Ask Tony: Can a non-Catholic receive communion at a funeral Mass?

From Becky in Omaha, NE, via Facebook:

My sister-in-law’s mother died this week. She was someone very dear to me and a devout Catholic. I will be attending her funeral in a couple of days. I’m sure it will be a full mass. Is it an offense if I participate in the communion? I regularly participate in communion at my non-denominational church obeying the command, “Do this in remembrance of Me” [Lk 22:19; cf. 1 Cor 11:25]. I however certainly do not want to offend anyone in the family or anyone in the parish if this is something inappropriate for a non-Catholic.

Answer:

First, I believe every Christian church ought to have Communion every Sunday, without exception. “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the chalice, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Cor 11:26). Some churches celebrate Communion so rarely, they don’t proclaim the Lord’s death so much as they mention it in passing.

The Catholic Church has what’s known—and sometimes damned—as a “closed table”. To participate in Communion, you must be in communion.

Many people—mostly but not exclusively Evangelicals—like to speak of the “invisible unity of believers”, a bond that reaches across dogmatic and sectarian divisions to embrace all Christians. This “invisible unity” has some utility in interfaith dialogue. We could postulate, for example, that the degree to which we all hold the points of faith in the Apostle’s Creed is the degree to which we’re united as Christians; we could go so far as to plug it as the minimum standard for what C. S. Lewis termed “mere Christianity”.

But there’s no denying that there are visible fissures and fractures among Christians, from the squabbling between Catholics and Orthodox over the filioque to the Docetist denial of the Real Presence by Evangelicals. (And let’s not even start on the Jehovah’s Witnesses and LDS, okay?) Whatever we can say about the invisible unity, the all-too-visible disunity is a scandal and a tragedy.

Setting aside for one moment the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, for Communion to fully symbolize the unity of believers, there must be unity among those partaking. By the rules, even Catholics who have committed mortal sin or publicly broken with the Church on dogmatic grounds—think Vice-President Joe Biden, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi—should not participate.

This is not a question of judging souls but rather of telling the truth. Partaking in Catholic Communion as a non-Catholic, or as a Catholic ex communione, is telling a lie: it says, “I’m fully united in faith with everyone else here” when the person is not. You could tell yourself it’s a harmless lie, but it’s not. It deliberately misleads people to whom the truth is owed in full justice. In fact, you are one of the people owed the truth, and you’ve denied it to yourself. Not only should you not bear false witness against your neighbor, you shouldn’t bear false witness against yourself.

I also recognize Becky’s intent in wanting to participate; I for one am happy she wants to do this in memory of Our Lord. To help her out, I sent her instructions for the Chaplet of Divine Mercy. The Chaplet is a series of prayers, revealed in a vision to St. Faustina Kowalska sometime in the 1930s, which spiritually unites the person praying with the Eucharist. Hopefully it will help. And please keep Becky’s sister-in-law’s family in your prayers.

EXTRA: LIFESITENEWS BEING SUED BY PRO-CHOICE PRIEST!

A Quebec priest and former Member of Parliament, Rev. Raymond Gravel, has filed suit in the provincial courts against LifeSiteNews on the grounds of libel and demanding $500,000 compensation. Apparently the good Fr. Gravel blames LSN, among other media outlets, for his forced retirement from his seat (although canon 285 §3 forbids clerics from "assum[ing] public offices which entail a participation in the exercise of civil power"). Although Fr. Gravel is on record as having declared himself "pro-choice", and as having defended the awarding of Canada's highest civil honor to abortionist Henry Morgentaler, he apparently claims a distinction between "pro-choice" and "pro-abortion".

The Thomas More Society has offered legal help; however, TMS is a US organization, while the lawsuit was filed in Canada. Even a successful defense will severly cripple or shut down LSN. For this reason, they're passing the hat around for contributions to help them fight off this vicious attack.

