The Communion Controversy - Father Joseph Wilson

Long after his death, Father Leo Trese proved to be quite a conversation-stopper.

I'm sure I haven't thought of this story for over twenty years, but recently it popped, unavoidably, into my head. I was in a discussion group with some of my fellow seminarians, in one of those progressive postconciliar seminaries which specialized in updating the Faith. Precisely what was the discussion topic, I can't recall. But I remember referring to a point made by Father Trese, in one of his pre-conciliar books for priests, where he said, "Of course, we all realize that the Priest who ascends the altar in a state of mortal sin does not offer a sacrifice. He commits a murder."

The effect on the group sitting there was electrifying. They clearly thought that this was a thoroughly morbid, "old-church" hyper-supernaturalist perspective. It had nothing to say to them. In their seminary formation, they had been repeatedly taught to contrast the perspective of the "old church" with the enlightened, renewed approach of the postconciliar age, so dismissing a bit of uncomfortable old school spirituality was really just a reflex.

Interesting reflex, though; especially after you've read Saint Paul on the subject: "Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord" (I Cor 11:27 RSV). In dismissing Father Trese, they were putting aside Saint Paul.

Catholicism, as I have said elsewhere, is more than simply a list of rules to be followed, or a list of things to be mastered and memorized. Catholicism is a deep, and wide, and fruitful way of looking at all reality in light of the Incarnation of Him Who became flesh, and dwelt among us, and lived, and suffered, and died for us, and rose again. In light of that Mystery, and following in the footsteps of the saints, all of life is transformed, everything is charged with meaning. And everything is seen in that light.

And, ideally, one absorbs this through the life of the Church: a vision, a peculiar way of looking at things. This is the birthright of every Catholic; that through his participation in the Church's life, the catechesis he experiences, the liturgies at which he assists, he experiences the very life of the Church, he is formed by that life as it is authentically expressed. This, I repeat is our birthright.

I recall another time in the seminary, a Moral Theology class. The professor had arranged for us to view a series of ninety-minute Public Broadcasting presentations on medical/ethical issues. The series wasn't produced under Catholic auspices, but it was well worth viewing.

One installment was on amniocentesis, and the moral implications of seeking to determine whether an unborn child was 'normal' or 'healthy.' In one disturbing segment, we saw a group of profoundly retarded children. They were institutionalized, and we saw them sitting listlessly around a playground. The contrast between the brightly colored playground furniture and the non-responsive children was jarring.

Afterwards, as we had coffee in the refectory, one of my classmates said to me, "And you wouldn't even let people practice birth control?"

This is the sort of moment that demands discussion in our Church. My classmate was not a bad, or ill-disposed person. He took his theological studies seriously. But because he was serious in his studies, he had thoroughly absorbed what he had been taught through the very atmosphere of that seminary: that we were living in a privileged, new age, in which the "old answers" of the "preconciliar church" were at best suspect, and virtually everything was up for grabs. Again, he had presented himself to the Church for formation in all good faith: and this was how he was being formed.

To his pointed question, I replied, "Um, now, wait a minute. Are you suggesting that you are able to draw a line and judge who should have been created, and who should not have?" And, to his credit, he immediately saw the problem to which I was pointing. What I had said to him was, quite simply, the Catholic perspective. It was true, and he recognized that.

But isn't it troubling that, knowing what the Church teaches on such issues as contraception, he naturally assumed that it was a good thing to question it? He was a seminarian in the Major Seminary, preparing for parish ministry; but, rather than being able to come to drink of the stream of perennial wisdom of the Church and be formed by it, he had absorbed a mentality which sees the Church's teaching as a starting discussion point. And this is not simply a situation in one seminary. It is a Church-wide problem in our country.

It is with this context in mind that I read the pastoral letter of the Bishop of Colorado Springs regarding pro-abortion politicians, the Catholics who vote for them, and the reception of Holy Communion.

"There must be no confusion in these matters. Any Catholic politicians who advocate for abortion, for illicit stem cell research or for any form of euthanasia ipso facto place themselves outside full communion with the Church and so jeopardize their salvation. Any Catholics who vote for candidates who stand for abortion, illicit stem cell research or euthanasia suffer the same fateful consequences. It is for this reason that these Catholics, whether candidates for office or those who would vote for them, may not receive Holy Communion until they have recanted their positions and been reconciled with God and the Church in the Sacrament of Penance."

Now, I'd like to reflect a bit on where we find ourselves as Catholics in America today.

