March 2006 – Page 6

Altzheimer’s & Communion

A reader writes:

My grandmother had altzheimer’s for several years before she died. During that time, she went through a series of stages; first she started forgetting things, then she became deranged (trying to light a cigarette with a pen, etc), and finally, she became near catatonic. When my grandfather looked into having Communion brought to her, it was denied because it was speculated that she no longer recognized the Holy Eucharist as the True Presence of Christ. When he told me this, I was horrified! I can think of very few times when the administration of Holy Communion is more urgent.

In any event, when she died, it had been a period of several years since she had received Communion.

What justification can there possibly be for denying my grandmother Holy Communion, simply because she was very mentally ill? The explanation given above is insufficient on theological grounds, since in the Byzantine rite, Holy Communion is given to infants, who do not recognize Christ’s presence in the Holy Eucharist. How can communion, then, be denied in the Roman rite?

Please explain this to me …

What happened to your grandmother is reprehensible. I wish I’d known about it at the time, and I may have been able to point you in the right direction for getting the situation redressed.

Here are the facts:

While it is true that in the Latin Church there is a canonical requirement for people to be able to discern the Real Presence as a requirement for making their first Communion, there is NO REQUIREMENT that a person must retain this faculty in order to continue to be able to receive Communion.

The fact that the ability to discern the Real Presence is not an absolute requirement is illustrated by two things:

1) The Church’s practice (that you point out) of allowing infants to receive Communion in many of the Eastern Catholic Churches, and

2) The historic practice of the Latin Church itself in giving Communion–at least in the form of Viaticum–to people who have lost the use of reason due to illness or age.

The Church feels very strongly that the faithful receive Viaticum no matter what their circumstances, and it is normal to provide Viaticum even to people who are totally unconscious.

I know that if I’m rendered comatose on my deathbed, that’s what I want to happen (after I’m given the anointing of the sick)!

Even apart from Viaticum, though, the Church still make available Communion to those who are mentally handicapped.

This subject was touched on at the recent Synod of Bishops on the Holy Eucharist. The Propositions that the synod fathers wrote for the consideration of Pope Benedict contain the following:

Proposition 44

The Eucharist and the Sick

We consider it of utmost importance to favor Eucharistic celebration for the sick, through an appropriate catechesis on active participation in the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Christ. A special significance of the Eucharist, as summit of Christian life, is enclosed in its reception as Holy Viaticum. Given that it opens paschal fullness to the sick person, it is recommended that its practice be intensified.

It is especially requested that Eucharistic Communion be provided to baptized and confirmed mentally disabled persons: The latter receive Communion in the faith of the family and of the community that support them.

The impossibility of knowing the effective sensitivity proper to certain types of sick people is not sufficient reason not to give them all the sacramental supports of which the Church disposes. It is important that those who suffer from disability may be recognized as members of the Church in all aspects, and have their just place in her.

It is desirable, moreover, that the architectural functionality of churches facilitates their participation in celebrations.

I need to point out that the Propositions released by the synod fathers are not a legally binding document, but they are illustrative of the attitude taken by the Church toward the interpretation of its law on these points, and the law simply does not prevent someone in your grandmother’s condition form receiving Communion.

Period.

Blessings At Communion Time

A reader writes:

My wife is Episcopalian. I am Catholic. Recently, she was attending Mass, sitting up in the choir loft with our 2 1/2 year old son, while I was the cantor. At communion, she normally stays up in the choir loft at the back of the church (my father sings in the choir, so she gets privileges to sit off to the side/back), but one of the choir members normally carries our son down to Communion- mainly just to give him a ride.

So, this most recent time our son went with his usual ride, and I think another choir member, or possibly the choir director (who is pretty Orthodox)- not sure which it was, said she should go down to get a blessing. As you probably know, at Episcopal/Lutheran/probably other churches you can cross your arms on your chest to receive a blessing if you don’t want to receive communion.

So, she went down, and did that, and the pastor basically looked at her and said "We don’t do that". She handled it gracefully, but my questions are as follows:

1) I thought blessings could be given in such a case. Is this wrong? I thought I’d read at one point had indicated this was possible.

The giving of blessings during Communion time is a sticky subject. There are several principles to keep in mind:

Since giving a blessing is not the same thing as giving Communion, this represents an interruption of the distribution of Communion.
It is not provided for in the liturgical books, and canon and liturgical law prohibit introducing new elements into the liturgy.
That being said, a priest is empowered to interrupt the liturgy for an adequate cause. For example, if a plane flies over during a prayer or his homily, he can pause for a moment until the plane is past.
It strikes me as reasonable–and it’s certainly within the realm of legitimate liturgical opinion to hold that it is reasonable–for a priest to pause the distribution of Communion in order to administer a blessing if the alternative is sending someone away disappointed and possibly angry and disaffected.
That being said, I would not be encouraging people to go up for such a blessing since it is not provided for in the liturgical books–yet. (See below on this.)
What I have said applies to priests and deacons. It does not necessarily apply to laity who are giving Communion and who are empowered to give blessings in many fewer circumstances than members of the clergy.

