I find it interesting that the current controversy over Communion occurs while simultaneously critical race theory is suffering pushback from communities and states. Yes, the Eucharist is being treated as a political football, with right-wing critics of Pres. Joe Biden, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, and other pro-abortion Catholic politicians leading the charge for reinforcing excommunication. So I’m somewhat astonished to find no one has accused right-wing Catholics of displaying a privileged mindset. Which would be the pot calling—um, which would be hypocritical.
A No-Cost, Customized Faith
Privilege is an equivocal word. On the one hand, it applies to a mindset of elitist entitlement, an individual or subcultural conviction that one’s class or qualities release them from the rules and obligations that bind lesser mortals. Entitlement belief is a recognized cognitive distortion. But, on the other hand, it indicates a conditioned license, a practice or institution to which one is not entitled as a right, revocable on violation of the condition(s) under which the license was granted. So we could say that the privileged mindset treats privileges as—you’ll excuse the expression—God-given rights.
The left often subverts their own efforts to create social change by unconsciously displaying the entitled arrogance they attribute to oppressor classes. For example, last summer, center-left leaders published an open letter criticizing the woke movement for their repression of free speech. In their reply, prominent woke leftists replied that they were merely holding the privileged classes accountable. Simultaneously, they accused the center-leftists of “silencing” the marginalized. You don’t dare criticize your betters, but they’re free not only to condemn but to “de-platform” you. Qui custodiet ipsos custodes? Who can hold the woke accountable?
Over two thousand millennia, and in many places around the world, Catholics have suffered and continue to suffer hardships because they live(d) the Church’s teachings to the best of their ability. Only in the rich, comfortable, privileged West do Catholics demand a no-cost faith customized to suit their politics, lifestyles, and self-images. Taking up one’s cross (Matthew 10:28, 16:24; cf. Mark 8:34, Luke 9:23) isn’t supposed to be comfortable or convenient. As Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI said, we weren’t made for comfort but rather for greatness.
Communion and Party Etiquette
“Many are called, but few are chosen” (Matthew 22:14). In the Wedding Banquet parable, it’s easy to miss or skip over the detail of the one guest who showed up not dressed for the party. His end was not much better than that of the people whom the king initially invited. Even today, a certain etiquette attaches itself to a party, especially a wedding celebration. Violate that etiquette, and your chances of being invited to other parties diminish. Only a specific type of personality arrives at a party expecting to be excused from observing the niceties. Can you guess what type of personality that is?
From the very beginning, in both the Latin and Eastern rites, in both Catholic and Orthodox Churches, the Eucharistic celebration—Holy Communion—has been a “closed altar.” The reason is simple: Only those who truly believe all that the Church teaches and do their best to practice those teachings belong at the table. So The Pillar editor and canon lawyer JD Flynn recently pointed out in a series of tweets:
It has never been the case in Christian history that the Eucharist was a kind of universal meal. From the earliest decades of Christianity, the Church understood the Eucharist as an expression of communion, and admitted to Eucharist those who were fully in the Church’s communion.
In the early centuries of the Church, Christian initiation took years of formation. And so did penance for grave public sins. Penitents would enter the “order of penitents,” and live sometimes for years doing public penance for grave sins, to atone for wound[s] to [the] Church’s unity. …
The idea was not punishment in order to shame or humiliate. The idea was to effect conversion, to take seriously the integrity of the Church’s unity and witness, and to take seriously God’s judgment.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church says, “The more painful the experience of the divisions in the Church which break the common participation in the table of the Lord, the more urgent are our prayers to the Lord that the time of complete unity among all who believe in him may return” (CCC 1398). Nevertheless, paragraph 1400 rules out intercommunion with Protestant denominations. Canons 915 and 916 of the Codex prohibit the excommunicated, the interdicted, and “others obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin” from receiving the Eucharist, as well as those who are “conscious of [having committed a] grave sin.”
