Jimmy Akin

HERE’S THE NEXT FIVE PROPOSITIONS FROM THE SYNOD OF THE EUCHARIST.

Having raised the question of "Sunday assemblies awaiting a priest" in Prop 10, the fathers go on to discuss vocations in Proposition 11.

They basicallly ask for a greater push for vocations–particularly by parish priests serving as recruiters.

They also reaffirm the discipline of priestly celibacy for the Latin Church and ask that the reasons for it to be explained to the faithful. Hopefully, B16 will go into some detail about that in his apostolic exhortation, because there is an annoying tendency in ecclesiastical documents for requests to be made for the reasons for something to be explained to the faithful but then (as here) there is NO ENUMERATION OF THOSE REASONS, meaning that the explainer just has to make his best guess at figuring out what the Church has in mind (and on some subjects it’s not even clear what the Church has in mind).

It would be so much nicer if, whenever an ecclesiastical document asks that the reasons for something be explained to the faithful if it then went on to say "And here’s what those reasons are."

I’ve seen Pre-16 offer his personal thoughts on the reasons for clerical celibacy before. Hopefully he’ll give us some official reasons in his apostolic exhortation.

One other note in this proposition is a push to have "a more equitable distribution of the clergy," which means moving priests around from high-vocation centers to low-vocation centers. In principle, that’s fine as long as it doesn’t serve to mask the PROBLEMS in a particular area that are CAUSING it to have a lack of vocations (e.g., heterodox vocations officers who drive away the best candidates for the priesthood or regional seminaries whose faculties are consciously trying to eliminate orthodox seminarians).

Proposition 12 continues the vocations theme by suggesting practical steps the fathers of the Synod hope will be taken to get more vocations. This is pretty standard stuff (priests giving their vocation stories, setting up vocation centers, having Eucharistic adoration for vocations).

A couple of items, while logical, have been unfortunately handled in recent years.

One is the recommendation of focusing on altar servers as potential vocations. The problem here is that you can’t just tell altar servers that they need to consider a vocation to the priesthood because MANY of the altar servers are INCAPABLE of becoming priests since the previous pontificate decided to allow girls into the altar server pool.

Had that not been the case it would be possible to make a stronger push for altar servers to consider becoming priests, but now it’s harder to deliver that message because of the extra nuances that have to be built into its delivery to the target group.

This could be solved, of course, by ceasing to have female altar servers, but I don’t see that happening. (Imagine the outcry. B16 has bigger problems he needs to spend his public capital on.)

Another suggestion that will be complicated in the light of recent events is the suggestion that priests mentor young people (meaning, young boys) and steer them towards vocations.

The problem here (at least in this country) is that in light of the recent priestly sexual abuse scandal parents in many places are frequently going to want to MINIMIZE CONTACT between their sons and parish priests. The less time priests get to spend with boys, the less they can encourage them to consider becoming priests.

Proposition 13 deals with the order of the sacraments of initiation (baptism, confirmation, the Eucharist). This section suggests an in-depth study of Confirmation to more clearly bring out its role and connection to the Eucharist, which would be good since the three sacraments of initiation share a common orientation that is often not understood.

The big news here, though, is that the fathers suggest that the Latin right RECONSIDER THE AGE AT WHICH CONFIRMATION IS TO BE ADMINISTERED.

YEE-HAW!!! This is something that is long overdue.

For a start, the age of confirmation in the United States is A TOTAL MESS. Basically, the U.S. bishops years ago got permission out of the Vatican to basically let each bishop set his own age for confirmation in his diocese (within certain limits). This is AN ENORMOUS PROBLEM and A TRAGIC MISTAKE in a society as mobile as ours, because it is GUARANTEED TO RESULT IN CHILDREN FALLING THROUGH THE CRACKS AND NOT GETTING CONFIRMED as families move from diocese to diocese.

If you’re in a diocese where the confirmation age is 16 and you’ve got a 15-year old kid and then you move to a diocese where the age of confirmation is 7, guess what! Your kid is past the age of confirmation in this diocese and will either have to go to special classes or be shoehorned in with a bunch of 7 year olds.

Conversely, if you have a kid who’s been confirmed at 7 and then you move to an age-16 diocese then when he’s 16 he’s going to sit out what all the other kids his age in the parish are doing because he’s already been confirmed.

