Let's consider two related Catholic positions:
1. Traditional Catholicism practices closed communion. That's to protect unworthy communicants from physical and spiritual harm. Based on 1 Cor 11:27-30, priests have a duty to fence the table because unworthy communicants expose themselves to illness, including mortal illness, as well as endangering their souls. To be a worthy communicate you must be in state of grace at the time of communion.
That's why Pope Francis's Amoris laetitia is so controversial. It allows divorced and remarried Catholics to take communion. But if marriage is indissoluble, then divorced and remarried Catholics are living in sin–the sin of adultery. This means they are in a state of mortal sin when they received communion.
2. Protestant communion is invalid. They don't receive the Host. The bread and wine (or grape juice) never becomes the True Body and Blood of Christ. The communion elements remain bread and wine (or grape juice).
I see Catholic apologists make this argument. I haven't read a Catholic theologian make this argument, but I'm guessing the logic goes something like this: for communion to be a valid sacrament, the communion elements must be consecrated by a validly ordained priest. To be validly ordained, the officiant must be in apostolic succession. But when Protestants broke with Mother Church, they ceased to be in apostolic succession. Here's one example:
Moreover, Anglicans have a stronger historical claim to be in apostolic succession than Lutherans, Baptists, Presbyterians, Pentecostals, &c., so if even Anglican ordination is null and void, where does that leave candidates with a poorer claim to apostolic succession?
3. Assuming that's an accurate representation of traditional Catholic theology, let's consider these two positions in combination.
i) On the one hand, it follows that as a rule, Protestant communicants can't be unworthy communicants. They fail to satisfy a necessary condition to be an unworthy communicant. So long as they confine themselves to Protestant communion, they can't be unworthy communicants because the Protestant eucharist was never a valid sacrament in the first place. They aren't receiving the Host unworthily. The Host isn't present in the Protestant eucharist.
Protestants can only be unworthy communicants if they attend Mass and receive the sacrament at Mass. Say a Protestant married to a Catholic who attends Mass to accommodate the spouse.
ii) The flip side is that only Catholics are in danger of becoming unworthy communicants, since only Catholics receive the Host.
4. This generates a striking risk-assessment dilemma. On the one hand, the risk to Protestants is to miss out on the benefit of sacramental grace in the eucharist.
On the other hand, the risk to Catholics is to contract illness, even fatal illness, and worse yet, imperil their immortal soul.
Ironically, this means Catholics have more to lose than Protestants. While Protestants miss out on a channel of sacramental grace, Catholics endanger their physical wellbeing and even–or especially–their eternal wellbeing. Protestant communion is safe whereas Catholic communion is Russian roulette. A cost/benefit analysis discourages the Catholic option.
5. Finally, this invites an actuarial comparison. If the Catholic position is true, then the morbidity rate for Catholics ought to be much higher than for Protestants. Given the number of unworthy communicants at Mass, Catholic communicants should be dying like flies, well above the replacement rate. You'd be safer in a snake-handling service than attending Mass. But is there any comparative statistical evidence that Catholic communion is far more hazardous than Protestant communion?
I don't accept the Catholic paradigm. I'm just playing along for the sake of argument to examine the implications of the Catholic paradigm on its own terms.
Roman Catholics might have the 2000-year-old church but Landmark Baptists have the 2001-year-old church! It's quite the pedigree, I assure you.
ReplyDeleteThe "dying like flies" part seems like a mis-step. After all, Protestants presumably also believe that what Paul says in I Corinthians is true. And no doubt there are many Protestants who take Communion unworthily by Protestant criteria--e.g., while not repentant of their sin, while harboring malice against others, and so forth. So if eating and drinking unworthily really does mean you are *likely* to die, here and now, then presumably Protestants would also expect deaths in their own congregations to be attributable to partaking unworthily as well.
ReplyDeleteThe comparative point (as opposed to the *absolute* statement about "dying like flies") may have more to commend it--that if Paul's words *cannot* be fulfilled in a Protestant context, then we should have *more* deaths in a Catholic context.
But the *absolute* point should be rescinded, for a skeptic of both Catholicism and Protestantism could otherwise use it to argue that Paul must be wrong, since neither Catholics nor Protestants appear to be dying because they are taking Communion unworthily.
I would guess myself that it's possible that God is fulfilling Paul's words nowadays more through spiritual than through physical death, whether in Protestant or in Catholic contexts, and hence that death rates are not a good way to decide who has valid Communion and hence not a good ground for skepticism of either Protestantism, Catholicism, or Paul's teaching.
One issue is whether 1 Cor 11 has reference to Host desecration by acting in ways that dishonor the real presence. But what if 1 Cor 11 isn't referring to the real presence. For instance:
Deletehttp://triablogue.blogspot.com/2017/01/discerning-body.html
As I understand it, the passage isn't about the Eucharist but the Agape feast preceding the Eucharist. Some Christians were mistreating other Christians at the Agape feast, and that incurred divine judgment. The question then would be what might be equivalent to the Agape feast in modern denominations, which, in turn, might incur similar divine judgment in case of abuse.
Delete