Seán O’Conaill: The Scandal of the Eucharist in Ireland in 2024
Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.”
It was to this teaching in John 6 that Jesus was alluding when he then asked, in the Gospel for the 21st Sunday of Year B :
“Does this offend you? Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. But among you there are some who do not believe.”
Christians who read this passage today are far less disturbed than were those who ‘grumbled’ and turned away from Jesus at this point in the Gospel account. We know this passage well and know that typically the homilist will put a comfortable ‘spin’ upon it – before the peaceful business of transforming the offerings of bread and wine – but should he do that?
Why do the homily resources provided for this Gospel typically underplay the scandalous aspect of what Jesus was saying, from the point of view of those first listeners?
By ‘scandalous’ I mean an event or a teaching that challenges faith in the teacher – a cause of ‘stumbling’. That Jesus might have been deliberately challenging the complacency of his listeners – to shock them to a state of agitated questioning about the meaning of their own Temple sacrificial ritual – is never considered.
What an opportunity is missed to fully awaken today’s listeners!
What if the celebrant were instead to ask:
“What are we celebrating when we celebrate the Mass? Is it the violence of those who crucified Jesus, or the non-violence of Jesus himself – the fact that he did not respond to violence with violence – but with forgiveness?”
That such an obvious question is never raised and that, typically, we want the Mass to be over – without any drama – in half-an-hour – surely explains the crisis of the Catholic church in Ireland at this time. We don’t expect anything to happen to connect our peaceful ritual, dramatically, with the violence that rages everywhere in the world outside – even in Ireland, where in recent days a teenager wielding a knife attacked a military chaplain in Galway.
It is surely centuries of ignoring this obvious question of what Jesus was doing in instituting the Eucharist that lies at the root of the imminent threat of its disappearance in Ireland. This is the scandal of the Eucharist in our own time.
That in submitting to Crucifixion Jesus could have been challenging all of us to transform our own hostilities into forgiveness, and to transform the world accordingly, repudiating all of the violence that rages – that question could not be raised when churchmen were beholden to violent governments, over sixteen centuries of Chistendom – but why not now?
In raising Jesus from the dead was God the Father approving the shedding of Jesus’ blood by those who opposed him – or rewarding Jesus’ refusal to respond in kind?
That we do not even ask ourselves this question – or query a Catechism that speaks of Divine ‘satisfaction’ at the Crucifixion – explains why the future of the Mass in Ireland is now so doubtful.
It’s easier for everyone to remain confused than for someone to call a halt to that, and to go to the historical root of the confusion. That would take time, and who now has the time for that?
The best book which I have ever read on the Mass ‘The Incredible Catholic Mass’ by Fr. Martin von Cochem, addresses the issues you raise.
Available from TAN USA and Blackwells UK.
Alternatively you could read the Section on the Holy Eucharist in the late Prof. Ludwig Ott’s book ‘Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma’.
Available from Baronius Press. Imprimatur by the current Archbishop of Liverpool. I knew Prof. Ott before he died. A first rate and CLEAR Theologian.
Seán, how timely on a sad day is your reflection on the Mass.
It seems a long time ago now since I sat as a lone male among over twenty women at night classes in continuing education at UCC to be awarded at the end of two years with a diploma in Rebus ad Feminas Spectantibus in 1998. There I learned how much women, from the time of Matilda Witherington, the wife of Wolfe Tone, and so many others, were excluded from our history books. There too I learned about Nell McCafferty who was born in Derry’s Bogside in 1944.
Sad is her passing. Her Requiem Mass at St. Columba’s Church in the Long Tower on Friday will be a time I hope for all to reflect on the challenge of the Eucharist and the Beatitudes.
President Michael D. Higgins in his tribute to her said:
“Nell had a unique gift in stirring people’s consciousness, and this made her advocacy formidable on behalf of those who had been excluded from society. A defining feature across Nell’s life was such a fierce drive to tackle repression, poverty and authoritarianism wherever she saw it.”
The future of the Mass in Ireland need not be “doubtful” with women like Nell to remember and others to continue her legacy.
Ar dheis Dé go raibh a h-anam.
Why can you not see, Dermot, that if the works you cite truly do what you claim our homilists would not be still crippled by a theology that represents the Trinity as simultaneously violent and non-violent, a confused theology that is bound to lead to the atheism that now flourishes in Ireland while Sunday congregations dwindle to the grey-haired?
