5/14/2021
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| Duccio, "Agony" |
Pastors benefit from Ed Peters's work on hard Holy Communion cases
The matter of the administration of Holy Communion requires pastors to have their act together. The Canon Lawyer, Ed Peters, has done excellent work over many years explaining Canon 915 and its application. His 2019 post, “Canon 915’s moment has arrived” on his blog together with his 2011 essay called “The Cuomo-Communion Controversy” in CWR both investigate the supposed contrast between the Church’s law and her pastoral practice. They can be helpful to us.
Harsh Penalty or Good Practice?
One point Peters makes is the difference between sacramental discipline and penal sanctions. The norms which govern sacramental discipline are distinct from the norms establishing penalties. Rather than being norms that contrast with each other, they operate in altogether distinct ways. Sacramental Discipline governs the Church’s responsibility to administer the Sacraments, its norms being found in Book IV of the Code. Penal Sanctions govern the Church’s responsibility to use coercive power against its offending members, with its norms in Book VI. Sacramental Discipline requires the prudent execution of the minister’s sacramental responsibility according to a pre-determined set of commonly occurring circumstances, even those circumstances that may happen rather infrequently. Penalties require strict interpretation of carefully defined crimes and involve due process.
Peters also explains that excommunication is a penalty sanctioned by the Church in accord with the law. Required for its execution are laws prohibiting certain crimes, the procedure against an alleged perpetrator and the adjudication of the case by the competent authority. One of the most obvious effects of the penalty of excommunication is the exclusion from participation in Sacramental Communion.
Exclusion from Holy Communion
The effect of exclusion from Holy Communion, however, also has other causes which are themselves not penalties at all. Non-Catholics are excluded from Holy Communion as are young people who are not yet prepared. So too are the faithful who have not fasted from the previous hour or who know themselves first to require absolution before approaching. In short, anyone lacking proper preparation can find themselves indisposed and thus warranting exclusion from participating in Holy Communion at any given time. The Church’s sacramental discipline guides both the faithful and the Sacrament’s ministers in discerning individual cases.
While the effect, the exclusion from Holy Communion, is the same for someone obstinately persisting in manifest serious sin as it is for an excommunicate, it is an effect that is nevertheless arrived at from two very different paths. In the case of excommunication, exclusion is the result of the lengthy and carefully adjudicated penal process. In the case of someone publicly unworthy due to their obstinate persistence in manifest grave sin, exclusion is the spontaneous reaction of a discerning minister executing his responsibility simultaneously to safeguard the individual presenting himself, the surrounding community and most importantly, the Most Blessed Sacrament.
Pastors are ‘on it’
In the parish, the discernment of cases of exclusion from Holy Communion involving any of the faithful who are obstinately persisting in manifest serious sin is the responsibility of the pastor. The Church has clarified this with its 2000 Declaration concerning the question of Holy Communion for the divorced and remarried (cf. paragraph no. 3). At any given Mass where, say, the pastor is not present, it would be the priest responsible for the community, that is, the priest celebrating the Mass.
A less serious, but no less real example of a minister spontaneously excluding someone from Holy Communion would be the case of an absentminded gum-chewing six year-old who somehow ends up at the altar rail at communion time. No one would accuse the minister of usurping to himself some sudden, unsanctioned authority of meting out the penalty of excommunication as he passed over the six year-old and moved on to the next person in line. Ministers are well-practiced at executing this momentary discernment, even if they get a couple difficult cases wrong due to a lack of clarity or the fog of the moment. The Sacramental Discipline guides ministers in the common cases, even the increasingly common case of the publicly unworthy.
There’s no need for pastor’s to feel in the dark on this question. Peters’s explanations, with characteristic frankness, favor the dispelling of ignorance that can often surround the Church’s norms. While difficult situations do require study, Peters encourages us that “none of this is canonical rocket science.” Christ’s desire for our participation in his Body and Blood favors our diligence in discerning how best to administer so great a mystery as effectively as possible. Our deeper understanding of the differences between the penalty of excommunication and the minister’s spontaneous reaction to an immediate set of circumstances will serve to build up the Communion of Saints.
[I posted this to "The Rectory" Substack, also.]
Image: Duccio "Last Supper"