Having said that, I suspect that the giving of blessings during Communion time is may receive authorization at some point.

At the recent Synod of Bishops meeting on the Eucharist, the bishops talked about this practice as a way of giving people (including non-Catholics) a way to participate so that they don’t feel pressure to receive Communion if they aren’t able to receive it. We know that because the topic showd up in the Instrumentum laboris for the Synod, which stated:

Some responses [by bishops to a questionnaire sent out to prepare the groundwork for the Synod] mention that priests, while distributing Holy Communion, give a blessing to children or catechumens—both duly pointed out—who approach the altar and have not made their First Communion. In some Churches, a blessing is imparted to non-Catholics who approach the altar at Communion time. In this regard, some responses from Asia suggest finding some gesture at Communion time towards non-Christians to make them feel more a part of the liturgical community.

It is possible that Pope Benedict will take up the subject in his Post-Synodal Exhortation, which should be released within a year or so. If he does take it up (and I’m not saying that he will) then my guess is that he will approve the practice for precisely the reasons that the bishops’ responses spoke positively of it–that it will relieve social pressure to receive Communion for those who are not able to receive, thus resulting in fewer sacrilegious receptions of Communion (something that the synod fathers were very concerned about).

It is also possible, giving how widespread this practice is, that the Congregation for Divine Worship may weigh in on it. If that happens, it could either approve or disapprove of it.

All this is just speculation, though. The issue at hand is what does liturgical law provide now (covered in the bullet points above).

Since this practice does not have current authorization, I’d try to be understanding of your priest. He’s trying to do what he think is right, even if his application on the law of this point may have not taken account of the idea that it is reasonable to pause the distribution of Communion for a just cause.

2) He also does not bless the smaller children, which I have seen done other places. What is the common (or alternatively, the advisable) practice regarding that?

The same considerations apply. If you have a child being brought up for a blessing and one is denied then either the parents or the parents and the child may go away disappointed, angry, and disaffected, which strike me as legitimate reasons to pause to give a blessing.

3) If a blessing is allowed and/or proper/encouraged, what would you recommend as supporting evidence to the pastor?

Since this practice is not provided for in liturgical law, there isn’t really any documentation on it, but feel free to show him this blog post as a liturgical law opinion.

Honor Thy Progenitor A And Progenitor B

That rumbling you hear is the grave-spinning of all of Spain’s Catholic kings and queens. Or should they now be called Spain’s Progenitor As and Progenitor Bs?

"Spain has taken another step in its journey from conservative to liberal bastion by creating new birth certificates to avoid discrimination against same-sex couples.

"According to an announcement in the Official Bulletin of State ‘The expression "father" will be replaced with "Progenitor A," and "mother" will be replaced with "Progenitor B."’

"The head of the national Civil Register, Pilar Blanco-Morales, told the newspaper ABC that the change took account of a new law on same-sex marriages passed by the socialist government in July."

GET THE STORY.

No matter what Spain decides to call fathers and mothers, even legislative fiat won’t change the biological fact that two Progenitor As and two Progenitor Bs cannot create a child without the biological material of the opposite Progenitor. In other words, there still must be a Progenitor A and a Progenitor B to make a Baby C.

Two Mil

WHOA!

I don’t check my stats that often, but I happened to do so today and noticed that in the last week we’ve motored right past the 2,000,000 hits mark.

Congratulations, folks! Thanks for making it happen!

(NOTE: As usual, the average hits per day number is misleadingly small since it’s a daily average including figures from when the blog was very small in its early days. The real current average would be Last 7 days divided by 7, or 6,441 hits per day.)

(OTHER NOTE: Please note that these hits are page views, so every view of a combox counts as a hit. We don’t yet have 6,441 folks visiting each day. The actual number is only a part of that. Unfortunately, I don’t know what that would be since I don’t have a feel for how many people keep up with the comboxes regularly vs. how many just read the main section and glance at the comboxes occasionally. Unfortunately, polling via the comboxes to find out the answer wouldn’t necessarily work due to the nature of the question.)

The Law Of Fast: Beverages

A reader writes:

My question is this: Where have the US bishops defined what fasting is for American Catholics during Lent? The reason why I ask is that a friend claims that during the fast days of Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, we are not only restricted to eating 1 full meal and 2 smaller snacks, but that we must also not drink any alcohol and other "non-water" beverages.

