Living Catholic with Father Don Wolf
Father Don Wolf, a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, offers a Catholic perspective on the issues confronting each person today.
Living Catholic with Father Don Wolf
January 12, 2025 | "Real Presence in an Age of Distraction"
The episode invites listeners to reconsider their understanding of the Eucharist and the concept of Christ's real presence amidst modern skepticism.
• Exploring the Eucharistic revival as a response to widespread confusion about the real presence
• Historical shifts in the understanding and practice of receiving communion
• The impact of societal absence on contemporary faith practices
• The ongoing dialogue about genuine presence in faith and relationships
• Encouraging a vibrant appreciation of the Eucharist as essential nourishment for believers
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Father Don Wolf is a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. Living Catholic also broadcasts on Oklahoma Catholic Radio several times per week, with new episodes airing every Sunday.
This is Living Catholic with Father Don Wolfe. This show deals with living the Catholic faith in our time, discovering God's presence in our lives and finding hope in His Word. And now your host, father Don Wolfe.
Speaker 2:Welcome Oklahoma to Living Catholic. I'm Father Don Wolfe, pastor of Sacred Heart Parish and rector of the Shrine of Blessed Stanley Rother. Recently, I was asked to provide some commentary on the Eucharistic revival. When I asked for a little clearer notion of what was asked for, the direction I got was Eucharistic revival 2.0, in a few words. Well, I'm not so good at a few words, so I thought it might be interesting to spend some time reflecting on where we go with the impulse to revive our understanding of and participation in the sacramental life and the gift of the Eucharist in our lives. As we all know, the American bishops were disturbed about polls indicating that so many of our people are unclear about our belief concerning the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. When asked, a good number of Catholics describe the Eucharist as a symbol of Jesus' presence or perhaps just a memorial of what happened at the Last Supper. These were their notions of how to answer when the correct answer is, of course, the Eucharist is the body and blood of Christ. If something so central to this sacramental life of the Church is misunderstood, then the benefits of, and the experience we have of the Eucharist is not only blunted but astray. In response, the bishops thought it best to refocus their energies in their dioceses on teaching the true gift of the Eucharistic presence and inviting all believers into a more profound encounter with the real presence of Christ among us. Thus we have the Eucharistic revival, but we all know this renewal of belief and practice has to be something more than a vocabulary test, that is, we're not content to end our efforts simply because we've taught people how to respond to a specific question with a specific answer. That's no more satisfying to the life of faith than it is satisfying to learn in the fifth grade how to spell through and thorough. It's an interesting artifact of what we need to know, but it's not going to change anybody's life. The ultimate reason for the revival is that our lives of faith and our practice of the presence of God will deepen and become more meaningful. As in all teaching, we want the information to be part of the matrix of understanding and practice. Unless we practice the presence of Christ, simply knowing the answer to a question hardly gets us anywhere.
Speaker 2:The revival is more than Q&A, and we need to begin by noting that our current practice of Eucharistic celebration is not all negative. If you spend some time flitting around on the internet, you might be tempted to believe that all is lost and the life of the church has somehow ended because of the polling answers people have given. Not only that, the proposals coming out of this mindset are often vacuous and meaningless, interestingly focused on external behavior having almost nothing to do with actual belief. But of course, unless you understand the actual situation, all proposals will be off base. In many cases, the descriptions of the concerns are incomplete at best, they're flat, wrong at worst. It's important for us to place ourselves inside of our situation in a more complete way. So the first thing to notice is that we live at a time in our Eucharistic practice of which the dreams of bishops expressed for a thousand years have begun to be realized.
Speaker 2:For a thousand years, 500 years before the Protestant Reformation, bishops have longed for more frequent communion. In dioceses all over the world, pastoral initiatives were launched to encourage the people there to receive communion more often. And for most of these years and in most of these places, those initiatives produced only scant results. People seemed intent on not going to communion. Often the impulse was, of course, to make receiving the body and the blood of Christ part of the regular journey of faith. Communion was supposed to be food for the journey through life, not a premium or a reward for the perfection of a life well lived. Rather than reserving the Eucharist for an apex moment of triumph in the moral life or an expression of a particularly extraordinary commitment to the spiritual life, communion was thought of as part of the regular regimen of Christian living, and every day, or at least in every Sunday experience, it was often this way, or it seemed to be in the early church, and many bishops longed to see this understanding operative in their dioceses. But often communion was received only irregularly by most people.
Speaker 2:The Easter duty of going to confession and receiving the Eucharist during the Easter season was imposed as a way to require Catholics to go to communion at least once a year. This imposition was a response to those who not only thought they shouldn't go to communion at least once a year. This imposition was a response to those who not only thought they shouldn't go to communion often, but for those who were proud to not go to communion, since their abstinence was a sign of their indignity and a sign of their regard for the holiness of the Eucharist. The common practice had come to such a notion that it was thought laudable to honor the real presence by not receiving it. James Thurber once said that you can lean so far over backwards that you fall on your face. In the practice of going to communion, it was often this way. Bishops everywhere wanted to tackle this aberrant notion and substitute the more genial understanding that the Eucharist was given to the faithful to be received, not simply regarded, and this understanding was not reserved to the Middle Ages, although it was an aspect of those times.
Speaker 2:It was very much a part of my own father's sensibilities. He received communion at most once a month, usually about six times a year or something like that. He never missed Mass, not once in his life. The one sole Sunday he didn't go to church was the Sunday before he died, when he was in the hospital recovering from surgery. He was an expression of the spirituality of his time, though the premium was on attending Mass, not on receiving communion. It's an irony to note that, while he went to Mass every Sunday and every Holy Day, without ever a thought of not going, he received communion about as often as a Presbyterian about once a quarter.
Speaker 2:In the spiritual understanding he practiced, going to Mass and receiving communion were not the same thing. It was this gap in common understanding that the bishops of the church over the years wanted to heal. Going to Mass was supposed to be linked directly and immediately with receiving communion. It was the changes following the Second Vatican Council that closed the gap Very quickly. The church worked to link together the reception of communion with the celebration of Mass. It's now common to see most people go up for communion on Sunday morning. Contrast this with a comment that Fr Frank Wrigley made to me about the 11 o'clock Mass at the cathedral when he was first ordained in about 1950.
Speaker 2:At that Mass, although the church was full, the priest didn't even come down from the altar to offer communion to anyone, since there was no one who came forward for communion ever. Partly this was because the rules for fasting were so extreme you had to fast from water and food from midnight on if you were to receive communion, which is why there were no masses after one o'clock in the afternoon by church law and partly this was because the expectation in the mind of the celebrant and of the people was that communion and mass were two experiences that were separate from one another. Both the fasting laws as well as the expectations changed. Now we're in the midst of the realization of what these many bishops, over the many centuries, longed for.
Speaker 2:In the mind of everyone, at Mass, the norm is that we are to receive the Eucharist. It is in fact what we come to do. Yes, it's laudable to attend Mass even if it's not possible to receive the Eucharist, that is, if you have not fasted beforehand, if you're not morally prepared to receive Christ, if you're not in a state of grace, if you're not in communion with the belief, in the practice of the church, etc. Etc. But we all expect the sincere Catholic to come to communion as part of the heritage and belief and practice due to him. At least in the US and at least in this very day and time, this has become the expectation and the practice. Rather than a premium or a prize offered to those who are extraordinary in belief, observance and piety, communion is the food served to sustain the ordinary traveler on the roadways of life. That's a good thing. We do not live only amid negative or depressing news when it comes to sacramental practice. If there are sacramental excesses in our day, and no doubt there are, we might remember we're in the middle of correcting a sacramental excess that went on too long. Finally, we're doing something the right way that's good for everyone.
Speaker 2:There are other complaints, of course. Recently I read the remarks of a priest who reacted to something he had heard about World Youth Day in Manila in 1995. He had read that though, there were not enough provisions for distributing communion for all the people who had gathered there at World Youth Day, so the hosts were being passed from person to person in the densely crowded environs so that anyone who wanted to receive could in fact go to communion as part of that notable experience. And reading that, he was appalled. In fact, in his reflections he resolved that he would lead the charge for making sure that no one ever received the Eucharist again except by kneeling and being given communion by a priest. In his mind, it was the only way to preserve the integrity of the real presence— that is, by making sure those who wanted to receive it made the right gestures and adopted the correct posture, at least correct according to his measures.
Speaker 2:The news for him there at World Youth Day in Manila was all negative. In these reflections he never once reflected on the fact that he, as an Anglo, was being very highly critical of the organizational measures of non-Anglos, that is to say, his sensibility were offended, not only on the sacramental level but on the levels of practical arrangements. It's fine to be an Anglo, and it's fine to know that better organization can lead to better outcomes, and it's fine to point out ex post facto what might have been done better. But at the same time it's not fine to confuse a lapse in logistics with a defect in faith or a lack of sincerity. It seems never to have occurred to him that perhaps the organizers were surprised by what they found and perhaps they did just the best they could. After all, on the spot, someone had to decide whether it was better that people receive the body of Christ at the papal mass, even if in unconventional ways, than not to receive it at all because of a lack of thoughtful preparation. I'll let you chew on the appropriate answer to that question, which had to come to some solution at communion time. Right then and right there. His reflections also did not include the fact that the gathering in Manila, involving millions of people, was one of the largest gatherings for any single event in the history of humanity. In his mind, he could not be grateful for the fact that millions turned up to listen to the message of the gospel from the mouth of the Pope, to hear the words of consecration repeated from Christ's own commands to his disciples, and to receive from the hand of the Pope the very body and blood of Jesus himself. It seems odd to me that in such a setting he could find nothing positive to say other than there were just too many people who wanted to go to communion. I'd say he missed the point, or perhaps he was leaning so far over backwards that he didn't even notice he was falling on his face.
Speaker 2:In our age, in our time, in our practice, there are many positives. We're not living only in a time when all is in ruin or we are at the end. As in every time in the life of the church, we're living through vast changes and great resettling of established patterns and practices. Some of these are incomplete. Many can be negative. A lot are positive. It's important we acknowledge what is and isn't among all of the attributes that we can ascribe to our eon. The context I think most important to establish as we're trying to revive our appreciation for the promise of the real presence is to understand ourselves in our environment.
Speaker 2:When someone responds to a pollster about whether Jesus is really present in the Eucharist, that person is also dealing with an aspect of society the pollster isn't asking. The question not being asked is what's really present in your life? If we had to answer the interrogatory about what's really truly there in our lives, what would we say? What would the average person say? It's a real question for all of us because we live at a time of real absence in everything. Almost nothing is really present to us at all.
Speaker 2:That absence is highlighted in the novels of Michael Welbeck. All of his characters suffer from the forgetfulness of the age. In the novel the Elementary Particles, the main character, a professor, spends some time at a retreat house. Now, this novel is written in France. Michael Welbeck is one of the best-selling novelists in France. But at that retreat house this character spends some time at. It had been a monastery for hundreds of years and had been a notable place of saints and scholars, but most of all it had been a place of prayer, sacrifice and wisdom for centuries untold. But as he was there, the professor wandered through what had been the chapel. He looked at the details of the architecture, he visited the area that had been the library and he looked at the grounds outside of his window. He knew there was something about the place that was attractive and he knew men had come there to deepen their relationship with God. But it made no impression on him at all, other than to note that the carvings there were splendid. Every part of the place, its history, purpose and expression were absent to him. He took part in real absence and we all know, not just in novels and not just in France, that we're living in an age of real absence.
