MetaCatholic

(This post is part of a series on the 39 articles of the Church of England)

In a comment on the first post on the twenty-eighth article Peter Kirk said:

Do you have nothing to say about the last paragraph of this Article, which is blatantly ignored by Anglo-Catholics?

The last paragraph (to save you looking it up) reads:

The Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper was not by Christ’s ordinance reserved, carried about, lifted up or worshipped.

I have spent far too long on this one article already, but I did promise to get to this point, and find a certain irony in doing so on what some keep as Reformation Day. Of course, the article does not really say enough to make its point “And therefore you shouldn’t do it.” Catholics and Protestants can quite happily agree that none of these behaviours were or are done “by Christ’s ordinance.” So in that sense, Anglo-Catholics don’t ignore what the article says, they ignore what it may reasonably be assumed to have intended, but never gets around to saying.

First, I regard reservation of the sacrament as quite uncontroversial nowadays. In this parish, for example, there are about ten people on average in any one week who receive Holy Communion from the reserved sacrament in acts of worship led by lay people in the homes of the sick or housebound, or residential care homes. The Church of England provides official rites for this, and also for the use of “Extended Communion” where Holy Communion is administered from the reserved sacrament in public Sunday worship where there is a shortage of priests. This latter use is intended for unusual circumstances, and not as a routine matter. The former use of communion of the sick is generally routine.

So if reservation is unexceptional, the question is then what one does with the reserved sacrament? I have argued that the idea of change in the elements, however (un)precisely conceived, needs to be seen both in the context of the eschatological transformation of all things, and as a sign of that work of the Spirit who is our present foretaste that God will be all in all. Once the elements have been consecrated, they should not be treated as anything else than vehicles of Christ’s presence in the church as the crucified and risen Lord, because his word of promise and the work of the Spirit is irrevocable. At a minimum that requires treating them with reverence at all times.

But the Eucharistic elements powerfully represent how Christ is always given to us in his Church. It is his risen body that makes us one body, and it is his sacrificed life that is the life given to us that makes us alive. In that sense continuous reservation witnesses to what the Church truly is, a Eucharistic community always gathered in prayer and praise around the cross. I see no reason why meditation in front of the reserved sacrament, reverencing and worshiping the Christ who gives himself to us in this Eucharistic gift, should be regarded as a problem. The hymn from which I take the title for this post is used in services of such meditation and prayer before the sacrament. The last two lines of the verse are worth noting here:

Faith our outward sense befriending,
makes our inward vision clear.¹

This practice, which some find execrable and others dubious, is one I and many find helpful, precisely as a focus for our faith in Christ, and his gift for us and to us.

As for Corpus Christi processions and the like, I’m not convinced that they lead to reverence. I think they tend to a triumphalism at odds with the humility of self-giving represented in the sacrament. So I’d be very dubious about engaging in them. But I would note that some historians, at least, seem to think that in the high mediaeval period they were a significant reaffirmation of corporate Christian society, and a celebration of its communal life constituted by equal access to and gift from Christ and not simply by the feudal structures. I don’t know enough history to know how well supported this view was. But I can see, if this is true, why neither the rising class sense of the merchant bourgeoisie, nor the absolutism of the Tudor monarchs would have been terribly comfortable with it. I don’t think I’m prepared or equipped to argue the rights and wrongs of it historically, any more than I would want to argue for doing it today.

1. St Thomas Aquinas Tantum ergo, tr. E Caswall [↩]