Word: eucharist
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After about 45 minutes the service was over. I had been anxious for the eucharist, to see whether or not the campesinos would partake of it, but I was disappointed; the mass ended right where the eucharist usually begins...
Over the centuries, divisions between the two churches have been exacerbated by punitive excommunication, mutual persecution and outright religious war. The underlying theological differences have included such questions as the nature of the Eucharist (an issue covered in an important 1971 consensus) and the role of the priesthood. The commission's new agreement resolves some of the remaining differences by ignoring old controversies in favor of new and broader interpretations...
Kelleher feels that the sub rosa aspect of that approach, however, leaves too many people with uncertain consciences. He suggests that the church should simply "welcome home" those who have suffered failed first marriages to "the central act of Catholic worship, the Eucharist," and to the "protective love of a genuinely Christian community." For U.S. Catholics, whose divorce rate is nearing the national average of one out of four marriages, that kind of compassion could be welcome indeed...
...they also maintain that a child cannot be required to receive the sacrament unless he is conscious of serious sin. Jesuit Francis Buckley of the University of San Francisco points out that canon law itself defines the age of reason differently for the reception of the Eucharist and penance...
...Roman Catholics who have divorced and remarried have rarely had the official sympathy of their church. Indeed, unless the first marriage can somehow be proved invalid, the second union is considered to be no marriage at all, and canon law bars the partners from the sacrament of the Eucharist. Even so, there has been one slight softening in Rome's attitude. A recent letter to the world's bishops promises that the Vatican will soon amend a canon law that forbids Catholic funeral services -or even burial in consecrated ground -to "public sinners," a category that has often...