This didn’t seem right, because what I had always remembered was that fasting was simply the meal restriction. Although I believe that the spirit of Lent will prevent me from drinking alcohol on Ash Wednesday or Good Friday, I just wanted a clarification about the law.

I’ve looked everywhere, and I can’t seem to find a definition of lenten fasting. Help! Thanks in advance.

The U.S. bishops have not created particular law for the United States regarding the form of fasting to be observed here, which means that the Church’s universal law on the subject will prevail. That law is found in the 1966 apostolic constitution Paenitemini, where Pope Paul VI provided:

The law of fasting allows only one full meal a day, but does not prohibit taking some food in the morning and evening, observing—as far as quantity and quality are concerned—approved local custom (norm III:2).

That’s it.

Beyond that, we have to fall back on the common and constant opinion of learned persons as to what it means.

When we do that, it is immediately clear that in interpreting the Church’s laws regarding fasting the terms "meal" and "food" are understood as being food rather than beverages. If you go look in old moral theologies, they invariably talk about the fact that you can drink things–including things other than water–on days of fasting.

Some moralists have considered alcoholic beverages contrary to the spirit of the day, but they don’t consider beverages other than water to be contrary to the spirit. Examples they commonly cite of beverages that are okay to have on fasting days are milk and fruit juices and coffee with cream, all of which contain calories.

Beverages just are not included under the law of fasting.

This means that, if I wanted, I could drink can after can of low-carb protein shakes on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday and consume 3500 calories of them and still be within the letter of the law.

I would not, however, be within the spirit of the law, which is to encourage moderate hunger as a form of spiritual discipline. If I use calorie-laden beverages (or hunger suppressants) to get around that then I am violating the spirit though not the letter of the law.

As a result, to comply with the spirit of the law, on days of fast I drink whatever I normally would drink but I don’t start chugging extra calories in fluid form. I keep my beverage consumption (mainly zero-calorie Diet 7-Up, since it’s made with Splenda rather than Aspartame) the same and lower the amount of food I eat.

Turning The Water Into Beer…

Tired of home taps that only deliver water? How would you like a beer tap hooked up to your kitchen sink? One Norwegian woman recently discovered her tap water had turned into beer.

It wasn’t a miracle, though; it was just a plumbing malfunction.

"It almost seemed like a miracle to Haldis Gundersen when she turned on her kitchen faucet this weekend and found the water had turned into beer.

"Two flights down, employees and customers at the Big Tower Bar were horrified when water poured out of the beer taps.

"By an improbable feat of clumsy plumbing, someone at the bar in Kristiandsund, western Norway, had accidentally hooked the beer hoses to the water pipes for Gundersen’s apartment.

[…]

"However, Gundersen said the beer was flat and not tempting, even in a country where a half-liter (pint) can cost about 25 kroner ($3.75) in grocery stores."

GET THE STORY.

I’m not much of an alcohol drinker myself. I wonder if I could get my taps to spout soda….

What You Can Get Away With?

Guestblogger Ed Peters writes . . .

Claude Allen suddenly resigned as one of President Bush’s top advisors a couple months ago. Last weekend, he was charged with multiple counts of shop-lifting at local retailers. The MSM is having a field day, of course. I’ve already seen lines like ‘Claude Allen, a proponent of home-schooling, was making $ 161,000 per year when he allegedly scammed the stores.’ But maybe it’s payback time; after all, when Teddy Kennedy left a young woman to drown in his car, the MSM reported ‘Congressman Kennedy, who supports the public school system, did not report the accident until the next day.’… Not.

Here, I wish to make just one point, prefaced by (1) a man is innocent until proven guilty, and (2) the behavior alleged here suggests psychological problems which might impact on moral responsibility, if not legal liability.

In any case, what is it that makes some people, when they find a way to be dishonest, think their discovery entitles them to act dishonestly? If a vending machine will kick out a can of pop if I hit in a certain way, have I the right to take a soda without paying for it, just because I could? (Hey, if the company cared, they could fix the machine, right?) If a clerk turns his back on an open cash drawer, have I the right to take some money? (If they cared about it, they wouldn’t leave it within reach, right?) And if a retailer has procedures that let people get refunds on merchandise they never purchased, then sure, they better fix their procedures, but until they do, it’s open season on them.

Such attitudes, I suggest, are at root “antinomian”. They reflect the attitude that laws (and the morality upon which law rests) are merely as extrinsically-imposed rules that only apply to the degree one might get punished for breaking them. But if, on the other hand, one sees law as somehow (even remotely) being an intelligent participation in divine order, then one’s ability to avoid detection does not justify acting dishonestly.

All of us have sinned, and most of us have broken a law at one time or another. But a functioning conscience reminds us that these actions offend God; as Catholics, we accuse ourselves of wrong-doing and seek forgiveness in Confession. We resolve, with the help of God, to commit that sin no more and, if appropriate, to make reparations. By doing so, we acknowledge that we hurt mostly ourselves when we act wrongly, even when no one else finds out.

