the sign of peace, to remind us that taking the Eucharist is something that requires genuine unity and integrity. There is the affirmative statement “Amen”— not an empty word, but one which states our full assent to the declaration: “The Body of Christ.”

To acknowledge the absolute primacy of God in our lives, to have gratitude and humility, to practice genuine reconciliation & unity with the Church, to recognize and affirm the Real Presence…without these, we have failed to dress in our wedding garment.

There is some sense of urgency to this. Consider the words of Jesus in John’s Gospel:

“Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes has eternal life.  I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died.  This is the bread which comes down from heaven, that a man may eat of it and not die.  I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live for ever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

Jesus says: “He who believes has eternal life.”

73% of American Catholics do not believe.

He also says, “Unless a man believes, he has no life in him.”

You do the math here.

The media has zeroed in on this whole process within the USCCB as being a partisan attempt to ban certain people from communion.

In reality it is a call to proper Eucharistic formation and to the authentic, consistent praxis that must go with that if we are to tell & live the truth.

Those Catholics who do not recognize the Body of Christ for what it is must be instructed so that they can have the opportunity to believe–which is at the same time opportunity to have eternal life. Those who are presently eating & drinking without discernment of what they do must also be taught, for the same reason, unless we as a Church are happy to watch them eating and drinking their own condemnation.

It is an act of goodness for our shepherds to say: “My friend, how is it that you came here without your wedding garment?”

Already the reaction of pro-abortion Catholic politicians tells you all you need to know about the straits we are in and just how necessary is the work presently at hand.

60 Democrat Catholics in the House of Representatives this week signed the following letter, a long-winded argument for how they, being pro-abortion, are nonetheless promoting the Church’s life ethic:

It is quite remarkable that, in the name of separation of church and state, 60 lawmakers chose to make an intervention at a bishops’ conference with a series of theological propositions and to draw up the same on official Congressional letterhead.

Has a single one of these ostensible scholars of Sacrosanctum Concilium ever read the document? Did they even know it existed before yesterday? We are sure that they must have missed, while poring over Christifideles Laici in their white pantsuits, the entire section entitled “Respecting the Inviolable Right to Life” (as apparently did whatever lefty priest ghostwrote this letter for them).

Let the Red Wolf give you an assist:

 No one, no individual, no group, no authority, no State, can change-let alone eliminate [fundamental human rights] because such rights find their source in God himself.

The inviolability of the person which is a reflection of the absolute inviolability of God, fínds its primary and fundamental expression in the inviolability of human life. Above all, the common outcry, which is justly made on behalf of human rights-for example, the right to health, to home, to work, to family, to culture- is false and illusory if the right to life, the most basic and fundamental right and the condition for all other personal rights, is not defended with maximum determination.

The Church has never yielded in the face of all the violations that the right to life of every human being has received, and continues to receive, both from individuals and from those in authority. The human being is entitled to such rights, in every phase of development, from conception until natural death

Christifidelis Laici #38. Emphasis added.

One does truly grieve for the ignorance of Catholic doctrine, and for the culture in the Church that has fostered the intractable spirit displayed here, often closed to the actual content of revelation, yet full of self-importance. What can one say: they are the children of their absent fathers, the bishops who neglected to form them. And now they feel they are unfairly being denied the chance to clink spiritual champagne flutes with the rest of the Church.

We may also look to the more openly hostile, like Congressman Ted Lieu, who went on a tweetstorm that included the following:

This is the type of ugly thinking that occurs when the Church allows Eucharistic incoherence, most especially in its praxis, to reign. Where is the gratitude, the humility, the penitence we are called to, the “Lord, I am not worthy…”? No. It has been replaced with “I flaunt God’s law, and I dare you to stop me.”

Here the Eucharist becomes, not the inestimable gift before which we can do nothing but humbly prostrate ourselves, but an emblem of vanity to which we are entitled, no matter how much we hate and scheme against the teaching of the Church. It becomes the prize of the powerful, the vocal, the apostate. It is the seat, arrogantly claimed at the table, no matter how little we respect the King whose table it is.

We cannot continue like this.

Coherence means things hanging together, fitting as they should with a proper bond. If any bishop cares for Joe Biden or Ted Lieu or any of the rest, he should do what is needful to restore them to grace and truth.

“My friend, how is it that you came here without your wedding garment?”

It is far, far past time for our bishops to ask this question, and to tell the truth about the Eucharist in word and in practice.

It is indeed, as one of our readers noted, time to “AMBROSE UP.”