The presumptive Democratic candidate for President, Senator John Kerry, professes himself a devout and committed Roman Catholic. It is important to bear this profession of faith in mind especially as one sees photos of him kneeling at the communion rail of an African Methodist Episcopal Church, or ponders his support not just for abortion rights, but for the loathsome partial birth abortion procedure. John Kerry is a committed, devout Roman Catholic, by his own profession of faith.

The Bishop of Colorado Springs, Michael Sheridan, seems quite clear in saying that not only is Mr. Kerry barred from Holy Communion, those voting for him, and for politicians supporting abortion, should also understand that they are outside the communion of the Church, and that they are jeopardizing their salvation. Several other bishops have publicly stated that Catholics making public pro-abortion stances should not approach Holy Communion. Meanwhile, the Archbishop of Washington, Cardinal McCarrick, says that he is not comfortable with barring such a person from Holy Communion, and Roger Cardinal Mahony, Archbishop of Los Angeles, says that Mr. Kerry is "welcome" to receive Communion. And there has raged in the Church, both pro and con, discussion about when a priest or Eucharistic Minister should refuse the Eucharist to a communicant.

Eucharistic discipline, it would seem, is now a matter of diocesan boundaries. I wouldn't have thought, a month ago, that the bishops could have further messed up our situation as a Church. It just goes to show that I do not give them nearly enough credit.

Watching this public discussion, it has occurred to me that a few things need stating which many people of good will seem not to realize.

The first is that hesitation about refusing Holy Communion to someone, even to someone who is publicly known to be in a situation contrary to the Church's teaching, is not necessarily the sign of a bad priest. It might be the sign of a charitable, realistic, prudent priest who does not want to hurt someone who is not malicious, but confused, perhaps even innocently.

I'm speaking as a parish priest who once had a couple a faithful, Mass-every-Sunday couple, kids-in-CCD couple suggest to me that my Trinity Sunday homily might have confused the children because "it almost sounded as though you were saying that Jesus is God." I understood immediately where they were coming from, as we were exactly the same age. We made out first Communions in May of 1967. We were the first class never to have seen the Catechism; we got large, outsized books with bright colored pictures and almost no text instead. These folks had never been taught the Faith; it was a minor miracle that they were at Mass at all. But they hadn't the vaguest idea what the Creed meant, or the Incarnation, or the Trinity. And that was at least partly because of what the Church had failed to teach them.

Or there was the couple who came up to me after Mass on my first Sunday in my current parish, seeking a blessing. They were beginning treatments in a fertility clinic to produce a child, using a procedure which was clearly immoral.

Or the couple who had been counseled into a 'selective termination' by a priest; the wife had conceived twins, the doctor said that one twin was in trouble and, if he were aborted, the other would be healthier. They came seeking the priest's advice; he told them that whatever they did, God would be with them

Oh, I could multiply such stories almost infinitely, but to what purpose? It is obvious that something is wrong, seriously wrong. It is the birthright of a Catholic to be born into the Family of God, to be raised in the Faith, to be formed by the Gospel and the Catholic Tradition. A Catholic should be able, throughout his life, to assist at the sacred Liturgy celebrated according to the mind of the Church, the feasts and fasts and sounds and scents of which shape and form the very soul. He should have learned the stories of the Lord Jesus and the teachings of the Church.

It is a shameful situation that so many have been robbed of this birthright; but it is true. Gallup established that even with regard to a central doctrine such as the Eucharist, only a third of MASS-ATTENDING Catholics could identify the Catholic teaching when it was set before them. And Mass-attending Catholics are harder to come by nowadays; after a drop of more than sixty percent over thirty years, Mass attendance stands at some 18%.

Ignorance of Christian doctrine is extraordinarily pervasive in the Church today. A book like "The DaVinci Code" easily draws a following among Catholics, who read its ludicrous assertions, such as that Constantine the Great invented the doctrine of Christ's divinity in the 300's, without ever realizing that the first chapter of St John's Gospel would debunk that lie if they but knew where to look for John's Gospel.

There are many Catholics today who were simply never taught the fundamental doctrines of the Catholic Faith. When it came to moral issues, if they got any moral "instruction" at all, it was a group discussion on a story showing some sort of moral situation, and through the discussion each group member was encouraged to find "your own answers." It is not that these folks do not want to be good people if by some miracle they are still active Catholics, that argues for their good will. But they have no idea of Catholicism. It is a dismal fact that the only reason most Catholics know the teaching of the Church on the moral questions of our day birth control, abortion, stem cell research, euthanasia, homosexuality, fornication, remarriage after divorce, etc is because they hear about it from the secular media. They certainly do not hear of it from the pulpit. But from the media they hear, not the reasoning, but the "bottom line," the Thou Shalt Not. And because they never hear the reasoning, they never have the chance to be formed in the Catholic Faith. The teachings of the Church are bits of unconnected data mediaeval-sounding data to be accepted or, more likely, rejected at will.