The perfunctory Mass, the Mass that glosses over the fact that Jesus was replacing a violent sacrifice with an utterly non-violent sacrifice – and inviting us to do the same – is trapped in that travesty by a medieval theology that tells us that, on the contrary, the violence of the crucifixion was willed and approved by the Father.
That theology did not emerge until the threshold of the twelfth Christian century, and was completely unknown to those who composed Psalm 23 and the Creed. I can therefore recite those prayers in full belief while utterly repudiating the medieval theology of satisfaction and substitution that undergirds the Christian right today, and disgraces the Catechism.
If Catholic clergy today had the same freedom they too would be able to insist – in their homilies – that the Father does not reciprocate or approve human violence.
That Jesus insisted that he and the Father are one and the same is in itself sufficient reason for repudiating the notion that the Trinity were ever violent or could have approved the Christian violence of e.g. the Crusades – which accompanied the rise of Anselm’s theology.
Christendom is over, but a hopeless Christendom theology still cripples the Gospel and the Mass. It is time to stop and to recover the full pacific meaning of the Eucharist.
Sean,
I do find your original comment asks too many questions for a simple Catholic such as myself.
I have a PhD in Engineering. I am a layman and not a Theologian.
That said, I got a brilliant upbringing in the faith from the Traditional Latin Mass and the Roman Catechism.
I was privileged in my youth to know the great Bavarian Theologian, Professor Ludwig Ott. How that came about is a story for another time.
You seem to be asking what is the Mass about. Here is a quote from Prof. Ott’s ‘Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma’:
“In the Sacrifice of the Mass and in the Sacrifice of the Cross the sacrificial Victim and the Primary Sacrificing Priest are identical; only the nature and mode of the Offering are different”.
In other words when the Romans crucified our Lord, he offered his Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity for us with the physical shedding of his blood.
At Mass, he Offers himself Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity in a Mystical and bloodless manner. For you. For me. That’s how we, Deo Volente, will get to Heaven.
That is the faith of the One Holy, Roman, Catholic and Apostolic Church.
I have passed this faith (Tradidi Quod et Accepi) on to my two Daughters. Sadly, due to being severely immunocompromised, I can’t attend my beloved Traditional Latin Mass at the moment. One of my daughters assures me that the Mass I normally attend still has all seats taken every Sunday about 15 minutes prior to Mass. My daughter and son-in-law are both 29 and both have red, not grey, hair!
Stephen J. Shoemaker, a specialist on the history of ancient and early medieval Christianity in his Introduction to the ‘Life of the Virgin – Maximus the Confessor’ Yale University Press, 2021, says (p.32)
“… the early Church Fathers often describe Christ’s death on the cross as a redemptive sacrifice. Yet like the image of a ransom, the use of such language is seemingly not to be taken literally. It is, as many scholars of patristic soteriology have observed, one among many different metaphors used to express Christ’s work of salvation, all of which are important and no one of which alone is seen as sufficient to capture the fullness of this mystery. By contrast, Anselm and much of the subsequent western tradition have in part broken with the polyphony of patristic (and biblical) soteriological discourse to focus squarely on a single metaphor, that of propitiatory sacrifice, largely to the exclusion of the others.”
#4 and #5
Thanks Peadar. My limited reading of the early fathers suggests that their constant theme was the life-giving impact of the Gospel story – probably because faith in the Resurrection was stronger in the pre-Constantinian era than it became in the long centuries of repetitive violence – under nominally Christian rulers – that followed. For the early church the Resurrection had overthrown the judgement of Jesus by the Roman world, so a new creation was in process.
Jesus’ own direct teaching on how we should respond to an insulting blow – to unjust violence – i.e. by not reciprocating (Matt 5:38-48) – is in itself sufficient explanation of why he submitted to crucifixion. He was simply being consistent with his own teaching – and showing us the only way to stop the endless cycle of blow and counter-blow that has afflicted humankind from the beginning – in the belief that God will vindicate those who suffer unjust violence without reciprocating and perpetuating it.
The actions of e.g. Sophie Scholl, Franz Jägerstätter, Maximilian Kolbe and others in World War II show that this teaching carries to us down the centuries, because it is both implicit and explicit in the Gospel story.
Anselm obviously could not adopt that interpretation of Jesus’ acceptance of crucifixion because for centuries the bishops of the church had accepted the word of a Roman warlord, Constantine, in 312, that he had seen a vision of the cross telling him to conquer under that sacred sign – and because by the late 1090s Christian Europe had embarked on the anti-Islamic Crusades.