We can’t stress the unity of Communion enough. If we are ambassadors of the faith, then we have an obligation to represent the faith as it is, not “what the faith means to me” or “what I think the faith ought to teach.” For we’re not just representing ourselves, but rather over 1 billion people alive now and billions who have held the faith throughout the centuries. If we don’t share the faith we’re supposed to represent, we don’t belong at the table with those who do.
A Perhaps Unnecessarily Autobiographical Section on Authority
When my mother married my father, a divorcé, she continued to go to Mass but absented herself from Communion. She took her excommunication seriously because she took the Church’s teachings seriously. Finally, after 29 years of dysfunctionality led to a traumatic and humiliating end to the marriage, Mom received absolution and began receiving Communion again. (Near the end of her life, I became an Extraordinary Minister so I could bring Communion to her.) Because of Mom’s example, I decided in 2002 that I could either embrace the fullness of the Church’s teachings or stop calling myself “Catholic.”
Although I sometimes speak of black-and-white thinking as a cognitive distortion, some choices really are binary. Either the Church’s teachings on faith and morals are infallible—at least in the sense of reliable or trustworthy—or they’re not. If they aren’t, then either Christ reneged on his promise to send the Holy Spirit as a guide (John 14:26, 16:13), or Scripture is unreliable, or the Holy Spirit is unreliable. Accepting any of these conclusions undermines Christianity. Loss of faith that the Church is an authoritative teacher, pursued to its logical end, eventually erodes faith in Christ.
To fulfill her Great Commission (Matthew 28:19-20), I realized Christ must have given the Church divine authority to preserve its integrity through the ages. Christ and the apostles only preached one gospel, and we can reasonably presume it wasn’t “Read the Bible and figure it out for yourself.” Or “Believe whatever you want, so long as you invoke my name.” By contrast, I found nothing in Scripture, Tradition, or ecclesial history that gave me (or anyone else) heckler’s rights. Instead, I found a limit to my intellectual arrogance. Thanks to Mom.
So far, no one has presented me with a credible claim to divine authority on matters of faith and morals that legitimately overrides the Church’s or succeeded in plausibly indicting the Church’s claim. Over time, I’ve found that people tell me to question others’ authority only so they can substitute themselves. Unfortunately, the 2020 election demonstrated just how easy it is for faceless strangers like QAnon to gain credibility by telling people what they want to believe—by affirming their fears, desires, and prejudices. So if you want me to question authority, I’ll start by challenging yours.
The Privilege of Communion
Authority matters because we have many credential-less talking heads in the media and on social media platforms telling us that the Church has no right to deny Communion, let alone deny it to pro-abortion politicians and public figures. One priest whose avatar simply screams “Anglican,” @RevDaniel, sniffs that “You were appointed an ambassador of the Good News, not a bouncer at the door of Club Heaven.” Everyone, he declares in another meme, is “unworthy” to receive Communion. Odd how St. Paul convinced himself that some could receive it worthily.
Certainly, reception of the Lord’s Body and Blood is unmerited grace. And that’s how we should receive them—as gifts, not entitlements. They’re not trophies you deserve just for showing up at Mass on Sunday. They’re not something the Church is obliged to give you simply because you “identify as Catholic.” In other words, participation in Communion is a privilege, a license extended under the charitable presumption that you share the faith in its entirety and are trying, however imperfectly, to live it. A license revocable when your public words and actions testify to the contrary.
To present yourself at Communion while in either private or public dissent from the Church’s teachings and in disrespect for the Church’s teaching authority is to lie—to the Church, to the living Body of Christ, and to yourself. There’s no room here for a self-deluding subjective perception or an equally notional “invisible union.” You are literally ex communione, out of the unity of faith. In a day and culture in which apostasy has negligible social costs, you’re free to leave the Church with your doubts and dissent; so many people have. Yet you choose to stay and pretend agreement.
How is that not dishonest? And how can you say the Church doesn’t have the right to call you out on it?