If you'd like to help, follow this link to LSN's donation page. You can make a one-time gift, or on a monthly basis. Your donation is tax-deductible under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.

A quick lesson in political reality

Not too long after "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" was officially ended, the commader of an aircraft carrier was sacked because of some speeches he'd made over the ship's intercom that included anti-gay epithets. Times being what they are, it apparently wasn't enough to make him tolerate open homosexuality; the new rules had to make possible an ex post facto punishment for being intolerant.

What brings this to mind is a discussion on Fr. Dwight Longenecker's blog on a recent decision by the British Parliament to formally allow churches to hold marriage ceremonies for same-sex couples. Father's concern is that gay-rights activists will use the law to try to compel Catholic and Anglo-Catholic communions to "marry" gay couples. A couple of the commentors seem to suggest that Fr. Longenecker's concerns demonize gay people; one even hinted that it was comparable to the demonization of Jews in the last century, by such sterling examples as Fr. Charles Coughlin.

Are you kidding me?

Look: let's first grant that not every gay person or same-sex couple feels the need to have their love validated by any church, let alone the Catholic Church. There are others who, while they feel the Church is wrong and wrong-headed, at least respect where the Church is coming from. There are even homosexual Catholics who adhere to the Church's teachings voluntarily, remaining chaste. We're not talking about these people.

Then there are those whom my cousin, who is gay himself, calls "the screamers". Besides behaving like brats at the slightest sign of opposition, it's not enough for them to win a point: they have to rub their opponents' faces in their defeat. Hence the now-disgraced Navy captain. The vast majority of the screamers are virulently anti-Catholic.

If restricting the legal definition of marriage to heterosexual couples were ever ruled by SCOTUS to be unconstitutional—and Lawrence v. Texas gives us no reason to think they wouldn't—you can bet your hat and ass some screamers will try to find a way to leverage the decision against the Church in court. And Roe v. Wade shows us that even the plainest words of the Constitution and its amendments are no protection when five out of nine over-glorified lawyers decide they want to change society to their liking.

Our only protection right now is that most of the over-glorified lawyers on the bench right now are Catholics, even if "cafeteria Catholic" like Associate Justice Sotomayor.

That's not demonization. That's political reality in the West.

The dumbest thing I've read this week

Not too long after I wrote the post about the Philadelphia grand jury, I visited Fr. Z's blog. He, too, had posted a short reflection, a call to prayers and penance. And amidst the comments, I found a few posts by some ... people ... who suggested that the cause of the scandal was the adoption of the Novus Ordo liturgy.

This is exactly why traddies set my teeth on edge: Clown Masses? Wymyn ordaining themselves priests? Prominent Catholic politicians blatantly thumbing their noses at Humanae Vitae? Gay ephebophile clerics? Well, it can all be solved if we just go back to the Tridentine Latin Mass!

Since I kept to the spirit of Fr. Z's post, let me post my reply to the anti-VII crowd here:

Dear dumbjohns,

First, let me introduce you to a concept known in logic as the post-hoc fallacy. The post-hoc fallacy occurs when you say, "A happened, then B happened after that, so A must have caused B."

Now that you've absorbed that complex idea, let me ask you this: Do you honestly think this kind of thing never occurred prior to 1962?

Let me tell you: it did.

People didn't know about it, because people didn't want to hear that that nice Fr. O'Malley was a sexual pervert, any more than they wanted to hear that that nice Reverend Mooney, Rabbi Tuchman, Dr. Fassbein, Mr. Holmquist down the street, the Little League coach or dear Uncle Fred was a sexual pervert. In those days—in fact, just up until the last twenty years or so—the Church didn't have to work too hard to cover these things up because the community didn't go out of its way to unearth child-molesters. They still don't.

Yes, the Novus Ordo Mass has problems, most of which will (hopefully!) be corrected with the new Missa Romanum translation coming out this Advent. But there are a lot of other problems in the Church that simply throwing away the NO won't solve, and may even exacerbate.

