An analysis of new trends in Eucharistic theology within the Church of Rome
A few years ago the suggestion that Roman Catholic and Protestant clergy might one day have intercommunion would have been thought preposterous by both sides. Today it is not. During the last few years, some developments in the Roman Catholic Church, particularly studies on the Lord’s Supper and on relations with Protestants, have brought about changes in theory and practice that lead one to ask: What next?
As recently as four years ago Roman Catholics were forbidden by canon law to worship with non-Catholics: “By no means is it permitted for the faithful to assist actively in any way whatsoever or to participate in non-Catholic worship” (Codex Juris Canonici, 1258). But the Second Vatican Council gave guarded encouragement to certain forms of common worship:
In certain circumstances, such as in prayer services “for unity” and during ecumenical gatherings, it is allowable, indeed desirable, that Catholics should join with their separated brethren. Such prayers in common are certainly a very effective means of petitioning for the grace of unity, and they are a genuine expression of the ties which even now bind Catholics to their separated brethren. “For where two or three are gathered together for My sake, there am I in the midst of them” (Mt. 18:20). As for common worship, however, it may not be regarded as a means to be used indiscriminately for the restoration of unity among Christians. Such worship depends chiefly on two principles: it should signify the unity of the Church; it should provide a sharing of the means of grace. The fact that it should signify unity generally rules out common worship. Yet the gaining of a needed grace sometimes commends it. [“Decree on Ecumenism,” The Documents of Vatican II, 8].
Four days before the close of the council, the Pope set an example of interfaith worship when he took part in a prayer service with Protestants and Greek Orthodox at one of Rome’s great churches. Joint worship of Roman Catholics and other Christians is no longer news.
But what about intercommunion? To sing, pray, and hear the Word together is one thing; to share the Eucharist is another.
Is it? Some theologians wonder. With the “new look” in the theology of the Mass and the conviction of some theologians on both sides of the ecclesiastical fence that the other’s doctrine might not be so bad after all, the possibility of intercommunion no longer seems remote.
On the Roman Catholic side, there has been in recent years a spate of writings on the Eucharist that sound more like Reformation theology than what most of us have associated with Rome. The old terms are still used, but often the meaning is changed; and there are new terms, too. Paul VI’s encyclical Mysterium Fidei (September 3, 1965), meant particularly as a warning to Dutch theologians, seems not to have slowed them down but rather to have been received as part of the ongoing discussion. The term transubstantiation is used, but transfinalization and transignification—i.e., the idea that the bread and wine have a new finality, a new significance or meaning—continue to be used also. More important, Christ’s presence in the Supper is understood in personal, spiritual categories. The bread remains bread. “The physical reality does not change, otherwise there would no longer be any eucharistic sign,” says Edward Schillebeeckx, one of Rome’s top theologians (“Transubstantiation,” Worship, Vol. 40, p. 337). Kilian McDonnell, a Benedictine whose magnum opus on John Calvin, the Church, and the Eucharist has just been published by Princeton University Press, writes similarly: “Only on condition that the materiality of bread remains can there be a eucharistic reality” (p. 315).
They, and other Roman Catholic theologians, not only interpret the Eucharist in terms more acceptable to Protestant understanding but show positive appreciation for the Protestant celebration of the Holy Supper as well. In doing so they agree with Vatican II, which, though it lamented that separated Christian brethren “have not preserved the genuine and total reality of the eucharistic mystery,” nevertheless conceded that “when they commemorate the Lord’s death and resurrection in the Holy Supper, they profess that it signifies life in communion with Christ and they await His coming in glory” (“Decree on Ecumenism,” 22).
Since the Dutch theologians have been in the center of the Eucharistic debate with Roman Catholicism, it is instructive to hear what they say. Passing over the Jesuit Piet Schoonenberg, whose untranslated Dutch Eucharistic writings caused a considerable stir, we mention the Dominican Edward Schillebeeckx and the Jesuit Frans Jozef van Beeck. Schillebeeckx’s Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God laments the focusing of attention after the Council of Trent (1545–63) on the substance of the elements and on the recipient of the sacrament and his dispositions, while the encounter of the Christian with God in Christ received inadequate attention. Schillebeeckx is a personalist, and he interprets the Gospel and the Eucharist accordingly. Wasting no time, he begins his book by saying:
One cannot help remarking that the theology of the manuals does not always make a careful distinction between that unique manner of existence which is peculiar to man, and the mode of being, mere objective “being there,” which is proper to the things of nature. The absence of this distinction, particularly in the treating of grace or of the sacraments, occasionally obscures the simple fact of encounter with God. The intimateness of God’s personal approach to man is often lost in a too severely objective examination of that which forms the living core and centre of religion, the personal communion with the God who gives himself to men [from Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God by Eduard Schillebeeckx, O.P., © Sheed and Ward Ltd., 1963, published by Sheed & Ward, Inc., New York; this and the following quotations used by permission].