Conclusion
My main concern now is that the push to deny Communion occurs at the wrong time and for the wrong reasons. As Michael Hanby reminds us, authority and power aren’t at all the same thing. One leads us from in front while the other forces us forward with a gun at our backs. Every exercise of power confesses a failure of authority. The last sixty years of Church decline have been a signal of divided, ineffectual leadership. Right now, the hierarchy is in greater need of rebuilding their moral authority than of exercising their sacramental power.
At some point, though, we all need to see “identifying as Catholic” for the pathetic juvenile rebellion it is—pretending community with people whose symbols, stories, and values you secretly hold in contempt. Again, it’s the egotism of the subjectivist unmasked: the belief that “what Catholicism means to me” matters more than does the meaning it has held for saints, mystics, martyrs, and unknown hosts of witnesses throughout the centuries. It’s a form of Pride that desperately needs to be told:
“Check your privilege!”
17 thoughts on “Of Holy Communion, Kings, and Privilege”
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Either embrace the faith or leave ; park or drive, then. Most are in neutral, by asking them to leave if they’re not all in is to ask them to abjure which makes them not Catholic. It’s not about pretending if you were born into the church, And faith is a gift, given from above and
cannot be taken away. I get your point, though. Mine is that the intellect is always trumped by the will and free will makes them Catholic. Sad times..
I get your point as well. I have a friend who hadn’t been to Mass for years even before she married her husband in a Methodist church (concelebrated by two priests, ironically enough). To my knowledge, neither she nor her husband has gone to church since, except for weddings and funerals. I’ve even seen her check out some Wicca memes. However, that doesn’t stop her from “identifying as” Catholic or commenting on the Communion brouhaha. Like I said to Peter, it’s hard to stop being Catholic, even if you formally convert to something else.
This is a well written article, but I disagree with the core of the argument that it is making.
First, I do agree that the church currently has no foot to stand on in terms of making moral aspersions on others (Democratic politicians in this case). If they wanted to bar people from communion for failing to live a lifestyle in accord with church teachings, they would have to bar a majority of the clergy/bishops for either frequent homosexual activity (against church teaching) or covering up abuse (lying and harming God’s children – and also against church teaching).
The main point I disagree with is that one has to submit to every church teaching to be eligible for communion.
First, church teaching and structure has changed and been developed many times over the centuries. Without the ability to disagree and debate, the opportunity for development and growth is stymied. There MUST be room for disagreement and debate within the church. We’ve gone through periods of church history where debate has been encouraged, and periods where is has been forbidden. We’re coming out a of period where it was effectively forbidden – the papacies of JPII and Benedict XVI. While this might be new territory for most of the people born after 1960 or so, this is by no means brand new in the history of the church.
Second, papal infallibility is a relatively new part of church teaching. It came from Vatican I in the late 1800s, and it was a fiercely contested issue. I believe they got it wrong. To assume that the pope is infallible, you have to assume that either (1) God takes away the free will of the pope to protect the church, or (2) every pope ever has always fully submitted himself to God’s will. In my opinion, the second option is laughable based on the history of the papacy. When popes were appointed by political leaders as part of power struggles in the early middle ages, they were not submitting themselves fully to God’s will. Their behavior (as well as modern clerical behavior) also makes it pretty clear that these prelates are not submitting themselves to God’s will. As for #1, I also do not believe there are any situations where God takes away a person’s free will. Free will is a gift He has given us, and I just don’t believe He would take it away. I can see plenty of room for disagreement there, but God giving us all both free will and reason is a core part of Catholic teaching.