We’ve really got to get a single age for confirmation in the United States, and any Church-wide revisiting of the age of confirmation is a good thing in that it could result in that.

The re-examination may have even more dramatic results than that, though, because what they’re talking about (at a minimum) is whether we should mandate that kids get confirmed BEFORE they have First Communion and (at a maximum) whether they should be confirmed immediatley after baptism (as done in many of the Eastern Catholic churches).

Either of these would be an improvement, as they would both restore the ideal order of reception of the sacraments of initiation (baptism, confirmation, Eucharist, not baptism, Eucharist, confirmation).

They would also get around a lot of the nuttiness that goes on in high school confirmation classes (which are also frequently a friction point between teens and parents if the kid is going through a rebellious stage and isn’t sure if he wants to be confirmed).

My preference on this question tends to be Eastern, so I’d love it if they had confirmation administered immediately after baptism, the way it was typically done in the early Church. But I’d be happy if they just mandated that confirmation be administered before First Communion.

(Note that the preceding commentary may tell you more about my concerns about the celebration of confirmation than it does about the Eucharist, though the question of the sequencing of confirmation relative to the Eucharist is a Eucharist-related question.)

Proposition 14 basically calls for renewed Christian education in parishes, focusing on the Eucharist and the Catechism of the Catholic Church and other recent Magisterial teachings.

It also stresses that seminarians "must understand as well as possible the meaning of each liturgical norm."

Proposition 15 basically calls on the family and the parish to be involved in preparing kids for sacramental initiation.

Okay, now that I’ve got my computer situation squared away, back to the propositions from the Synod on the Eucharist.

HERE ARE THE NEXT SIX PROPOSITIONS FROM THE SYNOD OF BISHOPS.

Proposition 5 is another theological review proposition. It discusses the relationship of the Eucharist to the Church. One thing it says is rather interesting:

The ecclesial character of the Eucharist might also be a privileged
point in the dialogue with the communities born with the Reformation.

I’m not sure which communities they’re thinking of (probably Lutherans first and foremost) or what hay they think they may be able to make in this direction, but it stood out.

With prop 6 things get more interesting. #6 is devoted to Eucharistic adoration and forcefully recommends it (even using the word "forcefully"). This is in reaction to an erroneous theology that took hold in some quarters after the Council that dissed Eucharistic adoration, arguing that the celebration of the Mass is what’s important, so all our attention needed to be on the celebration of the Mass, not on Jesus himself as the Eucharist after Mass.

JP2 had been dinging away at that mindset for a while, and this is a continuation of same.

Of note in this section is a recommendation that churches be kept open as much as possible to allow people to come for Eucharistic adoration and that this practice be part of preparation for first Communion.

One thing that it’s important to note here: As encouraging as all this is, the document doesn’t call for any changes in the rules regarding Eucharistic EXPOSITION. People often talk as if exposition and adoration are the same thing, and they’re not. The law imposes VERY SIGNIFICANT restrictions on when exposition can be done, so the call for greater Eucharistic adoration does not translate directly into a call for greater Eucharistic exposition. What they’re envisioning is having churches open so that people can go adore Jesus in the tabernacle, not having Eucharistic exposition available in every parish. That being said, the faithful in different parishes can certainly appeal to the Synod’s recommendation for greater adoration and argue that this would be facilitated if they had exposition available in their parish.

Prop 7 deals with the Eucharist and the sacrament of reconciliation. Noting that the state of grace is necessary for reception of the Eucharist and encouraging frequent confession, the document calls for bishops to do a number of things: (1) start educating people more about the need for conversion and confession, (2) eliminate general absolutions (I’ve never seen one of those, but they appear to be a problem in some countries; Austrailia, for example, from what I understand), (3) make sure there are suitable places for confession in parishes, and (4)–oddly–for the bishop to "appoint the confessor." I’m not sure if the latter is a translation problem or what, for it makes it sound as if each parish would have only one confessor even if it had multiple priests, and I don’t think that’s what they mean.

The prop also says "it would also be necessary to further the dimension of reconciliation
already present in the Eucharistic celebration (cf. CCC 1436),
specifically in the penitential rite," which might be interpreted as a call for beefing up the penitential rite at Mass in some way.

And it calls for a renewed catechesis of the faithful on indulgences and encourages bishops and priests to request more indulgences from the apostolic penitentiary.