Your brother in Christ,

Anthony S. "Tony" Layne

P.S. Vatican II will never be disowned or discarded. Paul VI declared it part of the Church's ordinary Magisterium; both JP2 and B16 have accepted it in its entirety. It's with us forever. Get over it; get used to it.

Don't have time to pray?

Sure you do. It takes less time than you think.

Within the wide, variegated collection of Catholic prayers are short prayers known as aspirations, so called because they take one breath or less to say. To get you started, let me give you just one:

Lord, Thy will be done.

Upset because some jerk cut you off in traffic? Got some bad news about a relative (in the hospital, in jail, in his/her final hours)? Just got your lay-off notice? Facing a very unpleasant task or circumstance? In saying, "Lord, Thy will be done," you've prayed, accepted the situation, offered up your suffering and re-committed yourself to discipleship in five words. And it took less than five seconds. You may also have gained a partial indulgence. And you can do it while you're doing something else.

(By the way, the Sign of the Cross, when performed with the traditional words "In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen," also gains a partial indulgence.)

There are plenty of others; check out this website for a list. Please note that neither "Jesus H. Christ!" nor "Good Lord on a bicycle!" are aspirations. But "Jesus, Mary and Joseph!" is ... which is why it's commonly associated with the Irish.

Please note that I'm not suggesting a steady diet of aspirations is all you need for a solid prayer life. I'm saying that by themselves they're better than not praying at all, and that they can even help you deal with the many irritants and obstacles of quotidian existence in a manner that builds discipleship.

I'm also saying that you do have time to pray. Because the simplest prayers take no time at all, at all.

[H/T to Fr. John Zuhlsdorf! Has to be a hat, since I can't wear a biretta ....]

A small suggestion to the Philadelphia chancery

According to Rocco Palma, the second grand jury to sit on the handling of clergy sex-abuse cases in the City of Brotherly Love has issued its findings.

In light of the Archdiocese’s reaction to the last grand jury report, we expect that some may accuse us of anti-Catholic bias for speaking of these painful matters. We are not church-haters. Many of us are church-goers. We did not come looking for “scandal,” but we cannot close our eyes to the powerful evidence we heard. We call the church to task, to fix what needs fixing.

And there is much that still needs fixing:

The present grand jury, however, is frustrated to report that much has not changed. The rapist priests we accuse were well known to the Secretary of Clergy, but he cloaked their conduct and put them in place to do it again. The procedures implemented by the Archdiocese to help victims are in fact designed to help the abusers, and the Archdiocese itself. Worst of all, apparent abusers – dozens of them, we believe – remain on duty in the Archdiocese, today, with open access to new young prey.

My first, small suggestion to you, reverend fathers of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia? Shut up. Don't make any excuses; don't try to explain what you were trying to accomplish. FIX THE PROBLEM. NOW.

A poll to vote on!

Over at his fine blog What Does the Prayer Really Say, the ineffable Fr. Z has a poll running: Should women wear head coverings at church? I recommend you go over there and vote now; it should be up for at least a week from today, but don't count on it!

Jackie Kennedy rocking the white mantilla!

For my part, I would like to see female head coverings, like mantillas, come back as part of a greater movement by Catholics to dress more appropriately for the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. However, I don't see the use right now of legislating it, since "cafeteria Catholics" and "C&E Catholics" don't pay much attention to canon law or USCCB norms anyway. (And, lest you think I'm being sexist, I'd also like to see men wearing proper hats ... fedoras, not baseball caps.)

The appropriate citation is 1 Corinthians 11:2-16, if you're insistent on the matter. My take on it, though, is that head covering is a matter of discipline rather than dogma, and the rule can be adjusted to suit the cultural context; I believe that's also the Vatican's current thought on the matter. (I stand willing to be corrected.) At the time St. Paul wrote, a woman's hair was her pride; even today, after fifty years of women's liberation, in our culture it's more important for a woman to have beautiful hair than for men to have hair at all. Yet I don't really notice any less vanity among men about their hair—or lack thereof—than among women. It was sometime a paradox, but the time gives it proof.

