Sermon on Eucharistic Belief preached by the Very Reverend John Paterson in Christ Church Cathedral on Sunday 4 March 2001

We must disagree without being disagreeable

This evening I have accepted an invitation to be present in Dublin's Pro-Cathedral to mark the occasion of the return of Cardinal Desmond Connell from Rome. With many of my Roman Catholic friends I shall be there to rejoice with them that Ireland has been given a second Cardinal to serve the Holy Roman Church. I shall be there carrying greetings from this cathedral congregation. I shall be there despite the public controversy that has surrounded a small part of the Cardinal's newspaper interview just two weeks ago. I will be there because I would wish to distance myself from many of the comments and articles written in the heat of the moment since then. Principally, however, I shall be present because I believe and would wish to make public my belief that it remains possible for people to disagree without being disagreeable.

Our shared faith is greater than what divides us

So this morning I don't intend to confuse the issue with attempted explanations of what St Thomas Aquinas really meant by transubstantiation. It's enough just to say that few Roman Catholics, and perhaps even fewer Protestants, seem to understand the subtlety that lies behind that great Dominican thinker's theology. Aquinas seems actually to have been trying to prevent a carnal idea of the sacrament, common in the early Middle Ages, that in the Eucharist we received the earthly body and blood of Christ locally present. I certainly would not attribute such a concept to the Cardinal but it seems to be the idea that at least some writers to the letters columns appear to believe.

My own contribution to this present difficulty will rather centre on two points:

• the first, very briefly, is the question of whether or not the Church of Ireland can be expected to administer the rules of any other Church;
• the second, to ask the question, "Whatever happened to ARCIC?" (The Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission?)

The first question is the simpler of the two.

The Church of Ireland can only administer its own rules

The rule of the Roman Catholic Church is that no one should share in the sacrament who does not share the total faith and order of that Church. It is clear; it is precise. The Eucharist is the goal of unity. To use an analogy, we are not yet married and so we shouldn't jump the gun.

Until fifty years ago the general position of the Church of Ireland was essentially the same. We have to acknowledge that we have changed. Not through compromise or any liberalism that might suggest that ecumenism is our simply being nice to each other. Our change came about so that we could give due recognition to contemporary Christian scholarship and scriptural understanding. We had also come to recognise the incredible diversities of belief that existed among the Christians of the first four centuries. Yet despite their diversities they were able to share one bread, one body, and the faith spread so that the world came to believe.

Forty years ago the Lambeth Conference recommended rules by which most Anglican Churches now operate. People who are baptised and regular communicants within their own tradition may receive the sacrament in an Anglican Church if they make a conscientious decision so to do. Baptism is the defining moment. To all who voluntarily come, Anglicans actually have an obligation, according to our own rules, to offer Eucharistic hospitality. The cardinal, though, is justified when he says that no moral pressure must ever be placed on anyone to feel compelled to receive the sacrament - but that of course applies as much to members as to visitors.

Whatever happened to ARCIC?

The second question is, "Whatever happened to ARCIC - the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission?"

Why is it so many people have a mindset that can only reflect on doctrine by quoting documents from the sixteenth century or earlier? Why not speak from the contemporary renewal of our theological understandings. Tradition is the moving stream of the Church's life. That's why it really seems sad to me that so few seem to have given even casual consideration to ARCIC's trojan work over the forty years of its existence. Yet here was a joint commission set up by Pope Paul VI and by Michael Ramsey, then archbishop of Canterbury; set up to help reconcile our differences.

Basic Eucharistic consensus was actually achieved by the scholars who represented the breadth of Christian understanding in both our Communions - including Archbishop Henry McAdoo of Dublin. They worked through definitions from the past and they achieved a consensus of thinking that enabled them to express a common Eucharistic belief in the presence of Christ in the sacrament using a common formula of words. They didn't deny past controversies. What they did was more important: they expressed their belief in Christ's sacramental presence in contemporary thought that avoided denominational verbal definitions.

Get away from caricatures

The caricatures of our respective beliefs that we read daily in the papers don't make life any easier. It's too easy for Anglicans to believe that Roman Catholics have only the monolithic belief of their Church and that how individual members understand theology is irrelevant. As Cardinal Newman pointed out a hundred years ago, the Church would look very foolish without its laity. So that's not how things actually are. It's too easy for Roman Catholics to believe that there are so many individual beliefs among members of the Church of Ireland that the Church itself can have no real objective belief about anything. That's not how it is. God help us if it were like that. But people of any age who imply that whatever divides us should simply be politely ignored are no help either. They speak from a woolly liberalism that ignores the essence of unity.

Achieving a common faith

It was ARCIC that enabled us to look at the ancient common tradition that the Church in the Eucharist receives Christ in answer to prayer and in fulfilment of his promise to be with us. The presence, then, isn't just in the feelings of the devout communicant; it's actually also in the consecrated elements themselves. As to how this happens Anglicans would prefer to say that the sacrament is a mystery, one that can't be explained by our limited human language. That it does happen and that the presence, though received by faith isn't created by our faith, we affirm as truth. Indeed the Council of Trent and the 39 Articles both regard the sacraments as effectual signs - they effect what they signify.
Queen Elizabeth I, no saint yet a women who took theology very seriously, is said to have summed up her Eucharistic faith in what is admirable theology, even if it's rather indifferent poetry:

Christ was the Word that spake it;
He took the bread and brake it;
and what his word doth make it;
That I believe and take it.

Sadly, we know the ARCIC agreements are still on hold, both by the Vatican and by the Church of Ireland. Both our Churches can justly be accused of real negligence if we let such a situation drift on and on. We have to stop sitting on the fence. There are too many people who still want to insist that all belief must conform to what we each already have in our own sixteenth century tablets of stone.

Divorce?

Perhaps it will only be when we're strong enough to submit these tablets of stone to the scrutiny of the Scriptures, submit them to ancient common tradition, that we'll be able to move closer to each other. It was another profound thinker of the Dominican Order, Yves Congar, who, just a few years ago, gave us the analogy I used earlier that our two Communions are like an engaged couple who don't seem to be able to summon up the courage to get married. Our present controversies are unreal to a generation younger than most of us in the pews. They want us to get our differences sorted out. But to this younger generation it must presently appear that all the facts suggest, not just that the marriage is likely to be indefinitely postponed, but that the engagement itself is in such real danger that the ring could actually be about to be handed back!