I want to maintain two things: first that the eucharist matters, is the centre of Christian life, so that the ongoing disruption of our celebration of the mass ought to be a source of hurt. But secondly, I want to say that this disruption is justified, and that if we grasp these two points together we learn something about the eucharist itself.
Human beings have an anti-tragic streak in us, there’s a temptation to always see the best in a situation, even when the best isn’t there to be seen. So it is understandable that some people have seen the separation of the faithful from the eucharistic mysteries over the past months as an opportunity. The pages of the Catholic press have been full of stories of people discovering new forms of spirituality during lockdown. Now of course God does bring good out of ill, but to my mind people have sometimes been too quick to see the good and ignore the ill, there’s been a glib sitting lightly to the loss of the eucharist which ultimately runs up against what must be non-negotiable Catholic belief: that here in a unique way, Christ and his sacrificial self-giving are present to us.
But they are not present for the sheer sake of it, rather Christ comes to us in the eucharist – so Aquinas insists – to bring about charity, that love of God and of neighbour that is constitutive of God’s Kingdom. The mass, like all sacraments, does not exist for itself but for the sake of the Kingdom. It is not intended to make of us a religious in-club, but of people who are sent forth to change the world – Ite missa est. And so if the demands of love of our neighbour require restrictions on the celebration of mass, as they clearly do at the moment, far from being in tension with the nature of the eucharist, those restrictions – albeit in a tragic fashion – invite us to a proper living out of the eucharistic life. For the sake of the charity symbolised in our eucharistic communion, we must for a time live differently. When the full practice of regular masses, frequent communion, singing, full Sunday congregations, and so on is restored, we can say ‘this too is for the sake of our neighbour’.
In a strange land 