WE HAVE PREVIOUSLY referred to Queensland as the “sick man” of the
Church in Australia. This has been evidenced by the 2006 Advent
Pastorals in Toowoomba and Brisbane.
It seems the Pastoral Letter is in these cases something of a
subconscious cry for help - “See how far I am from thinking with the
Church? - Help me!” The doctor has been and gone and we await his most
direct prescriptions.
A recent Pastoral Letter for the Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ
has been issued by Bishop Michael Putney of Townsville. It is of an
entirely different order to the letters mentioned above. It is no less
disconcerting. In many ways more subtle, it would not be written much
differently if one wished to undermine Faith and create doubt whilst
always being able to point to covering clauses to show one really did no
wrong.
Even in its second paragraph it hides the definitive Catholic teaching
that Christ’s Presence in the Eucharist is par excellence and of an
entirely superior order to His presence in the assembly, the priest and
the Word. Instead the letter said, “He is present in us when we gather
as a worshiping community. He is present in the consecrated bread and
wine which we receive. He is present in the priest who presides.” Now
all of this is literally true - but as we see not the whole truth, and
the motive for the omission is our concern.
The next section of the letter - “The Eucharist and the Church” -
entirely omits any reference to sacrificial worship, the emphasis being
totally on the horizontal plane - we - God acting in us. The following
paragraph does pick up this idea, but only after the strange impression
left by this paragraph.
In a section beginning “Fifthly” there is a discussion of the meaning of
our “Amen” immediately before receiving Holy Communion. Very oddly the
one thing not mentioned is the true meaning of that “Amen”, which is
that we are giving assent to the priest’s assertion that this is the
Body of Christ really.
Heart of the Problems
This brings us to the heart of the problems with the Letter. The section
of the Letter headed “The Presence of Christ” commences, “Finally, we
believe that the bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ in
the eucharist. “ Well and good. The Letter goes on to set up a problem
... “how we are to understand the presence” ... “people are not sure”.
The circumlocution which follows, with a nod to “St Thomas Aquinas” and
“the Middle Ages”, “transubstantiation”, “substance”, winds up with,
“There has been a change so that what we see now is the sign or symbol
of something that we cannot see which it has become.”
Sign - yes - in its technical sense - as we know a Sacrament is a visible sign instituted by Christ to give grace.
"Symbol" - NO - NEVER.
This is the very thing the Blessed Sacrament is NOT. A symbol by definition is not the reality of the thing it
symbolises. Just as a drawing/statue of a dove is not the Holy Spirit.
But now the Letter proceeds to clarify the set-up problem. To what
authority does it have recourse? Are the Councils of the Church quoted?
The Popes? The Catechism or Compendium? The Saints? Too much to hope for
Sacred Scripture? NO ... why are we distracted with these ... the
Letter goes straight to ... the 1979 Anglican-Roman Catholic Dialogue!
(Devoid of teaching authority of course.) The section quoted is about
the meaning of “becoming” in the context of the bread and wine and the
Body and Blood of Christ. Again it is accurate as far as it goes, but
subtly it leaves the simple reader with the idea that Christ’s Presence
in the Eucharist is “sacramental” rather than real, the one word
studiously avoided throughout.
As for what “sacramental” might mean to the simple reader, the section
Sacramental Presence begins, “The ‘bread’ that we see is now only a
symbol of Christ who is thereby present sacramentally.”
No. No. No - as above. It seems everyone but Bishop Putney knows the difference between “symbol” and “reality”.
It finishes, “What we see has been changed not to our eyes but in
reality so that it really functions now only as a sign making him
present.”
Whatever the writer’s intention, this sentence would again nudge the
simple reader to think, “Functions now only as a sign making him
present???” What’s real about that? The writer goes on to say, “The
other error would be to think that because Christ is present through the
sign of bread, he has somehow taken on the size, colour, shape,
location of bread. This is not our faith either.”
But if Christ has not “somehow taken on the size, colour, shape,
location of bread”, how can he be really present? Why do we worship and
adore the appearance of bread in its “location” in tabernacle,
monstrance, ciborium, on our tongue - if Christ has not really taken on
the size, colour, shape, location of bread?
The Letter finishes up with an acknowledgement that we do worship and
adore the Blessed Sacrament “even after Mass has ended” and that this is
praiseworthy.
The truth of the Real Presence would have been more accurately written
about by many teenagers we know. Perhaps the writer - a great ecumenist -
has spent too many years in ecumenababble to be able to recall basic
Catholic teaching on the sacraments, and its precisely-honed language.
When Bishop Putney was first appointed, Archbishop Bathersby opined that
“it would be good that we now have a theologian bishop in Queensland to
stop the Southern bishops laughing at what’s done here”. His Grace was
half right - they’re not laughing, they’re weeping along with the rest
of us.
Let us ask Pope Paul VI to clear the air:
"The Physical Reality of Christ’s Body and Blood in the Eucharist
To avoid misunderstanding this sacramental presence which surpasses the
laws of nature and constitutes the greatest miracle of its kind we must
listen with docility to the voice of the teaching and praying Church.
This voice, which constantly echoes the voice of Christ, assures us that
the way Christ is made present in this Sacrament is none other than by
the change of the whole substance of the bread into His Body, and of the
whole substance of the wine into His Blood, and that this unique and
truly wonderful change the Catholic Church rightly calls
transubstantiation. As a result of transubstantiation, the species of
bread and wine undoubtedly take on a new meaning and a new finality, for
they no longer remain ordinary bread and ordinary wine, but become the
sign of something sacred, the sign of a spiritual food. However, the
reason they take on this new significance and this new finality is
simply because they contain a new “reality” which we may justly term
ontological. Not that there lies under those species what was already
there before, but something quite different; and that not only because
of the faith of the Church, but in objective reality, since after the
change of the substance or nature of the bread and wine into the Body
and Blood of Christ, nothing remains of the bread and wine but the
appearances, under which Christ, whole and entire, in His physical
“reality” is bodily present, although not in the same way that bodies
are present in a given place."
¬— Pope Paul VI in Mysterium Fidei [emphasis added]
Pope Paul VI pray for us and for the people of Townsville Diocese.
But wait - there is more out of Townsville:
At St Mary’s Church, Bowen on 17-18 May Father Bill Brady MSC deleted the Creed from the Mass and substituted the following:
"I believe in God,
who is love and who has given the earth to all people.
I believe in Jesus Christ,
who came to heal in and through all who work for justice.
I believe in the community of faith,
which is called to be at the service of all people.
I believe in God’s promise to finally destroy the power of sin in us all,
and to establish the kingdom of justice and peace for all humankind.
I believe in human rights,
in the solidarity of all people,
in the power of non-violence.
I do not believe in racism,
in the power that comes from wealth and privilege,
or in any established order that enslaves.
I believe that all women and men are equally human,
that order based on violence and injustice is not order.
I do not believe that war and hunger
are inevitable and peace unattainable.
I believe in the beauty of simplicity,
in love with open hands, in peace on earth.
I do not believe that suffering need be in vain,
that death is the end,
that the disfigurement of our world is what God intended.
I dare to believe,
always and in spite of everything,
in God’s power to transform and transfigure,
fulfilling the promise of a new heaven and a new earth
where justice and peace will flourish."
Parishioners were asked “to return the printed text so that” it could be used again!!!
Given the problems with the Pastoral Letter it is perhaps less than
surprising that this abuse of the Liturgy should take place in
Townsville Diocese.
TONY DIXON
Copyright This article was first published in the June 2008 issue of FOUNDATION.