In the study of the sacraments, the consequence of this tendency towards a purely impersonal, almost mechanical approach was that they were considered chiefly in terms of physical categories. The inclination was to look upon the sacraments as but one more application, although in a special manner, of the general laws of cause and effect. Inevitably, the result of this view was that we appeared to be merely passive recipients of sacramental grace, which seemed to be “put into us” automatically. We do not, however, want to divert ourselves with the defects of the theological works of the last two centuries, but positively and constructively to take up the study of the Church’s sacraments, with the concept of human, personal encounter as the basis of our consideration.
Religion is above all a saving dialogue between man and the living God.
The most interesting part of the book is his struggle with the problem of Protestant sacraments’ seeming to be charismatic, life-giving ordinances, and yet being invalid. Reformed communion is not a true sacrament; yet it has a “positive and Christian significance.” The author feels he must examine this “delicate question closely” in the light of Thomistic principles. Thomas did not deal with this question, since he knew nothing of the Reformation, but he shows that whoever is validly baptized “possesses an inner orientation to the Catholic sacrament of the Eucharist.” Schillebeeckx goes on:
Are Protestants willing, for the sake of ecumenicity and fraternity, to commune after the manner of the Mass?
Furthermore, valid baptism is implicitly a “Eucharist of desire.” Therefore in virtue of their baptism Christians of the Reformation have an inner orientation to the Catholic Eucharist. For the baptism is truly a Catholic sacrament which in consequence incorporates them not into the separated community but into the Catholic Church [p. 192],
Thomas claims that no single grace comes to us except through a desire, at least implicit, for the Eucharist. With this desire, the essential effect of the sacrament is received. Yet it is not necessary that we receive this effect through the real sacramental reception of the Eucharist. A “Eucharist of desire” is enough, and this is necessary for salvation. Evangelical Christians have this, and so in their communion services they really participate in the res sacramenti, or in the effect of the sacrament, though not to the full. The fathers ate manna in the desert and communicated in a spiritual manner, but this eating of the fathers was more than mere spiritual communion. Likewise Protestant communion is more than that. “It is the spiritual reception of the sacrament itself” (p. 193). As Thomas says, “This is not only to eat Christ spiritually but also to partake spiritually of the [true Catholic] sacrament” (ibid.). Schillebeeckx says such a statement has many and far-reaching consequences, for it is impossible to deny that the Protestant rite is truly a figure of the Eucharist, more so than the manna or the Jewish Passover.
It is not merely a foreshadowing, it is a direct commemoration of the Last Supper, even if not in the full ecclesial sense of the word. Some of the fundamental aspects of the Catholic Eucharist are lacking in the Protestant Communion Service, but others are retained in it. And this is sufficient to enable us to apply with even greater right the ancient patristic and scholastic view of non-Catholic sacraments as vestigia Ecclesiae, traces of the true Church of Christ, to the Protestant sacraments [p. 194].
Schillebeeckx takes his position with reservation, aware that the teaching authority of the church may decide otherwise, but he argues that the Protestant Communion is a “quasi-sacramental manifestation of an explicit eucharistic desire which, moreover, implicitly looks forward to the true fruits of the Catholic Eucharist.” Thus in our Supper there is an “intrinsic tendency towards integration into the Catholic Eucharist” (p. 194).
Van Beeck, writing similarly in the Journal of Ecumenical Studies (Winter, 1966), tells of the common current Roman Catholic theological conviction that the celebration of the Lord’s Supper in the Presbyterian church two blocks away is not “nothing.” But if it is not nothing, what is it? Rejecting the categories of valid and invalid as inadequate, he tells of a student who asked Karl Rahner whether a priest would be validly ordained even if in the chain of episcopal consecrations leading up to his ordination there had been an invalid consecration. Rahner’s response was, “One should not think of these things in the manner of an apothecary.” What about the priest, reasons Van Beeck, who learns that he was invalidly ordained after a lifetime of fruitful ministry? Or what about the happy parents who, on the eve of their fiftieth wedding anniversary, discover they were invalidly married? Van Beeck’s response is this: The Roman Catholic Church has a “healthy awareness of the relativity of the notions of validity and invalidity in matters sacramental. Validity is no more (and no less) than the juridical claim to ecclesiastical recognition; it is the finishing touch every normal sacramental celebration needs as its marginal rounding-off” (p. 63). Juridical thinking of the sacraments gets rough treatment from this author, who would have them looked at existentially.