The Tsunami Approaches

Ever since the election of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI, Vatican watchers have been expecting a curial shake-up. These Vaticanistas have pointed out that Pre-16 often commented on the need to streamline the Church’s bureaucracy so that it can more effectively carry out its mission, and have consequently predicted that B-16 will shuffle the curial decks. This anticipated move has been likened to a "papal tsunami" and the Vaticanistas have been impatiently watching the ecclesial weather vanes for its arrival.

The storm watch is over. The "tsunami" has begun.

"Pope Benedict on Saturday began a long-awaited streamlining of the Vatican’s central bureaucracy by merging the leadership of four departments, including one which promotes dialogue with Islam.

"A statement said the Pope had appointed French Cardinal Paul Poupard, who is already head of the Pontifical Council for Culture, to also lead the Council for Interreligious Dialogue.

"A statement said the Pope was making the move ‘in order to favour a more intense dialogue between men of culture and exponents of various religions.’"

GET THE STORY HERE.

AND HERE.

Heavy Weather

Just a quick post to show this hailstone my son (the amateur meteorologist) found in our yard Sunday night. It was one of several that he grabbed and put into the freezer. They were the size of plums and made quite a racket when they began to hit the roof. I’ll be checking the whole exterior of the house for damage later today, as well as the cars. I’m hopeful that my old SUV is damaged enough for a new paint job (heh-heh. I’ve found that the key to never being fearful about having your car stolen is to never own one worth stealing. I never lock the thing.).

This particular hailstone happened to split when it impacted, revealing the layers that it built up while falling from 30,000+ feet.

We were lucky. The Doppler radar showed the storm (with several tornados) tracking directly toward our neighborhood. We went down into the basement, lit candles when the power failed, and sat there, listening. Nothing much except for the pummeling from the hail. It passed pretty quickly.

A little later (just before midnight) I headed into town for my weekly hour of adoration. Everything was normal until I nearly hit a tree that had fallen into the road. Then I saw where a number of people had gathered at a local church that had been struck by the twister. It was still standing, but obviously damaged (no one was injured).

A good deal of destruction in our area. I will try to send a few more pics later, if I can get them without being obnoxious or a road hazard.

All together, an interesting night. A little too interesting for our daughter. She was not amused at all, at all.

Today’s forecast; bright and sunny.

The Odd Politics Of The Free Market In America

Earlier I mentioned the Vatican position paper saying that developed nations should reconsider their farm subsidies and agricultural trade barriers so that those in the developing world won’t be hurt by them.

Unfortunately, protectionism is a perpetual risk for every nation, including those in the developed world.

After all: What politician doesn’t want to be able to please certain segments of his constitutency by offering it subsidies and protectionistic trade barriers to keep the prices it can charge for what it makes high?

Jonah Goldberg has an interesting analysis of how the U.S. has been able to ward off the kind of protectionism that has hurt Europe’s economies, as well as a warning about what may be on our horizon.

He writes:

The beauty of the American free-trade consensus over the last few decades is that it split two outlooks that tend to go together: nationalism and socialism. In terms of economic policy, nationalism is indistinguishable from socialism. When you nationalize an industry, you socialize it. And what is the difference between socialized medicine and nationalized healthcare?

Liberals are naturally sympathetic to socialistic arguments, conservatives to nationalistic ones. But to everyone’s benefit these two outlooks have been quarantined in different parties. Conservatives have been culturally nationalistic but economically liberal (in the classical sense). Liberals have been economically nationalistic — on healthcare, regulation, taxes, unions — but culturally liberal. Although it’s been quite painful for them, this cultural liberalism has kept the Democratic Party in favor of free trade and immigration. Protectionism hurts foreigners and poor Americans, after all.

Indeed, to be fair, the Democratic Party has been heroic in bucking its base — the economically nationalistic labor movement — on free trade. FDR, Truman and Kennedy were all consummate economic nationalists. Free trade was tactically in their interests for a long time because it dovetailed with labor’s interest. When the United States stopped being the manufacturer to the world, the Democratic Party struggled — not always successfully — to stay pro-trade on principle, even at the cost of votes. Meanwhile, the GOP has had the opposite challenge: to stay pro-free trade even as its ranks swell with working-class voters enamored with their paychecks, not Adam Smith.

Now, a win-at-all-costs Democratic Party has realized that this is the perfect moment for it to re-brand all of its economic ideas in the language of patriotism. Many Republicans are determined to fight the Democrats for this turf. So they too are bending their economic policies to fit their cultural conservatism.

And if we let them follow this path, we’ll have the same problems as Europe in no time.

GET THE STORY.