And so Anselm theorised that the Crucifixion was needed to repay a cosmic debt owing to God the Father by sinful humankind – even though Jesus himself had given us a prayer that clearly speaks of the Father’s willingness to forgive if we do the same, and that is also the theme of his greatest parable of the prodigal son.
I am sorry, Dermot, that your condition prevents you from attending the Mass of your choice, but endless repetition of pious formulas about the sufficiency of Jesus’ sacrifice cannot free the church from an inadequate theology of atonement that hangs upon the mistaken attribution to God the Father of an inability to be as forgiving of our sins as was Jesus himself.
Professor Ott obviously did not think he could question that theology. We don’t need to think as he did. To put that whole long era of Christian complicity with imperialism and murder behind us we cannot go on ducking the challenge of seeing the Crucifixion for what it was: history’s greatest challenge to replace violent reciprocity with forbearance, in obedience to the fifth commandment.
Salvation, individually and as a species, hangs upon us rising to that challenge, strengthened by the Eucharist and by an exegesis and homiletics that do complete justice to it.
It is time to make fully explicit what is already implicit in the Gospels: the Resurrection was Jesus’ reward for his rejection of the option of worldly power through violence, and will be ours for doing the same.
Thanks Sean. I disagree with you.
The Dogma I cited from Professor Ott’s book is De Fide. Good Enough for me. You didn’t know Prof. Ott. I did. No Church Authority ever refused an Imprimatur for any of his work.
Do you imply, that those of us who reject your view, and wish to remain faithful to the perennial teaching on Eucharist, have a questionable chance of Salvation?
I adhere to Trent and Pope St Pius V.
To the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas on the Eucharist.
To St. John’s Gospel Ch6 and the official interpretation of it.
To what Leo XIII taught regarding the Mass and Eucharist.
To what Pope St. Pius X taught about the Eucharist.
To the understanding of the Eucharist that St. John Fisher and Edmund Campion were Martyred for.
No, Dermot. I do not question your hopes of salvation, grounded as they are. What I am questioning is not the sufficiency of Christ’s sacrifice or the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist – or your faith – but the sufficiency of our grasp of the relevance of Jesus’ teaching on the Eucharist to the increasingly violent world outside the church.
In that world young people search for models of heroism they can emulate. Inspired by the Gospel Sophie Scholl at 21 acted in her own terrifying world in a manner that seemed futile then but is ever more inspiring today – because she saw that Jesus’ sacrifice was not merely a liturgical one but a call to oppose extreme violence peacefully in her own time.
Our Eucharistic understanding needs to rise to the challenge of connecting Jesus’ sacrifice with the challenges facing young people today – and the medieval idea that Jesus accepted crucifixion to propitiate the dissatisfaction of his Father, rather than to inspire us all to endure violence rather than deploy it, is an unnecessary obstacle to doing that.
The Eucharist not only prepares us for heaven but strengthens us to resist the satanic glamour of violence here on earth, in our own time! That too was surely Jesus’ intention in instituting the sacrament and in then submitting to crucifixion. Is it heretical to say that?
I was reading the masterpiece of Buddhist monk-priest-philosopher Śāntideva in the translation of Ernst Steinkellner and its update in Perry Schmidt-Leukel’s majestic commentary https://www.amazon.de/Buddha-Mind-Bodhicaryavatara-Commentaries-Non-Christian/dp/904293848X
I also read a very rationalistic commentary by Paul Williams https://www.routledge.com/Altruism-and-Reality-Studies-in-the-Philosophy-of-the-Bodhicaryavatara/Williams/p/book/9781138878877?srsltid=AfmBOoqJoyXqzD209QX4CJeC_SINdgozyL_QqcRHMuKdi5UYr2InWqnr
Williams quizzes Śāntideva’s arguments as if they were those of a British analytical philosopher finding all sorts of flaws in them. He seems totally tone deaf to the saintly monk’s message.
Buddhists take the reality of the self very lightly, and Śāntideva speaks of our present existence as a transitory lodging. He is animated by compassion more than by a philosopher’s quest for theoretical solutions, and his philosophical insight is born of his compassion rather than providing it with its justification as Williams thinks.
I thought of Kolbe all the time while reading him, as well as Sophie Scholl. These martyrs of charity shine like stars in a black night. The equality of self and other and the interchangeability of self and other, the two most striking notes struck by Śāntideva, were common sense to Kolbe and Scholl — perhaps the former’s years in Japan gave him a sense of this equal importance of his own survival and that of the prisoner whose place he took.
