The Eucharist: Development or Deviation?—I

Extract

In the first of a series of lectures under the general heading, ‘Theology-Development or Deviation’, Fergus Kerr considered shifts in the way people are accustomed to think of the Church. He suggested that the central insights which have been recovered in recent years, though the beginnings of this recovery can be traced back well into the nineteenth century, are those of brotherhood and eschatology;- and he further suggested that this was not just a recovery of a long lost insight into the mystery of the Church but had been a real experience, though under a somewhat different guise and under very different names, in the English Catholicism of the inter-war years, in the ‘loud and draughty’ singing at benediction in a northern city parish for example. These two notions of brotherhood and eschatology are likely to recur constantly in discussing whether in any theological area there has been development or deviation, and certainly when the eucharist is in question.

It is probably in the area of the eucharist more than in any other that Catholics tend to suspect that there has been not so much development as deviation. That, no doubt, is because there has been a not insignificant change in eucharistic worship over these last ten years, a change altogether unlooked for by most Catholics, unlooked for, unexpected, and therefore viewed with some suspicion.