Third, I believe that the same arguments from #2 apply to the bishops as a whole. Bishops have argued over church teaching throughout the centuries. And one group usually wins. The loudest voices in the current church arguments appear to be the German bishops and the US bishops with other bishops around the world likely being somewhere in between. I agree with many of the German bishops, but I disagree with my own. Should I be excommunicated in the US, but not in Germany? When I was growing up, my local bishop excommunicated a group that was pushing for women to be readers at mass (something done in virtually every other US diocese). These people were excommunicated in my diocese, but they could drive across the Platte River to a different nearby diocese and be allowed to receive communion with no problems. That situation would’ve comical had it not been so sad. Excluding people from communion is a power play and nothing more. It is using power to attempt to win an argument rather than logic and persuasion. I have to laugh when I hear the argument that the goal is really just to help the person. This is like parents or grandparents refusing to go to their children’s weddings because the children left the church. Excluding people doesn’t bring them back. It just drives them further away. In the author’s example, his mother never left. She always believed the church which is why she continued to be involved and followed the rules. Barring her from communion didn’t bring her back. It was actually incredibly futile. Even though she always believed them, she still married a divorce.
And finally – and most importantly – I believe this concept of fully submitting to church teaching has been a significant factor in the abuse crisis that we’re only recently finding out about. The abuse has been going on for centuries, but we’ve only now had the ability to put the pieces together. Like Martin Luther used the printing press to spread information about some truly despicable practices of the church during his time, the internet has allowed people to share information freely which helped Catholics realize that cases of abuse were not isolated. It was and is a global practice. The idea of fully submitting to church teaching without question puts church leaders on a pedestal, and it puts those leaders beyond question by the laity. That is an incredibly dangerous aspect of Catholic culture, and Catholic leaders abused it for their own selfish reasons. And I know that the counterargument is that the leaders themselves aren’t personally infallible (other than the pope at times), but the teaching of the infallibility of the church seeps out onto the representatives of the church in many circumstances. It drives the culture. The bishops are the church, and the church is God. Those things aren’t true, but those are associations that many Catholics appear to have been ingrained with.
We need to open the church up for debate. Without it, the church will continue shrinking until a cult is effectively the only thing left. Past church leaders understood this and changed the church. In my opinion, it’s long past time for the current leadership to do the same.
“If they wanted to bar people from communion for failing to live a lifestyle in accord with church teachings, they would have to bar a majority of the clergy/bishops for either frequent homosexual activity (against church teaching) or covering up abuse (lying and harming God’s children – and also against church teaching).”
The first statement—that the majority of clergy participate in frequent homosexual activity—has never been credibly established as a fact; it has only been reported second-hand by third parties, including the usually-anonymous snitch’s WAG as to the numbers, and only in a couple of major metropolitan archdioceses that I’m aware of. The second statement—that the majority of clergy/bishops participated in covering up child abuse—is not only false but a low blow. The scandal was monstrous enough without exaggerating the number of participants. But yes, those who have participated and do participate in such activities ought to be excommunicated, and arguably returned to the lay state.
Now, to turn to your three points:
First, debate can and does legitimately occur on those points that haven’t been formally defined as dogma by a council or declared infallible (either by the Pope or through the ordinary universal magisterium; see CCC 891). But once the final authority of Pope or council is invoked, the Church cannot walk it back, which has caused some discomfort at times (consider the dogma, “There is no salvation outside the Church”). Once that happens, licit debate ends: Roma locuta est, causa finita est (“Rome has spoken; the matter is at an end”).
The second issue has been partially addressed by the first response. Reply to objection 1: “… [It] does not of necessity belong to liberty that what is free should be the first cause of itself, as neither for one thing to be cause of another need it be the first cause. God, therefore, is the first cause, Who moves causes both natural and voluntary. And just as by moving natural causes He does not prevent their acts being natural, so by moving voluntary causes He does not deprive their actions of being voluntary: but rather is He the cause of this very thing in them; for He operates in each thing according to its own nature. (Summa Theologiae I, Q. 83, A. 1 ad 3). Reply to objection 2: Never has it been part of Catholic teaching that a person, minister or not, had to be always open to God’s will in order to be influenced by the Holy Spirit. This objection may spring from a misunderstanding of papal infallibility, which operates only under limited, special circumstances and has only been invoked twice since 1870—three times, if you count Pope St. JP2’s Ordinatio Sacerdotalis. See https://www.papalencyclicals.net/councils/ecum20.htm for the decrees of Vatican I.
The first and second responses also apply to the third issue. Here I detect a perfect-solution fallacy: If excommunication doesn’t always work or is sometimes abused, it shouldn’t be applied. There’s an old principle from Roman law: “The abuse doesn’t take away the proper use.” For instance, a hammer doesn’t stop being a construction tool simply because it can be used as a weapon. (On the other hand, a gun doesn’t stop being a weapon simply because it can be used for shooting paper targets and clay pigeons.) Excommunication has been misused and overused; in fact, we have Catholic and Orthodox Churches because the patriarchs of Rome and Constantinople excommunicated each other. However, even if we denied the Real Presence, Communion would be symbolic only if it stood for an ontic, objective reality—the actual union in faith of its participants. If the participants aren’t united, then it fails even as a symbol.
Last issue: Elitism is always a danger with an authoritative class. That’s part of human nature. However, the fragmentation of the Western church into numerous competing communions shows what happens when human authority is denied. The mainline Protestant communions tried compromising with secular liberalism; they’re dying even faster than is the Catholic Church. Liberal Catholicism offers nothing Westerners can’t get from other sources, and will die off with the Boomers and Generation X. (For that matter, so will “Republican-rite Catholicism.”) There are far more causes for our decline in the West than mere clericalism, which was not the cause of the abuse crisis and is probably the least of our problems today.
All of the evidence points to a large percentage of priests being and having been homosexual for a long time. If you require an official survey with public admissions, then you’ll be able to continue denying it. Ignoring the evidence at this point is akin to believing that Putin doesn’t occasionally kill his rivals because he denies it. There is a ton of evidence if you choose to look.
The same goes for bishops. In my state, all three bishops have covered up abuse. And all three are still in power. Putting restrictions on priests (i.e. no ministering to males between ages 20 and 24) without letting the public know and moving them to a different parish is covering up abuse. And a vast majority of bishops – at least in the western and latin american worlds – have done this or worse. These non-enforceable restrictions led directly to multiple of my acquaintances becoming victims of previously known abusive priests. Bishop Finn was convicted of hiding (failing to report) abuse in the Kansas City diocese. After a lay revolt, he was forced to resign. He now lives in my diocese – still as a bishop – and he was confirming kids up until recently. The list goes on and on and on. Until they come clean, I think it’s pretty safe to assume at least half have met the bar I set above especially considering so many have admitted as much with the recently published “lists”.
To your first point, I am saying that the idea of infallibility should be revoked. The pope – while technically infallible – can declare himself and the church fallible. So could the bishops. The rules about infallibility have hamstrung the church and put it in an untenable position. You admitted as much with the rules about there being “no salvation outside the church.” Time and again the church in one time period has made an “infallible” declaration only for later church leaders to attempt to walk it back (because it was wrong). You can say the same thing about unbaptized babies who die. There is dogma, and then sometimes they end up creating direct contradictions because sending unbaptized babies to hell seems un-Christ-like.
For your second response, you actually raised another problem. What is infallible? A teaching is infallible when someone likes it and fallible when they don’t. So Ordinatio Sacerdotalis was not infallible. 🙂
For the third point, the Eucharist should not be used as a weapon. As the pope said, it is the bread of sinners. The fact that it doesn’t usually work is secondary. The Eucharist is a symbol that we are all united in trying to follow Jesus and live up to his commands. It is not a symbol that we do it perfectly or believe that the church is doing it perfectly. The point I was making in that section was that the Eucharist becomes a comical object of disunity when the rules aren’t even consistent across dioceses and countries.
And finally, we have a ton of factions because the original faction (the Catholic church) became corrupt. The blame for the Protestant reformation lies squarely with the Catholic church. The massive level of splintering was unfortunate. It would’ve been nice to have those discussions respectfully internally, but when you throw in corruption and political gaming that became impossible. I completely agree that elitism is a danger with an authoritative class. I think the idea of infallibility is a perfect example of the elitism within the authoritative class of the church. And it was this elitism that led to the splintering. Secular liberalism is competing with the church because the church is hamstrung and cannot make corrections. Until the church is capable of correcting their wrongs, they are effectively forfeiting the battle.
