COLUMN

HOLY COMMUNION!

Gerard V. Bradley

I
f the wag who coined the term "cafeteria Catholic" had taken out a copyright, he would surely be rich by now. It is the standard term for self-identified Catholics who pick and choose among truths of the Faith, as if putting together lunch on a cafeteria line.

Campus Cafeteria Catholicism, the type with which I am most familiar (call it CCC), includes a healthy portion of social justice teachings (seasoned heavily with Roncalli; light on the Wojtyla, thank you). The intellectual content of CCC has been entirely evacuated. There is, to be sure, intellectual interest in Catholicism on campus. CCC is in fact a great intellectual smorgasbord, like mealtime on a Carnival cruise ship. This interest is in something called "the Catholic intellectual tradition," an ensemble of authors, books, and other stuff available for common inspection. But "interest" does not imply that intellectual assent is due to the propositions which are essential truths of the Faith.

CCC is actually at war with the Faith, for the two great truths to which it does demand assent - "institutional autonomy" and "academic freedom" - preclude a college's fidelity to the Church. They undermine individual faith as well. Besides these two propositions, the faith of CCC is pretty much the individual's experience of his or her relationship to God. CCC has no necessary ecclesial dimension.

CCC combines a high-church aesthetic in liturgy - lots of hymns and organ music, no more Woody Guthrie guitar riffs - with a very low sacramental theology. Think Protestant, and you will get the general idea.

The Mass is the summit of the Catholic life, and the Mass is essentially the Eucharistic Sacrifice. CCC's Protestant tendencies regarding the Eucharist are therefore quite corrosive of the Faith. Even where the wildest liturgical abuses are absent, there are telltale signs on campus (and in all too many Catholic parishes) of this tendency. For example, explicit denials on campus of transubstantiation are, mercifully, rare. But that transubstantiation is a myth is implicitly taught. The priest has been demoted from celebrant to presider, if not to facilitator, a steady descent into psycho-speak. In reality, the priest links the visible assembly present to the universal Church; by virtue of his ordination by a successor to the apostles.

Then there is the transformation of the beatitude, "Happy are they who are called to his supper" to "Happy are we who are called to this supper." Here is concealed a theological revolution. This change leads people to focus on this group's "groupness." It obscures the fact that the unity of the entire Church, not only those living on earth, but the Church Suffering in Purgatory and the Church Triumphant in Heaven, is the beatitude's focus.

The truth is that in the Mass Christians through the centuries and all over the world have come to share in the unique communion established by Jesus at the Last Supper. But once the focus is imperceptibly but effectively shifted to the quality of our "worship experience," the Eucharist can only play an instrumental, not a central or defining, role in the Mass.

Any reliably Catholic understanding of the Sacraments, most notably but not only the Holy Eucharist, will relegate experience to a decidedly secondary role. What could be plainer than that at an infant baptism nothing palpable or observable occurs, except that the parents beam, and maybe the baby cries? Not much of an experience, right? But the reality of baptism is that a new Christian has come into a being; a human being has been redeemed. No change of appearance accompanies the profound transformation of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of our Lord. Yet, even a Mass celebrated by a priest on automatic pilot, attended by a singled distracted altar boy, works an indescribable miracle: truly, really present is Christ's eternal sacrifice which reconciled us to our Father, and so makes possible everlasting joy in Heaven.

How should that be rated as a "liturgy experience"?

Gerard Bradley is a professor of law at the University of Notre Dame.