This is the dirty little secret of the Catholic Church in America. Most of the talk about "Renewal" over the last forty years has been nonsense; nothing that has lost sixty percent of its active membership can claim to be 'renewed.' The Sacred Liturgy was debased into an exercise in group self-expression; the whole sense of the Catholic Tradition, to be gratefully received, lived, and passed on, was junked in favor of a massive group-process exercise which assumes that Christian history started in the reign of John XXIII.

In light of all of this, perhaps we should go slow, very slow, before we start to talk about the priest on Sunday morning, administering the Blessed Sacrament, and his obligation to refuse Communion to reprobates.

Most priests have no desire to do more harm than good. Day in, and day out, a parish priest today will run across people woefully un-grounded in theFaith. Yet the frustrating truth is that, even if he preaches solidly and consistently from his pulpit at all Masses and offers the best possible catechesis and adult education, in this highly mobile society a certain percentage of his people will have moved during each year, to go off to places of uncertain teaching and be replaced by others from places with faulty teaching. Because catechesis in this country is so woefully inconsistent, a parish priest can feel as though he's trying to scoop out the ocean with a soup spoon.

I have watched with interest over these past few weeks, as discussion has raged in the Church over whether or not pro-abortion politicians, and now even those who vote for them, should be admitted to Holy Communion. If you follow the discussion with care, you'll note that this really isn't an in-house, Catholic Church discussion. There are two different Religions talking past each other here.

On the one hand, there are people who understand the teaching on the Eucharist. They understand Father Trese's point; to approach the Eucharist in a state of mortal sin is to commit a sacrilege, for one has, by one's sin, shut the door of one's heart to Jesus, committed idolatry, really, by preferring to Him something that one cannot have and have Him also, and thereby one has literally chosen a false god. I cannot commit adultery and still walk with Jesus, murder and walk with Jesus, slander and still possess Him; if I receive Communion with such sin on my soul, I don't simply lie. I crucify Him again. That's the Faith.

But then there are those on the other hand. What I just wrote will make no sense to them. Catholicism is not the pursuit of holiness to them. They are already okay, 'good people;' the Eucharist is something like an inclusion ritual, like birthday cake at a party, something to which everyone is invited. It would be mean to refuse someone a piece of birthday cake. Everyone should be welcome, and if you should happen to find yourself in an African Methodist Episcopal Church at communion time well, dig in and help yourself!

Undoubtedly, there are many in this latter group who know better, or should. But there are many, many more who honestly don't. They were deprived of their birthright. Eucharistic discipline is for them a hopelessly medieval concept (mediaeval is everything before Pius the Twenty-Third, as John Kerry will tell you). What they have absorbed from their experience of the Church is that truth is subjective, your answers are to be found within, and whatever Father X might preach from his pulpit or teach in his confessional, there's always that nice Father Y in the next parish with a different set of answers.

The madness of it all is that this has been going on for so long, and yet we are still enmeshed in this weird denial, still talking about the past forty yearsas 'Renewal.' People are pointing the finger at John Kerry as though they have no idea that the vast majority of communicants on Sunday are totally neglecting Confession, and that most Catholics, having no idea of the rationale for Catholic Moral teachings, pick and choose among those teachings as they wish. If we truly cared about our own people as we should, this situation would be accorded the most urgent priority status. We would move heaven and earth to develop and implement a clear, consistent, coordinated, country-wide catechesis, supported by adult education. And alarm bells would have been rung long ago about the liturgical abuses which subvert our sense of the sacred.

What a peculiar sight we must present to our nation. Our bishops publicly contradicting each other on points of discipline, all the while everyone knows that masses of our people don't even understand, let alone accept our teaching. And, as a Church, it all means so little to us that apparently we cannot bring ourselves to admit that we are in trouble. We've been robbing our own of their birthright, of that deep, and rich, and fruitful way of looking at all Reality in light of Him Who became one of us, and died for us, and loves us.

What a great many things we can find to distract us. Anything, apparently, anything to avoid having to fix our eyes on Jesus.

Father Joseph Wilson is a priest of the diocese of Brooklyn, serving at St. Luke's Church in Queens, NY. This article appears here with his permission. Email author: [email protected] (This essay also appeared at Cruxnews.com May 21, 2004)

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