Peter CostelloIt will be a familiar Sunday scene to many: the parents at Mass praying and participating, their children restless, bored and uninvolved in the service they attend. The congregation will be mostly older parishioners and couples with children. There will be few teenagers and almost no young adults. This indifference, this lack of interest will be recognised by all.
But there is worse. Some time ago in the Catholic library, with which I am involved, a mother called in seeking help. Her 12-year-old daughter had expressed the opinion that taking Communion, if the bread were the body of Christ, was a kind of cannibalism. The mother was naturally distressed. She was seeking some way to explain to her daughter the true meaning that lies at the heart of the Mass. I asked her why she didn’t speak to her parish clergy. She said she couldn’t talk about it with them at all.
These impressions suggest there is a crisis of some kind at hand. But even those who attend to the Mass have ideas that are far from those they are nominally supposed to hold, as was revealed some years ago over President McAleese taking Communion at an Anglican service. The understanding of the Real Presence among the great body of Catholics has shifted from that of their parents or indeed of theologians.
Both these books in their different ways address these concerns. Fr McGovern is an American Opus Dei priest, with all that implies. He attempts to provide in a clear way the outline of a theology of the Eucharist. He does this very well, but does his approach, I wonder, truly address the problems. While written from a very traditional point of view, which will appeal to some readers, does he grapple with the nature of the crisis?
Fr McGovern’s book is a very professional production from a mainstream press. The book by John MacMahon, a Dublin priest, has been published by the author. Fr MacMahon was ordained in 1951 and has inevitably lived through profound changes in the life of the Church.
In simpler, more popular, language than his American counterpart he tries to explain again the theology of the Mass, first taking his readers step by step through the service.
His second section is intended more by way of reference on topics associated with his main theme as supported by Scriptures. In the third section he turns to dealing with the mystery of the Eucharist, the Real Presence. He hopes that his book might find its place on courses, but the actual audience he writes for is a family one.
Indifference
Will these books answer the indifference or the rejection which so many sense? Will they help the bored children, the anxious mother? I suspect not. Perhaps what is needed to engage both those children and that young girl is an emphasis less on theology (the approach that comes naturally to priests through their training), but a return to Scripture, to an understanding, or even a feeling for the historical events of the Last Supper and the Passion, to an engagement with those real experiences of which the Mass is a stylised re-enactment.
But whether the answer lies in theology or in spirituality, a realisation that there is a problem, and that somehow it is not being well answered has to be accepted.
What we see at the Mass has emerged by a pattern of historical growth, when questions posed by the early Christians were answered by then appropriate means.
The doctrine of the Real Presence as expounded theologically depends on medieval, indeed Aristotelian, concepts of ‘appearance’ and ‘substance’ that science no longer recognises as a description of reality. Matter is not a ‘substance’; rather it is largely energy.
What changes during the Mass might be better explained a change in the true ‘heart of matter’, a mystery which like the mysteries of religion is imperfectly known to us.
Perhaps theology has to find a new ways of expressing faith’s eternal truths for the present day.