'Open Communion': a sign of disintegration, not progress

Many Protestant churches today accept and celebrate indiscriminate eucharistic sharing. Fr Ian of St Mary Magdalene parish, Blaenau Ffestiniog, questions the wooly thinking behind such a practice, which has come to enjoy growing support among Catholics.            

A typical group photograph after a typical Catholic First Communion Mass

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There's something about Mary

Consider this tale of woe, reported some time ago, on the website of the pressure group The Association of Interchurch Families.

Mary is a young girl with a Catholic mother and an Anglican father. Her parents decide that the occasion of her First Holy Communion will be spoiled if dad cannot receive the Eucharist during the First Communion Mass. All three write separately to the local bishop, requesting his permission for this to take place.

The bishop replies, explaining Catholic discipline in the area: only in very exceptional circumstances is it permissible for non-Catholics to receive Communion in the Catholic Church, and these circumstances do not include a First Holy Communion Mass.

The mother sends a second letter. She informs the bishop that her husband 'shares the Catholic eucharistic faith' and, adopting a tone of sweeping magisterial authority, adds: 'You do have all the episcopal powers necessary to make exceptions to the normal practice'. The bishop answers again, repeating his previous decision.

'We need to receive'!

The mother writes to the bishop a third time. She states: 'we need to receive as a family together' and reveals that they have long been in the habit of attending the local Anglican church on alternate Sundays. She omits to say that she usually takes the Anglican eucharist when she worships in her husband's church, but this comes to light later.

'We fully realise the age, range of experience and lack of knowledge on current ecumenical matters of our parish priest,' she remarks. The evidence for this condescending judgement seems to be that the parish priest had decided that Mary should only make her First Communion if she will be able to attend Mass every, and not every other, Sunday thereafter.

Pushy Mum then announces that she has managed to find another more compliant priest anyway and that her daughter celebrated her First Holy Communion a month earlier. She complains that her own parish priest is making demands 'that he doesn't impose on the average Catholic family'.

Once again the bishop responds, drawing the mother's attention to her breach of Catholic Eucharistic discipline (see Canon 844 of the Code of Canon Law: 'Catholic ministers administer the sacraments licitly to Catholic members of the Christian faithful alone, who likewise receive them licitly from Catholic ministers alone'). But the bishop concedes wearily that Mary can join the other children in her own parish at their First Communion Mass (for Mary a 'Second Holy Communion' as it were).

Further onerous negotiations ensue between the family and the parish priest, who by this time must have been hiding behind the sofa whenever he heard the doorbell. The parents finally declare themselves, with a monumental lack of self-awareness, 'joyful but totally exhausted', and the article ends with the triumphant proclamation that a 'special house Mass' was celebrated by a 'priest friend' for godparents and others who were unable to attend Mary's First Communion. 

A ridiculous affair

My own view of this ridiculous affair was that these febrile and self-involved individuals were shown far more patience than they deserved. It is regrettable that the bishop did not deal firmly and briskly with the parents' baseless appeals, thus demonstrating solidarity with the beleaguered parish priest. His failure to hold to his initial clear statement of teaching and practice gives the impression that the Church's principles don't apply to those who are obstinate and assertive enough in demanding special treatment.   

If Mary's father 'shares the Catholic eucharistic faith' why had he not become a Catholic? Then there are all the other elements of the Catholic Faith to which we implicitly assent when we receive Communion - all light years away from both the fluidities of modern Anglicanism and the sacramental minimalism of the Independents. 

Here as in other aspects of the dispute - the obligation to attend Sunday Mass, for example, and the mother's action in regularly taking communion in one of the separated church communities - it is Mary's parents and not the parish priest who are suffering from a 'lack of knowledge on current ecumenical matters'.

Right up to the celebration of Mass in their own home - Mary's 'Third Holy Communion'? - the parents exhibited a self-righteousness and pomposity which is, unsurprisingly fully shared by the authors at the Association of Interchurch Families, who allow no hint of self-questioning or sense of proportion to lighten their reporting of the whole palaver.