What do you think? Let me—and Fr. Z—know!

A timely wake-up call

Richard Collins over at Linen on the Hedgerow has issued a wake-up call to his fellow Englishment on the devastation caused by fire and floods in Queensland and Victoria in Australia. We in the USA should be ashamed ... Australia is one of our staunchest allies, who is still backing our play in Afghanistan when many of our other allies have already backed out (and some refused to go in to begin with). So here's the question, folks: What are we going to do about it?

On beauty

Here's an awesome meditation on beauty and Catholic churches by The Crescat:

Christ Hope of the World, Vienna, Austria ... ecch!

...I've been thinking much about beauty lately. I think about children who grow up in homes with drab walls and no books and then spend eight hours of their day in cinder blocked school houses. Or the neighbor kid who comes over occasionally and asks me to play music for him off my iPod. Classical, Klezmer, Bhangra and soulful Morna.

Beauty makes the soul soar and it's as essential to the spirit as food and water is to the body. Yet it's mocked as sentimentality. Foolishness. It's wiped out of churches and removed from school curriculums. Even art school's favor is with modern art and beauty is turned into profanity.

On any given day I am not overly exposed to beauty. I sit in traffic each morning staring at grey asphalt, then I ride through treeless streets lined with ugly buildings and spend the remainder of my day in a cube. I imagine most people go through these typical mundanities daily and my day is not unlike the majority.

My home though, is where I surround myself with beauty. I have it hanging on the walls and dripping out of stereo speakers. I visit it in my mind through pages in a book. My home is my sanctuary... because today's churches are not.

It used to be churches were where regular people could experience that overwhelming awe inspiring spiritual soaring. Churches used to make the soul sing for God. Beauty in the Church is essential. I don't want God brought down from the Heavens and made "relatable" to me. I want to carried up to Christ so I can meet Him there and be in awe surrounded by beauty.

People often justify their ugly little parishes by saying they don't believe in wasting money for garnishments, money that could serve the poor. Little do they realize that their bleak and barren churches are spiritually depriving the poor, starving their very souls. I often wonder why people think the poor only deserve the basic most bare minimums. It's an injustice to deny them of the one place where their senses should swim in beauty and be a refuge from the ugly harsh world. The Church.

Indeed, when I was studying art history at Virginia Commonwealth University my refuge was the Richmond cathedral. I was fortunate my dorm, Johnson Hall, was right next door. In the harsh environment of vulgar modern art lauded by my instructors, my only retreat was at this cathedral. It started there, my conversion. I was completely unchurched and, being an atheist, no argument from another Catholic could have swayed me otherwise. But here, here there was no arguing against the beautiful peacefulness that filled me in this place. There was no refuting the absolute Truth represented in the beauty of this church.

Beauty picks up where words leave off. It breaks my hurt every time I step into a white washed church devoid of beauty and love. There's an unspoken evangelistic opportunity that happens to a soul every time it steps foot into a church gilded for God's glory. Ugly churches miss that opportunity. ...

Anthony Esolen writes, "When a lost soul wanders into the silence of one of our churches, it should not feel to him as if he had walked into a doctor's waiting room, or the department of motor vehicles, but into a new world, mysterious and true."

Update: February 7, 2011

This reflection has been reposted to the interfaith website Patheos. The Crescat (Katrina Fernandez) is a single mother, an LPN, and both witty and wise. This repost tells me she's getting more visibility, which is all to the good, and I wish her all great things.
 

Music of the Sarum Rite

Footage from a concert given at Trinity Episcopal in NYC (remember from National Treasure?). If we see the establishment of an Ordinariate in the U.S., we may have the opportunity to hear such splendid choral music more and more often.

Feast your ears: