The sight of our Southern Baptist president receiving the Eucharist in South Africa touched off some foment for a few days this spring, but then, like most indiscretions nowadays not involving lurid sex, was quickly for-gotten. Clinton’s communion is part of a larger trend, manifested in various ways, toward increasing disrespect for the sacramental heart of the Catholic faith.
What must be sadly admitted is that the attack on the real presence is being launched primarily from within the Church. The Eucharist would not have been given to the president without prior permission of the local bishop. One further fact not widely reported, but discussed by Jesse Jackson on TV, was that Clinton was only one of many non-Catholics who were invited in advance to partake of communion by the diocese.
I have just celebrated my fifteenth year as a Catholic, which can be added to my fifteen years as Protestant. Each began with a walk down the aisle—first, down the aisle of a Southern Baptist church in Fort Worth, Texas, “to receive Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior”; then down the aisle of Immaculate Heart of Mary in Atlanta to receive “the body and blood of Jesus Christ” from the hands of Fr. Richard Lopez.
Nothing stands out more clearly to me now than how little I understood what was happening to me that Sunday morning in Atlanta. Yes, I understood intellectually, and I was capable of giving a reasoned account of Christ’s sacrifice, transubstantiation, and the sacramental system. It was relatively easy to explain the contrast between the “real absence” symbolized by the Protestant practice of communion versus the real presence as taught by the Church.
What I have come to see, what I did not appreciate then, is that the very dynamism—the quality of a personal, lived encounter with God—that first drew me to the Baptists was not diminished by the objectivity of the Eucharist, but was radically intensified. Freed from the unrealistic emotional expectations of my former brethren, I was initially relieved and unburdened by the relative coolness and detachment of Catholic liturgy. Here there was no chest-beating, no necessity for emotional convulsion, and systemic strictures against the cult of ministerial personality. God was present and we didn’t have to prove it to one another by jumping up and down.
But what was left for me to realize was just what happens when week after week and year after year I kneel and pray in the presence of God, consume him, and live in his grace. What finally looms up, after all the years of reading and learned debates, is the Person. All the ideas that led me into the Church are swallowed up in this Person and his love for me.
There are times that I think it is his continuing real presence that keeps me—and the rest of the world, for that matter—from going completely mad. No doubt it is the reason that the Catholic Church is the only institution on the globe that consistently tells the truth about the meaning of human life, the only institution not to measure its teaching by the vagaries of popular opinion.
Notice that the ideas of the Church are bolstered by the perpetual presence of the Person, not the other way around. The Church holds her course not because of the superior wisdom of her popes, princes, and priests but because God’s presence constantly animates his Body with his sacramental grace. If we are wise and good, it is because he is among us infusing our minds, giving life to our words, and guiding our actions.
So why shouldn’t the Church want all Christians to profit from this greatest of all gifts? The president did, after all, receive fraternal support from a Southern Baptist leader who told the press that the Catholic Church had no right to withhold communion from anyone who confessed faith in Jesus Christ. It took the courage of John Cardinal O’Connor to remind the nation that the Eucharist is not among the privileges that modern man claims he has a “right” to enjoy. The Church is not obliged to give everyone, even self-professed Christians, what they want. The
Church rightly explains that participation in the sacrament of the Eucharist requires of us that we belong fully, and without impediment of unconfessed mortal sin, to the Body of Christ. We are called to reciprocate his gift, in our feeble way, with the unreserved gift of ourselves. Nothing else—not political gain, or the smoothing over of “relations,” or any human concern—is good enough reason for us to approach the table of our Lord: or we shall eat and drink unto our death.