This morning, here in Vienna, I had a very interesting conversation with a Czech man aged 34, in the hotel business, who bears on his arm the concentration camp number of his grandfather. He is an atheist because of the miseries befalling both his parents and his maternal and paternal grandparents in the tragedies of the last centuries — World War I, Hitler, and the 1968 suppression of Dubček’s attempt at liberation from the Soviets. He remarked ruefully that no one had spoken to him of God. This made me feel guilty, and I remembered Bernanos’s complaint that the clergy “sidle along the wall” (quoted to me by Liam Swords, who wore a distinctive sign of the cross, which possibly gave rise to a sudden mugging he suffered while walking down a street near the Irish College in Paris).
I’ve got a little talking point that might have some missionary value: when I explain my email to people I point out that “325” and “1517” are the axial dates in church history and that Harnack said that Athanasius reaches his hands out to Luther across the centuries.
One further point, Śāntideva is all about sacrifice, but it is not about blood and self-torture, but about joyful self-giving and trust, and he says that if you cling to ego your life will be miserable but if you let it go and use your self as skilful means for the salvation of others you will be the happiest of mortals. This is also the very tonality of Eucharist.
Seán@6, thank you for that excellent reflection on “the inadequate theology of atonement “ that we have been lumbered with.
On another topic altogether, Seán, I wonder have you read Brendan Hoban’s latest book, “ Holding out for a Hero”?
We have a group of friends here in Edinburgh, Edinburgh Newman Associates, who meet and discuss certain issues and books, a kind of book club , I suppose.
For our next meeting I recommended Brendan’s book and what an excellent read it is.
It would chime with much of what you have been saying over the years about our church in Ireland, indeed the universal church.
I ordered the books from a Mayo book shop who have an ample supply in stock. (Link below, Ed.)
Brendan’s book is up there with the late Donald Cozzens “The Changing Face of the Priesthood”, I think.
Dry in Edinburgh this morning.
Thanks Seán.
Paddy
https://www.mayobooks.ie/Holding-Out-for-a-Hero-9780992902353?search=hoban
#8 Absorbed by the knife-edge state of the world just now, and especially the uncertainty of the survival of the US constitutional separation of powers, I am way behind with my books-to-read list, Paddy.
And just yesterday I got news of a fascinating ongoing debate among the Girardians on ‘Constantinianism’ – the revival of the notion of a new union of church and state – especially favoured by some on the Catholic right in the USA. As this is my worst nightmare I must turn to that debate, remembering that Girard himself took a very dim view of the past Catholic Constantinian church’s scapegoatings of heretics, Jews and other minorities.
Nowhere in the world does a new union of church and state look less likely than in Ireland, but I have family in the US, where Trump is cosying up to the Christian right and anything could happen this year, with global consequences.
You will remember that the original Constantine’s alleged vision of the Cross – and divine command to conquer under that sign – was preceded by an alleged vision of the Greek God Appollo. The tendency of autocrats on-the-make to experience heavenly visions was well established in the ancient world, so you can understand my concern for the survival of democracy itself just now, when even some Catholics are proposing to lead us back into the Constantinian cul-de-sac.
One of those is Peter Thiel, a very wealthy mentor of none other than JD Vance, Trump’s VP choice and a recent convert to Catholicism – the Constantinian variety.
With Trump himself obviously ageing, but still electable this year, who can look away?
As Girard himself understood, we can only freely choose to follow Christ if we are free also to ‘go away’. The principles of religious liberty and separation of church and state are there – in plain sight – in the Gospel this weekend. That is why Girard supported Vatican II and Dignitatis Humanae.
I need to get to that debate!
“You will remember that the original Constantine’s alleged vision of the Cross – and divine command to conquer under that sign – was preceded by an alleged vision of the Greek God Apollo. The tendency of autocrats on-the-make to experience heavenly visions was well established in the ancient world, so you can understand my concern for the survival of democracy itself just now, when even some Catholics are proposing to lead us back into the Constantinian cul-de-sac.”
His Christian influencers, such as Ossius of Cordoba, apparently persuaded him that the God who appeared to him was not Apollo but Christ. In the same way, the fundamentalists who influence Trump (and perhaps there will be many more Trumps) persuade him that the vision of the Founding Fathers was not Enlightenment deism but fundamentalist Christianity. They are rooting for a Caesaropapist replacement of hated Democracy. The Maga extremists are living in a delusion that Americans love autocracy à la Kim, Putin, Orban, and even Hitler, and they are ridiculous. More insidious are the Catholic supporters of Trumpism.