The "Eucharist" is the Christian ceremony celebrating the Last Supper, and also refers to the bread and wine consecrated during the ceremony and received by the priest and the congregation. During the past few months, the press has reported calls by various Catholic bishops to deny the Eucharist to President Biden, as a punishment for his failure to support a national ban on abortion, or, more accurately, because his political beliefs and actions render him "unworthy" of receiving communion.
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has decided to draft and issue a "teaching document" reminding the faithful of the meaning of the Eucharist. The press had been rife with rumors that the document would specifically authorize a bishop to refuse the Eucharist to politicians under certain conditions. Representatives of the USCCB have denied that this will be the intent or the effect of the document.
The controversy aroused by this issue reminds me of a weekly email sent to parishioners by our then-pastor back in February 2020. The email did not address directly the subject of the Eucharist, but rather eloquently examined the nature of the Church itself, and noted the impossibility that any formal statement of doctrine could adequately sum up the nature of reality or set forth the fullness of the Christian message.
I'm copying a lengthy excerpt from that email, whose eloquence of expression I admire, and which I find myself reading over again from time to time.
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We can forget, sometimes, that our Catholic identity is rooted not in some clear and distinct theological and dogmatic ideas, but in the story of Jesus Christ and the unfolding story of the Church, i.e., the People of God. Ideas, dogmas, theological schemas: all may arise from our reading of the story of Jesus, but they are always just approximations—attempts to synthesize and reduce to a “yes” or “no” framework something which is, by its very nature, as complex, as open to various and varied interpretations as is the human experience itself. Jesus doesn’t come into the world with a white-board to explain everything to us, once and for all; but comes with a story, and leaves his story behind, to be told until the end of days. And while the teachings and the precepts may be important, what connects us to Christ is his story, as it is told by those who loved him and received by us; a story into which we are called to enter and make our own. In the end, the message of Christianity—including Catholicism—is that the complex revelation present in a human being and in a human community cannot be reduced to any idea or summarizing principle. The narrative character of Catholicism means that truth emerges only in the dynamic interplay of everything human—thought and feeling, intuition and rationality, science and poetry, action and reflection, gender and transcendence, individuality and community—which only our story can bear. Or, as St. Irenaeus says more succinctly: “The glory of God is the human person fully alive.”
In these days of competing ideologies and systems, there is a temptation to equate certainty of facts with the fullness of truth, and so to reduce the value of story to something less important and less true. We want definite answers—a “yes” or a “no”—which ideology too easily supplies. But what if the deepest truth of this world, and our deepest truth, cannot be reduced to bumper sticker aphorisms or 280 character tweets? What if truth requires engagement and encounter, like a book that needs to be opened and read, like a story that needs to be heard and told, over and over again—and whose meaning changes us, and changes in us, in ways we may not ever fully fathom? Then, if we want truth, we should read great stories—by Dostoyevski and Camus, L’Engle and Austen, Baldwin and Borges, and anyone else who opens our heart. And if we want true religion, we should read the gospels—not to sift out the rules or look for the loopholes, but to encounter the humanity of our God, whose Word longs to become part of our story.
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