Two very good recent theological reflections on the denial of the eucharist to Barbara Johnson at her mother's funeral, both with profound insights informed by feminist theology:
At National Catholic Reporter, Jamie Manson writes about how this story demonstrates that "lay Catholics have a deeper understanding of the power of the sacrament than clergy who claim to control it":
In the Gospel stories, Jesus never required that people repent or make a profession of faith before he would dine with them. He understood that God's transformative power works through an invitation to the table, not exclusion from it.
Jesus spent his ministry trying to convince religious leaders that they did not have the power to codify or control the encounter between God and God's beloved children. He lived and died trying to convince all people they were worthy to come to his table.
Yet the church hierarchy continues to treat the sacraments as a reward for conformity to doctrine, rather than as God's extraordinary invitation to a transformative encounter with love and mercy.
By turning away those who long to come to Jesus' table, the clergy denies the truth of the Gospel, which teaches us that no one can be estranged from or unworthy of the love of God. By denying the hungry the Eucharist, church leaders only thwart one of the most powerful ways that God becomes present to us.
And at Religion Dispatches, Mary Hunt makes a similar point:
One account of Ms. Johnson’s experience at her mother’s funeral included a detail I cannot verify but can well imagine. A blogger who spoke with her wrote that after being passed over by the priest for Communion, Barbara actually received a host from a layperson who was acting as a Eucharistic Minister at the mass. Lay ministers distribute Communion at many if not most Catholic churches at this time of increasingly fewer priests. It was the unordained person, not the priest, who did the right thing.
This act, based on pastoral common sense, is Catholic clerics’ worst nightmare, what I assume keeps Roman and diocesan officials awake at night. Lay people are taking on increased authority, begging no one’s permission or pardon. Clergy are coming to realize that the Eucharist does not belong to them any more than they own church buildings, theology, or ministry. They are not in charge of who receives Communion, whether politicians or waitresses, divorced, remarried, and/or queer. Whether in cathedrals or base communities, people decide for themselves about Communion, just as they decide about contraception, sexuality, and marriage. The Catholic community is changing indeed.
At a moment in the American political discussion at which women are being openly denigrated in power games designed to remind us of who's in charge (and what kind of God puts such men in charge), these powerful feminist theological insights take on new significance. They remind us of how crucially important the contributions of women are to theology, to the life of faith communities, to the sacramental life of the Catholic church.
And they also remind us of why the all-male and deeply misogynistic power structure of the Catholic church is so frightened of such theology: it points back to the hidden, long-denied, but transformative roots of the Jesus movement, from which the church springs and to which it must always return, if it intends to be faithful to Jesus and in vital connection to the gospel. The movement that gathered around Jesus was profoundly egalitarian, because he himself was profoundly egalitarian, welcoming to his table everyone, and, in particular, the despised and excluded of his culture.
The all-male and deeply misogynistic power structure ruling the Catholic church fears that dangerous memory. In doing so, it fears Jesus and the gospel itself, however.
And as long as the gospel continues to be proclaimed and the dangerous memory of Jesus continues to be transmitted through the proclamation of the gospel, they will continue to have reason to be afraid--and to engage in gestures of exclusion, domination, and control such as the one to which Barbara Johnson was recently subjected. Gestures that, by all accounts, the people of God gathered to celebrate the eucharist along with Barbara Johnson immediately overturned.
Since they had just listened to the gospel proclaimed.
The graphic is from the National Coalition for the Homeless's Bring America Home blog, with credits to Élelmiszer Online.
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