Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T12:58:17.505Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Practicing Catholic “Place”—The Eucharist

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2014

Philip F. Sheldrake
Philip F. Sheldrake
Affiliation:
Sarum College/University of Wales, Lampeter
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

A sense of place is critical to human identity. The Eucharist is a ritual practice that “places” us within a narrative wider than our individual and exclusive stories. The Eucharist breaks open private identities to embrace the oikumenē of all times, places and people. This article explores ways in which the Eucharist may be thought of as “the practice of Catholic place.” It does this by integrating sacramental and ethical perspectives. The eucharistic narrative in a radical way makes a place for stories of suffering and exclusion that demand redress. It is a place of reconciliation that makes space for memories that refuse to remain silent. The Eucharist draws believers into the all-embracing catholicity of God. It thus engages a power beyond the ritual enactments themselves that makes an entry point for “the other,” not least for the oppressed, the marginalized and the excluded.

Type
Articles
Information
Horizons , Volume 28 , Issue 2 , Fall 2001 , pp. 163 - 182
Copyright
Copyright © The College Theology Society 2001

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 McBrien, Richard, Catholicism (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 7.Google Scholar

2 For a detailed analysis of “thisness” see Wolter, Allan B., The Philosophical Theology of John Duns Scotus (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 89–97.Google Scholar

3 See the contrasting essays by White, Susan and Habgood, Archbishop in Brown, David and Loades, Ann, eds., The Sense of the Sacramental (London: SPCK, 1995), 31–43 and 19–30Google Scholar respectively. White's ethical approach needs to be balanced by Habgood's more markedly sacramental understanding of the whole of the natural world.

4 See Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologiae, IGoogle Scholar, q.8, a.1.

5 See Tracy, David, “The Return of God in Contemporary Theology,” in Concilium 1994/1996, Why Theology?, 37–46.Google Scholar

6 See Tracy, David, On Naming the Present: God, Hermeneutics, and Church (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1994), 42–45.Google Scholar

7 Rahner, Karl, The Trinity (London: Burns & Oates, 1970), 22.Google Scholar

8 For the notion of space in God, see Gunton, Colin, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1997), 112ff.Google Scholar See also his The One, The Three and The Many (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 164 where he writes, “There is thus a richness and space in the divine life, in itself and as turning outwards in the creation of the dynamic universe that is relational order in space and time.”

9 On reconceiving particularity in Trinitarian terms, see Cunningham, David S., These Three are One: The Practice of Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), chap. 6.Google Scholar

10 See Gunton, , The One, The Three and The Many, 113.Google Scholar

11 Dulles, Avery, The Catholicity of the Church (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).Google Scholar

12 McBrien, 8–16.

13 Traherne, Thomas, Centuries (London: Mowbray, 1975), 1, 31.Google Scholar

14 Curran, Charles E., The Church and Morality: An Ecumenical and Catholic Approach (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 18–20.Google Scholar

15 Curran, , The Church and Morality, 9.Google Scholar

16 The link between the enactment of identity and the ethical nature of the Eucharist is discussed by the contemporary moral theologian, Spohn, William, Go and Do Likewise: Jesus and Ethics (New York: Continuum, 1999), 175–84.Google Scholar

17 On this point, see Saliers, Donald E., “Liturgy and Ethics: Some New Beginnings,” in Hamel, Ronald and Himes, Kenneth, eds., Introduction to Christian Ethics: A Reader (New York: Paulist, 1989), 175–86.Google Scholar

18 Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry, Faith and Order Paper 111 (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1982), pars. 19–20 and 22. Cited subsequently as WCC.

19 Williams, Rowan, On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 209–10.Google Scholar

20 See Cavanaugh, William, “The Eucharist as resistance to globalisation” in Beckwith, Sarah, ed., Catholicism and Catholicity: Eucharistic Communities in Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 69–84.Google Scholar

21 Certeau, Michel de, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 115–30.Google Scholar

22 WCC, 24.

23 Ford, David, Self and Salvation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)Google Scholar touches on what he calls “the ethics of feasting” in 268–70.

24 See Rowland, Christopher, “Eucharist as Liberation from The Present” in The Sense of the Sacramental, 200–15.Google Scholar

25 For a radical social reading of the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, see Williams, On Christian Theology, chap. 14, “Sacraments of the New Society.”

26 The classic work remains Dulles, Avery, Models of the Church (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Image Books, 1987).Google Scholar

27 Cavanaugh, William, Torture and the Eucharist: Theology, Politics and the Body of Christ (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 207–21.Google Scholar

28 Williams, 212–14.

29 WCC, 14.

30 Codina, Victor, “Sacraments,” in Sobrino, Jon and Ellacuria, Ignacio, eds., Systematic Theology: Perspectives from Liberation Theology (London: SCM Press, 1996), 218–19.Google Scholar

31 See Ward, Graham, “The displaced body of Jesus Christ,” in Milbank, John, Pickstock, Catherine and Ward, Graham, eds., Radical Orthodoxy (London: Routledge, 1999), 163–81.Google Scholar

32 See Codina, , “Sacraments,” 228.Google Scholar

33 Ellacuria, Ignacio, “The Church of the Poor, Historical Sacrament of Liberation,” in Ellacuria, Ignacio and Sobrino, Jon, eds., Mysterium Liberationis: Foundational Concepts of Liberation Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993), 543.Google Scholar

34 On corporeality and the incorporation of the church in history, see Ellacuria, 545.

35 On the prophetic quality of Jesus' incorporation, see Ford, , Self and Salvation, 151–52.Google Scholar

36 See Cavanaugh, , Torture and the Eucharist, 11–18.Google Scholar

37 Ford, , Self and Salvation, 163.Google Scholar Although Ford's precise phrase concerns baptism, his wider context is the theology of the Eucharist.

38 WCC, 18.