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Sunday 1 June 2014

Those We Don't Speak Of -- the Monster, Not Under the Bed, but Behind the Altar

Ooooh, a place of reservation! Scary, boy and girls!

I have never understood liturgists making a bogeyman out of Communion from the tabernacle.
Before I go any further, let me say, if I had any control over practice in my own parish, I would certainly make every effort to adhere to the rubrics, (and the theology underpinning them,) in this regard, but if it were necessary to resort to the reserved Sacrament, cui malo?

Never understood it, is making a fuss about it, which sometimes borders on fanaticism,  just a progressive's marker, a means of establishing ones identity and bona fides as someone who actually reads the documents? [at least in this one instance, and sometimes, in ONLY this one instance,*] is it just a stick for Church Ladies to beat careless priests with?

Why the almost hysterical level of agitation, Does the use of consecrated hosts at Eucharist not fracture the Eucharistic sacrifice? the wailing and gnashing of teeth? Calm down!!!!!
Why is this admittedly less than "perfect" practice such a horror?

Oh no!!!!! Communion from the Tabernacle!!!!
It's not giving "less Jesus", it's not serving people leftovers, it's not a worse "sign", or shouldn't be, to people who truly understand what It, or rather, who He is they are so privileged to receive.

Fr Hunwicke writes about what I've heard called the Tyranny of the Here and Now as it relates to the One Eucharists Sacrifice that we  all, regardless of accidents of geography and chronology, share in.
"the Sacrifice actually being celebrated" is not so much the Sacrifice of Fr X and the good people who have walked or driven to his church on that particular morning, as it is the One Sacrifice of Calvary; what those of us who are proud of our Anglican Patrimony instinctively think of as the Lord's One Oblation of Himself once offered, a full, perfect, and sufficient Sacrifice, Oblation, and Satisfaction: Christ's offering made sacramentally present upon our Altar.
Each Mass is Calvary; there are neither two Calvaries nor many Calvaries.
To be communicated from the Tabernacle with a host consecrated at a previous Mass reminds one that every Mass is the One Mass; that, as that great Separated Doctor of Catholic Truth (Fr Aidan Nichols' phrase), Eric 'Patrimony' Mascall, put it, a plurality of Masses is "the same thing - the same essentially, the same numerically - not just a lot of different things of the same kind, but the very same identical thing ... the one redemptive act which Christ, who died for our sins and rose again for our justification, perpetuates in the Church which is his Body through the Sacrament of his body and blood."
*One person I know who obsesses on this bit of red has not problem at all with making up his own black.

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