“All the evidence” of a supposed majority of gay priests is a few second- and third-hand reports from very particular locations, repeated ad nauseam by those who want the reports to be true. That’s the kind of “evidence” that overturned the 2020 election. Count the number of dioceses, archdioceses, and ordinariates in the U.S. Count the number of bishops that have held these sees since 1980. Then count the number of bishops whose tenures have been rocked by credible accusations of cover-ups (I won’t even demand that they’ve been subject to legal action). Not a majority. Again, the scandals were monstrous enough without needing to inflate the numbers.
“The pope – while technically infallible – can declare himself and the church fallible.” No, he can’t. Infallibility binds forward. Or did you forget this when you said the Church has put itself in an “untenable position”? (Which is actually very tenable.) As I pointed out before, papal infallibility applies only in limited circumstances. For example, Catholic social teaching comprises a number of remarkable papal encyclicals that we ought to take seriously; however, none of them have yet been declared infallible. Historically, the Church has made broad pronouncements which subsequent teaching narrowed, softened, or fine-tuned (whichever word you prefer). But the exceptions—and there really hasn’t been as many as you seem to think—haven’t contradicted or displaced the rule modified. “Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus” is still part of both Catholic and Orthodox dogma, even with its conditions.
“What is infallible? A teaching is infallible when someone likes it and fallible when they don’t. So Ordinatio Sacerdotalis was not infallible.” My, how subjective of you. A flippant argument doesn’t merit a serious response. However, you can think of infallibility as the Church’s version of stare decisis … except the Church takes infallibility much more seriously than the Supreme Court takes stare decisis.
“For the third point, the Eucharist should not be used as a weapon.” Agreed once, a thousand times agreed. And it seems like you almost grasp my point without recognizing it as my point: “As the pope said, it is the bread of sinners. … The Eucharist is a symbol that we are all united in trying to follow Jesus and live up to his commands. It is not a symbol that we do it perfectly or believe that the church is doing it perfectly.” Of course we’re not doing it perfectly! That’s why the Church has both saints and confessionals (and why many if not most of the former made frequent use of the latter). But there’s a distinct difference between continually failing and not really trying, just as there’s a difference between hitting +24 at Sawgrass TPC and hitting +4 at Putt Putt Mini Golf.
Certainly, the medieval Church was corrupt; certainly, it has some corruption even today. The only church without sinners is an empty church. Calling the Protestant split a “reformation,” however, is like saying you’re fixing a cracked clay pot by shattering it. Denying the teaching authority of the Pope and bishops didn’t “reform” a darn thing. In fact, they couldn’t deny human authority without denying their own You blame it on the elitism; I blame it as much on the “reformers'” arrogance. The Church is hamstrung in the way that anyone determined to play according to rules is hamstrung when competing against a system determined to ignore or do away with rules that hamstring them and make up their own rules. But as I argue in an upcoming article, liberalism’s victory will be its own defeat. And not very far in the future.
Feel free to have the last word.
I’m not sure what the election comment was supposed to say but I think a word was missing somewhere. The 2020 election was not overturned, but I think you were comparing the evidence of bishops covering up abuse to the non-existent evidence of voter fraud? I’ll reiterate that my standards for bishops covering up abuse is not the legal definition. If a bishop knew that a priest was abusive and put him back in service repeatedly without warning anyone, that is covering up abuse by my definition. We don’t need to get into a debate about what makes a claim credible, but my definition does not require a confession from the accused. I noticed that you spent time in Nebraska. In Omaha, Lucas did it, and so did his predecessor Curtiss. In Lincoln, Conley did it, and so did his predecessor Bruskewitz. That’s 4/4. And the evidence is in the lists that were released. In Omaha, the dates clearly show that abuse was covered up. My wife served as a child under a priest that has been reported to the diocese years prior. In Lincoln, multiple people I know were abused by the same priest who had been reported to the diocese years prior. The church’s policies were widespread and they failed victims. And more importantly they were/are egregiously wrong from a moral standpoint. And this continues today. Please don’t pretend that this issue has been solved or fixed. My examples come from this millennium after the Dallas Charter. The church put lipstick on a pig, but they did not solve the underlying problems that lead to the abuse and corruption. To say that these problems are all in the past is not only insulting to those who have been recently abused, but it also perpetuates the problems and the abuse.