What, then, are the Protestant sacraments? Some Roman Catholic theologians, says Van Beeck, affirm that Protestant sacraments do not celebrate salvation really but only spiritually. Van Beeck rejects this distinction because it assumes that spiritual, as used here, is tantamount to unreal. He shows that this distinction can be traced to scholastic theology, which used physice ambivalently as “real” or “material.” So the spiritual, then, is relegated to the realm of the unreal, or imagination, or metaphor. This led to a material conception of the sacrament at the expense of its value as a sign. Once the choice was put this way, the Reformers opted for “spiritual.” Van Beeck says that if the Protestant sacraments celebrate salvation spiritually, they must be real sacraments (p. 66).
He then draws the consequences of the fact that Vatican II, at its third session, called Protestant communions “churches” and envisioned the whole church as the people of God on its pilgrim way into the future. Since Vatican II, Van Beeck argues, the unity of the church is no longer seen as a “juridically outlined, fixed unity of order; it has also, and pre-eminently, come to be viewed as Christ’s eschatological gift to his perfect community” (p. 70). Protestants, too, are part of this:
The ecumenical mentality provides not just a new political situation among the Churches, but a theological one: it means a conversion to an eschatological view of the Church, putting an end to the exclusive, paradoxical, antithetical situation in which the Churches antagonize each other. The Churches are in good faith, for the differences among the Churches no longer bear the stigma of formal invalidity and heresy [p. 72, n. 87].
Coming to grips with the problem of the “validity” of Protestant sacraments, Van Beeck argues that valid celebration necessitates (1) a church base from which it is administered, (2) proper intentions, and (3) a competent minister. All agree that the first two are met in Protestantism; but what about number three? A history of sacramental practice, writes Van Beeck, shows that the validity of a sacrament has never been one-sidedly linked up with a validly ordained minister. There was always the possibility of the minister extraordinarily. He can administer baptism, confirmation, and even marriage (p. 80), according to canon law. But all the sacraments have been so administered at times, says Van Beeck. The reason for this and for its recognition by the church as valid has been the need, or situation, in the church, and not law (p. 88). The real theological base is the universal priesthood of all believers, which under normal circumstances operates through the recognized ministers but which in emergencies has operated through those deputized by the faithful. Protestants have done this when they have lived in a protracted extraordinary situation. Consequently, he concludes, Protestant sacraments and ministers may be recognized as such by Roman Catholic theology and church order. Dogma and order are essentially provisional. They may never be allowed to tie salvation down to themselves in a univocal way (p. 95). The church is in status viae, and dogma and order are meant only to help her on the way.
Van Beeck criticizes the traditional distinction between joint prayer and the reading of the Word on the one hand and the joint celebration of sacraments on the other:
Prayer and Bible services are all too often permitted “because nothing happens in them,” as if prayer and the Word were not sacramental. On the other hand there is a tendency to view joint celebrations of sacraments as acts of the most perfect communio, which, therefore, would have to be postponed till the day on which official mutual recognition would be achieved. But is not this to forget that the communio in via will never be perfect and that it is also in the nature of a sacrament to be a pledge of salvation? It seems not wholly sound to consider the sacraments so eschatological as to practically deny that they are part of the status viae of the Church [p. 108].
The Protestant response to much of this is: Well and good, but what about the sacrifice of the Mass? Van Beeck suggests that the Roman Catholic “Eucharist as sacrificium Christi” and the Protestant Supper “as sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving carry essentially the same meaning, although viewed from very different doctrinal angles” (p. 109). He does not stand alone; some other Roman Catholic, and Protestant, theologians share his view.
Still there remain a number of unresolved problems. Just what is the nature of the Eucharist? In what manner do Christians feed on Christ? With Rome’s conviction about the infallibility and irreversibility of dogma, allowing for the qualifications made—historical conditionedness of all dogmatic statements, the necessary one-sidedness of all polemical statements, the imperfection of all dogma, and so on—are Protestants finally willing, for the sake of ecumenicity and fraternity, to overlook what their fathers believed to be “a cursed idolatry” (Heidelberg Catechism, Q.80) and commune after the manner of the Mass? Are Roman Catholics likely to forget the anathemas they have heard poured out against Protestant perversion of the “Blessed Sacrament,” and will their leaders allow their people to eat bread and drink grape juice in a typical Protestant setting?
These are only some of the questions that will be asked increasingly with the growth of the spirit of ecumenicity. They will have to be faced in honesty as well as love if there is to be real progress.
