Coveting the Eucharist

Saint Anthony of Padua Church in Houston has provided a thorough, detailed video guide to the reopening of their church for public Mass in this early phase. I encourage Catholics to consider what it will be like to re-gather responsibly in this limited way. It will be rather like boarding an airplane.

I nearly came to tears at the scene of receiving the Eucharist. This Eucharistic fast has been difficult.

My concern on a broad scale, though, is something I had never conceived of before the pandemic: the phenomenon of coveting the Eucharist.

We have already seen examples of some people who treat the Eucharist as an entitlement rather than a gift. With small Masses in the first phase of reopening, there is a strong temptation for some of us to rush back without asking the larger question of what Eucharistic justice might mean.

This is not a new question, of course. Paul raised the issue among Corinthian Christians in the first century. Addressing a church that experienced factions, he writes,

When you meet in one place, then, it is not to eat the Lord’s supper, for in eating, each one goes ahead with his own supper, and one goes hungry while another gets drunk. Do you not have houses in which you can eat and drink? Or do you show contempt for the church of God and make those who have nothing feel ashamed? (1 Cor 11: 18–22)

He identifies what I am calling a covetous attitude toward the Eucharist: a disordered desire for spiritual gifts, which St. John of the Cross called spiritual gluttony:

In receiving Communion they spend all their time trying to get some feeling and satisfaction rather than humbly praising and reverencing God dwelling within them.

Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, wrote on more than one occasion about the right attitude one ought to have to receive the Eucharist, and the kind of healing of attitude that can proceed from a fasting from the Eucharist. Pointing to Saint Augustine, who chose to fast from the Eucharist as he approached death, Ratzinger writes,

He wanted to meet his Lord in the humility of those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for him who is the Righteous and Merciful One. … Do we not often take the reception of the Blessed Sacrament too lightly? Might not this kind of spiritual fasting be of service, or even necessary, to deepen and renew our relationship to the Body of Christ? (Behold the Pierced One, 97–98)

and in his post-synodal apostolic exhortation Sacramentum Caritatis, he writes,

Our communities, when they celebrate the Eucharist, must become ever more conscious that the sacrifice of Christ is for all, and that the Eucharist thus compels all who believe in him to become “bread that is broken” for others, and to work for the building of a more just and fraternal world. (88)

Receiving the gift of the Eucharist in these times appears to me to involve a willingness to see oneself as entrusted with a particular mission to pray and work for the healing of the world. As a “medicine of immortality” — the phrase used by the second-century bishop Ignatius of Antioch — the Eucharist is a gift to be shared.

Those who are able to receive, therefore, must at the very least be willing to devote time in prayer to those who cannot: the aged, the sick, the people who work (often blue-collar) jobs with inflexible schedules; those who can’t expose themselves to public transportation; those who live at great distance from parishes; and many others. Even better, they should be willing to be public witnesses of the kind of mission the Mass prepares us for. Its closing words are some form of “go, you are sent” (the words which, in Latin, give us the very word “Mass”), meaning that to participate in(not just watch) the Mass, one assents to be in the world what God wants us to be, namely builders of a just and beautiful Kingdom.

In short, I propose this: those who intend to return to Mass sooner than later must discern in prayer what unique role God gives you in building the Kingdom today, under these still very serious conditions. There is no business as usual in public worship (if there ever was).