And back to infallibility, infallibility is not a version of stare decisis. Those two are not comparable. Stare decisis respects precedent, but it does not claim that precedent is infallible. There is a massive difference. The church can respect precedent without claiming infallibility. And there would be no problem with that.
As for the rest, we’re going to have to agree to disagree. I believe the church’s teachings compiled over the centuries are many times at odds with one another. Many others agree, and unless the church reforms itself and develops a coherent set of teachings, it will continue declining rapidly. I don’t want that to happen. There is a reason that virtually no non-Catholics as well as most Catholics don’t respect church teaching or church leaders. Doubling down on the problems is not the way to change that in my opinion.
I look forward to your upcoming article on liberalism. I don’t expect to agree with most of it, but I do look forward to getting your perspective.
Doesn’t the Church say that you can’t un-Catholic yourself regardless of what you believe or don’t believe: and even if you go elsewhere?
Is excommunication for those who are not in line with Church teaching; or is it also for those whose lifestyle is incompatible with a life in the Spirit? In 1Corinthians 5 and 6, Paul calls for the excommunication of a person whose lifestyle is not in line with Christian standards even if the community has looked the other way.
That’s not exactly what the Church teaches. You can’t “un-baptize” yourself, but you can formally abjure the faith. Informally, however, the patterns of thinking that proper socialization instills tend to stay with us even if we abandon the faith or its practice. As someone once said, “It’s almost as hard to stop being Catholic as it is to stop being black.”
Excommunication applies to anyone who has committed a mortal sin and has not received absolution for it. But the Church also encourages confession for venial sins because a kind of spiritual “guppy law” attaches to them. (“Enough guppies can eat a treasury;” that is, a lot of little expenditures can destroy wealth as effectively as a few large expenditures.) A lifestyle that isn’t in line with the Holy Spirit is almost by definition not in line with the Church. To call it a lifestyle is to implicitly admit that it’s obstinate persistence in sin, which compounds the gravity of it. Some sins are hard to overcome, which is why the Church encourages frequent confession. But to refuse to seek absolution is to refuse to admit you’re doing anything that requires forgiveness.
One of my fav characters in the gospels is the centurion who begged an indulgence from Jesus while being the willing and working part of a cruel and unjust conqueror. However his life turned out no one may deny that he became a Christian in so far as faith is concerned and that is why more people are receiving Jesus into their hearts than on their tongues.
Perhaps. Given the last year, I really have no right to chide others for their infrequency of communion. But I can’t help but think of St. Paul’s words: “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Cor 11:26). It seems participating only once in a while is more like mentioning His death in passing.
Very well written essay, Anthony. You drove the point flush with one strong blow.
One caveat – it seems as if those 60 -70 % who have stopped participating in parish life are no longer Catholic then it would only be truth ( as opposed to untruth ) to take 65% (average) off the census thus reducing the number of Catholics worldwide to appr. one half billion. You can’t have it both ways – plush numbers to claim billion status with assets of only half that number in situ.
“One caveat – it seems as if those 60 -70 % who have stopped participating in parish life are no longer Catholic then it would only be truth ( as opposed to untruth ) to take 65% (average) off the census thus reducing the number of Catholics worldwide to appr. one half billion.”
Fair enough IF you assume that the 60 – 70% holds constant worldwide and doesn’t simply reflect an American or Western problem. But I didn’t say they weren’t Catholic; you only stop being Catholic if you formally abjure the faith. My argument was for intellectual honesty: Either embrace the faith or leave, but don’t pretend you’re in communion when you’re not.