Woolly-mindedness and sentimentality

Let's move from the particular to the general.

Leaders of the European Reformation, engraving by an unknown artist 

When the Protestant churches came into existence in Western Europe at the start of the sixteenth century they naturally restricted their Eucharistic celebrations to their own professing members. Many called the Sacrifice of the Mass a blasphemy. But the movement initiated by the Reformers soon proved to be highly fissiparous, endlessly breaking into smaller, separate denominations, each with their own theologies, and liturgies, of the Eucharist.

Today of course the dominant trend in relations between the mainstream Protestant churches is not continued fragmentation but growing convergence. In my opinion, however, the pressure to come together is less the result of the movement for Church Unity that arose during the twentieth century and more a consequence of the collapse, in church circles, of clear thinking and a corresponding rise in woolly-mindedness and sentimentality.

Liberal Protestants have ceased to take their own history and traditions seriously. Some declare airily that being a 'caring person', or an environmental campaigner, or whatever, is more important than holding precise beliefs about God. Blessed are the tolerant, the inclusive, the diverse.

Only in such an impoverished intellectual climate, characterised by the disintegration of former certainties, could the focus of ecumenical endeavour shift away from detailed dialogue about long-standing theological differences and onto emotive talk about 'the pain of separation'. Evangelicals and Pentecostals who have no desire whatever to receive the Catholic Eucharist, based on firm doctrinal convictions, are actually providing a more solid foundation for honest ecumenical discussion.         

The Eucharist cannot be instrumentalised

On the Catholic side, the Church has always maintained that reception of the Body and Blood of Christ by all Christians can only take place at the end-point of our ecumenical efforts. The Eucharist must never be used tactically to bring about a cosmetic unity that leaves significant divisions unresolved.

Joint teaching document One Bread, One Body, 1998 by the Catholic bishops of England, Wales, Ireland & Scotland 

But this is exactly what the modern practice of inter-communion, or eucharistic hospitality, has done. Churches which now extend their own eucharist to all-comers, while permitting their members to receive anywhere and everywhere else, have killed the ecumenical movement, as originally conceived, stone dead.

Impatient of ever achieving 'one Lord, one Faith, one Church' they have, so to speak, abandoned the goal of lifelong marriage and lapsed into indiscriminate bed-hopping instead.

A new Eucharistic Crusade

But increasingly, among Catholics, there are those who advocate the sentimentalist idea of an 'open' or 'inclusive' Eucharist. They maintain that to refuse Protestants Communion during Mass, and to be prohibited from receiving Communion during Protestant services, is to be 'exclusive' – a grave modern heresy.

Some parish priests, wishing to avoid confrontation, acquiesce in instances of inter-communion on the part of their parishioners. Others openly flaunt their opposition to church norms, like the Welsh cleric who, on one infamous occasion, invited the vicar of some Powys hamlet to receive Communion during Sunday Mass, only to watch helplessly as the lay minister resolutely refused to offer her the Precious Blood from the chalice.

Many of these self-styled radicals are trapped in a sort of perpetual adolescence: for them, more than half the fun lies in defying authority and transgressing known disciplines. Priests who encourage parishioners to play fast and loose with the norms governing admission to Communion are choosing personal popularity over pastoral duty.

But whatever their motives, I believe that what is now necessary, and long overdue, is a campaign led by our chief shepherds, the bishops:

(a) to clarify important principles regarding participation in the Mass,
(b) to restore a sense of integrity and cohesiveness to our understanding of the Eucharist, and
(c) to reiterate clearly our attitude towards the other churches’ various Eucharistic theologies and forms of worship.

More is needed than an occasional vague mention in official newsletters and the like. Without a sustained campaign we will almost certainly disappear into the same marginal and irrelevant hole now occupied by the dwindling liberal churches. 

Not the future that the apostolic faith deserves!