Proposition 8 is an attempt to relate the Eucharist the the sacrament of matrimony, but like many of these theological-reflection type propositions, it seems rather thin–like butter spread across too much bread.

The problem is that, because the Eucharist is Jesus and Jesus is God and God is related to everything in the universe (as its Creator) there is a tendency to try to relate the Eucharist to everything in the universe. Anything that one values may get related to the Eucharist in some theological documents, even though there may not be a direct connection between them and so there may not be that much to say about them that is relevant to the Eucharist.

Things that one does not value don’t get this treatment. Thus one never finds attempts to relate the Eucharist to cockroaches or to Smurf dolls or to pebbles on the surface of Mars. The things that the Eucharist gets related to in a document thus often tell one more about the values of the person or people who wrote the document than tells you about the Eucharist itself.

In this proposition the fathers of the Synod are expressing the value of marriage and thus trying to relate it to the Eucharist, but there is not much of a direct connection as the two sacraments (while they are both sacraments).

Some of the interesting stuff in this proposition thus isn’t really about the Eucharist but about marriage. For example, it states: "The Synod recognizes the singular mission of woman in the family and in the society."

That’s interesting. It acknowledges that women have a unique (singular) mission in the family–a proposition that is currently under heavy attack in western culture, where many wish to see husbands and wives as having fully interchangeable roles, with no uniqueness to the mission and role of either. Unfortunately, they don’t go into any detail about what that unique mission in the family may be.

They also allude to women having a unique mission in society. This is probably a clause put in to avoid the charge of wanting to view women as if they only have a contribution to make to the family and no role outside the home. They don’t really go into any detail here either about what the mission of women in society is, though if I had to guess I’d say that one of the things they may have in mind is that "Women: Teachers of Peace" theme that found a place in John Paul II’s writings.

Proposition 9 is TOTALLY BIZARRO if you don’t recognize the style of relating the Eucharist to everything that I mentioned in the previous point. I mean, why on Earth would one want a section titled "Eucharist and Polygamy"? I mean, the Eucharist has NO DIRECT RELATIONSHIP TO POLYGAMY WHATSOEVER.

The reason for this proposition being here is that the fathers of the Synod have just raised the subject of matrimony in the previous point and, having done that (more to show us the value of marriage than to tell us anything about the Eucharist), they then want to address a pastoral problem connected with matrimony.

You see, a polygamy is still a social reality in many parts of Africa, which is also rapidly becoming Catholic in many areas. As a result, the Church is having to tell a bunch of African guys, "Listen, we want you to become Catholic, too, but you’re going to have to give up a bunch of your wives, while also making equitable provision for them and for the children you’ve had by them."

This is an important and delicate subject, but it really doesn’t have a place in a document about the Eucharist because it doesn’t have a direct connection with the Eucharist. One can pick up any social problem one wants and relate it to the Eucharist in this fashion (e.g., "Eucharist and Abortion," "Eucharist and Gay Marriage," "Eucharist and Pornography," "Eucharist and Tax Evasion," "Eucharist and Copyright Violation").

And so we see, once again, this proposition in the document revealing more about the values of the authors (what they consider an important subject that needs to be addressed) than it reveals about the Eucharist.

Proposition 10 actually gets us back to talking about something that has to do with the Eucharist: Communion services celebrated on Sunday becaues there is no priest to say Mass.

The Holy See has recognized a need for these in many places but it also has been quite nervous about them, not wanting people to see them as a replacement equivalent to Mass or a way of promoting the laity who often lead them into a quasi-priestly status.

There is thus a general endorsement of them but a stress on the need to differentiate them from Mass in the imnds of the faithful and a mandate for bishops’ conferences to come up with norms regulating them in their own territory–including when Communion can be distributed at them (it is envisioned that some Sunday assemblies might just be celebrations of the Word).

There’s also something new here that is not obvious unless you’ve read the background documents: There’s a new language introduced for talking about these services. They’ve taken to calling them "Sunday assemblies awaiting a priest." This is meant as a replacement for descriptors like "Sunday assemblies without a priest."

The shift in language–borrowed from France if I recall correctly–is meant to underscore the fact that the norm we have to work toward is having a priest saying Sunday Mass and that we can’t treat a Sunday service without a priest as equivalent to Mass.