A contentious debate at this moment...

A couple of weeks ago I did a two-part commentary on abortion law. If you want to, you can find it here and here. There was some spin-off discussion on the CathNews discussion board and also on David Schütz's blog.

I don't want to re-visit the topic of abortion, but one issue did come up that seems worth some further exploration. It was the question of denying communion to politicians who vote the 'wrong' way on abortion legislation.

I don't favour denying communion in these circumstances, of course, as I said in my commentary, but it does occur to me that there is a wider issue here. Can we ever say that some people should not be given communion in the Catholic church?

Let me put my cards on the table and say that this affects me personally, since my wife is an Anglican. This is part of the reason why the question interests me.

Who's in and who's out…

So far the rules go, apart from young children there are basically two groups who are not supposed to be given communion:

• non-Catholics, and
• those who, in the words of the relevant provision of canon law, are "obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin". Divorced people who remarry outside the Church who later return without first obtaining an annulment are the usual example.

I'm over-simplifying the situation here a little, for two reasons.

• First, the rules are actually a bit more nuanced that this. There isn't a blanket ban on all non-Catholics, for instance; there are different provisions for Orthodox Christians, for Christians with a belief in the Real Presence, and so forth, and there are also distinctions between regularly or routinely taking communion, and doing so exceptionally.
• Secondly, whatever the canonical provisions may say, as with so many areas of Catholic life the pastoral reality on the ground is often rather different.

But let that go. I'm interested in exploring the underlying principles here, and to get at those I'm going to allow myself a bit of over-simplification

Have we the right?

Over on the CathNews Discussion Board, whenever this issue is raised, Brian Haill posts to point out that the gospels do not record Jesus ever saying that anyone should be excluded from communion — his implication being, I think, that the church has no right to do this.

What attitude would Jesus have to the distribution of Communion?

About Jesus, of course, he is perfectly right. While Jesus says remarkably little specifically about communion, the whole history of his ministry is about reaching out to the alienated, the marginalised, the disreputable, the sinners. He doesn't wait for them to repent before he gives himself to them. While he does call them to repent, he never makes the grace of himself, his presence, his company conditional on their repentance.

So, like Brian, I'm not at all happy about denying anyone communion on the basis of their supposed sinfulness. Sacraments are the channel of God's grace and surely it is when we sin that we stand most in need of grace?

But park that thought for a moment; I'll come back to the sinners in a moment Let's look at the other excluded group; non-Catholics.

The Protestant view…

In the Protestant and Reformed traditions, an open attitude to communion is common (though not universal). Any baptised person is welcome to receive communion; in some churches, anyone at all.

This attitude has a powerful emotional appeal to me. It embodies the universality and openness of the Christian message. Christ does not wait for people to seek him; he actively seeks them. And what more powerful expression of that seeking can we have than Christ offering his body and blood, not just for everyone, but to everyone?

I think it is easier for Protestant and Reformed Christians to adopt this open attitude than for Catholics. Their tradition focuses strongly on the direct, personal, unmediated relationship between the individual and Christ. Who are you, or I, or the minister, or the congregation, or anyone to stand in the way of someone who seeks to encounter Christ by participating in the sacramental Eucharist?

The Catholic view…

For Catholics the Eucharist has other dimensions. It is the Eucharist which makes the church, the Body of Christ. The 'communion' in holy communion is not simply communion between the individual Christian and Christ, but communion among Christians; communion within the Body of Christ.

Hence taking communion can never be a unilateral action. My taking communion does not just say something about the relationship between me and Christ, but about the relationship between me and every other member of the Body of Christ. What it says is something important, and it had better be something true.

Taking the Sacrament, in the Catholic view, is both a sign of, and a means of creating, a greater communion between Christians. If that greater communion is lacking, then there is something deficient, perhaps even something dishonest, in taking the Sacrament.

And, it is important to realise, I do not get to decide unilaterally whether I am in communion with you. The point about communion, as with any other relationship, is that it is mutual. Hence nobody has a "right" to enter into communion with others on whatever terms he pleases. There needs to be a degree of sharing to create a true relationship of communion.

Now, it's a question for further reflection as to whether the necessary degree of shared belief, shared faith and shared Christian life does exist between (say) Catholics and Anglicans to make sharing the Eucharist an act which is true to the communion between them. But once you allow that the question can even be asked, it seems to me that you accept the basics of the Catholic view here.

Back to the sinners…

This brings me back to the issue of the sinners; those who are "obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin". I've always assumed that this rule was just a consequence of the general rule that someone who is affected by an unrepented grave sin is not supposed to take communion, reasoning like this:

• I'm in a better position than anyone else to know if I am in a state of serious sin, and if I have repented.
• The minister of the Eucharist typically will have no idea.
• Generally, therefore, it is my responsibility to apply this rule myself.
• But if my sin becomes public ("manifest", in the words of canon law), and the minister does know about it, then he is supposed to apply the same rule, and decline to give me communion.

It turns out, though, that I am wrong about the rationale for this rule — or, at least, Pope Benedict thinks I'm wrong.

	A photo of His Holiness as a Cardinal

When he was just Cardinal Ratzinger, he wrote a letter to the Archbishop of Washington, about withholding the Eucharist from politicians who systematically campaign for abortion. In that letter, he says that withholding communion from someone who is "obstinately persevering" does not involve the minister of Holy Communion passing judgment on the person's subjective guilt.

In other words, withholding communion is not some kind of "punishment" for sin. It does not involve concluding that, or even considering whether, the person concerned has sinned. It is not a statement about "worthiness" to receive communion. The person may be acting in all good conscience, and may have done all they can to inform their conscience, in which case they are certainly not sinning.

What Cardinal Ratzinger seems to be saying is that, if somebody's position is (a) public, and (b) fundamentally at variance with some core element of Catholic belief, then they should not take, or be given, Holy Communion. And the reason, I think, is that the necessary degree of communion, of shared faith and life, between the person and the church at large is not present.

I'm not quite sure what to make of this. To be honest with you, I'm still not comfortable with it. And yet it seems to be built on foundations that I do accept.

It is important to me that the Eucharist is a communion not just with some remote, spiritual, heavenly, interior Christ but with the incarnate Christ, really present in his people, alive, and active in the material world.

It does follow from this that the Church is not some interfering busybody, seeking to maximise its own power with its rules about who may, and who may not, take communion. The church is intimately involved in my communion — without the church, I simply can't have the communion that I am seeking.

But I think that we as a community should be very, very slow to identify this or that specific matter as one which is so central to communion that disagreement is a bar to sharing the Eucharist.

Historically, the beliefs which are set out in the Apostle's Creed represent the faith commitment required of a Christian seeking active communion with the Catholic church. I seriously doubt whether we are called to go much beyond that.

IMAGE SOURCES: The background image used in the headline wsa taken by Brian Coyne at the Mass to celebrate the Australian Catholic Bishops' Initiative for People with Disabilities in Canberra last year. Clicking on the other images will take you to the original source.

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Peregrinus can be contacted at: Peregrinus <peregrinus@catholica.com.au>

©2007 Peregrinus