While religious leaders worry about the letter of the law...
The flocks shrink
America’s Roman Catholic leaders have joined the Southern Baptists in internecine fighting.
Late last week, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops defied the Vatican and voted to draft a statement about the sacrament of the Eucharist, with an eye on denying communion to Pres. Joe Biden, a devoted Catholic who supports a woman’s right to choose.
Earlier that week, Pope Francis reminded — or tried to remind — Catholic leaders that the Eucharist is not the reward of saints, but bread for sinners. This weekend, the Pope stayed silent on this recent decision to weaponize a sacrament. Is it any wonder the pews are emptying?
Speaking as a fallen-away fundamentalist, I am uniquely familiar with the restrictions some religious groups employ to ensure quality control. In my old church, if you weren’t physically immersed in water, you were not considered baptized — and you needed to be baptized in order to go to heaven. Had I refused an immersion baptism, I believe I would have still have been welcome in the pews, but I would not have been considered a member of the flock, nor would I have been allowed to participate in communion (what we mostly called the Lord’s Supper, which is similar to the Eucharist only without the magic of the bread and wine (grape juice, in our case) literally becoming Jesus.
That need for quality control always felt, to me, like Christians taking their eyes off the ball. Where is love in all of this? And I do not mean this as an exercise in what-about-ism, but should those same bishops who protected generations of pedophile priests be allowed to partake in this important sacrament? And are the priests found to be pure of that stain conducting the same quality control of their other parishioners, the pro-gun, pro-death penalty, anti-immigrant contingent of the flock?
I think that there are a lot of reasons pews are emptying, including people angry when their local church is welcoming.
But more importantly, I've been thinking lately about the importance of communion as an integral embedding of inclusive community-making in its origins. It's not like sacrifice. Hebrew Bible sacrifice has rules about the quality of the sacrifice brought and about what needs to be brought for what purpose, with a clear correspondence between the expensiveness of the sacrifice and the seriousness of what it's meant to atone for or achieve. Sacrifice is carried out by ritual specialists because bobbling a ritual is *dire* and dangerous. But communion is a meal.
A meal of the most basic food and drink, no quality specifications made (well hello, Mogen David and Boone's Farm!) in a faith tradition that emphasizes hospitality and the care of bodies, not the judgment of souls or lives.
TL;DR: Use of access to communion as a punishment or a tool of suasion seems to me an extremely sad thing, but it's certainly been practiced for centuries.
Amen to your point. All of this is so petty and eye off the ball, as you say. I really think Jesus intended that we think of him any time we break bread together (i.e. eat & drink together) and anywhere. And more importantly - he wanted us to treat each other with love, like we'd want to be treated. The way I see it, the Catholic Church hijacked it and turned it into a power move- controlling communion wafers, who can hand them out, what it means and who can be offered them. It's as if Jesus should only live in the church during mass, and if and only if you follow the directions of the priests will Jesus accept you. Just NO!