Speaker 2:Just recently there was a report on ABC News about the closing of churches across the country. They were focused in their reporting in the northeast part of the US, but they included commentaries from other parts of the East Coast. There's a great reconfiguring going on as fewer and fewer people go to church. The greater part of their commentary was directed at the Catholic Diocese in Rochester, new York, because it's undergoing consolidations and downsizing. Also, they focused on the Catholic Church because of the presumption that it is always that its parishes are more permanent and a more substantial part of the landscape. But the observations were the same in every example Fewer people are in church compared to two decades ago, much less compared to the 1950s. There's a real absence of folks in the pews.
Speaker 2:At the same time, absence describes almost every aspect of our society. Marriages fail at record rates because spouses are absent from each other's lives. Rather than defining themselves as a unity, husband and wife move in parallel and encounter the world as a team rather than as a force. All teams are temporary, all team members are ultimately accidental and all team decisions are revocable In substance. The difficulty with marriage in our day and time is that, at the heart, spouses are absent from each other. That is when they actually marry. The great signal of coupleship in our age is that man and woman choose not to marry at all and carry their lives together into the future by specifically designating themselves as absent in their commitment to each other. Their lives together are defined by real absence.
Speaker 2:Most other elements of societal structures go down the same path. Political parties find themselves absent from the concerns of their patrons. What once garnered gigantic turnouts on the local level, as the local candidates closest to the ordinary needs of people listened and sought support, is now lucky if even a few people deign to show up at all. Education that was defined previously in the most direct and face-to-face manner is now shopped about online and indirect. Even health care is moving in the direction of anonymity and impersonal treatment as the doctor-patient relationship becomes more transactional and less interpersonal. Even dating has become obsolete as more and more people, mostly young men, opt out of actually coming to learn about the women in their lives and choose online interaction or the stilted fantasy of pornography, or they choose no relationship at all. The very heart of personal futures and lively contact, not to mention breathlessness and beauty, is now most defined by the perpetual and cold absence of postmodern life. Nobody is present to anybody. What's most frightening is the prospect that nobody is present to anybody at all.
Speaker 2:We've reached a point in which we have a hard time actually coming to grips with the truth of bodies themselves With serious faces. We're told by experts that the body of a child is no measure at all concerning whether that child is male or female. Appointed professionals assure us that it's merely an accident that we understand that certain genitalia are expressive of a category of sexual identification. Bodies, it turns out we find, don't mean anything specific. In fact, a person is so absent of their body that no one can tell who or what that person might be by way of the organs and skin that person might have. Real absence defines the most basic expression of life and being in our age, unless, of course, we're not actually clear about what real is supposed to mean. After all, we all understand more or less that real is supposed to indicate actual, substantial, instantiated, certain positive, concrete, compared to what is illusory or phantom or vaporous or insubstantial or intermediate. But it's harder and harder to know what real is supposed to indicate when we're talking to somebody.
Speaker 2:The most revealing scene about this difficulty was a video I saw recently of a climate protester in England. He was part of a group blocking a roadway there trying to draw attention to the proposal to ban all oil by 2030. When asked by a reporter what he wanted, he insisted that all sources of activity that contribute to adding CO2 to the atmosphere should be banned in order to save the planet. Oil production, cars, buses, airplanes, etc. All fit into his category of those artifacts to be banned. Then he helpfully clarified that all agriculture should be banned as well All agriculture.
Speaker 2:When hearing such a statement from someone who's never missed a meal in his life, you begin to wonder if he could define real in any substantive way, or whether such a thing is no more than a category of words with no referent. Just what does he mean by a real concern or a real suggestion, I wonder? Certainly we have the right to ask if he believes in reality at all. We can't ignore these truths when asked about real presence. Think of it when talking to a young person and asking her if the Eucharist is the real body and blood of Christ. When she is unable to define whether her body is a real expression of her own self, we shouldn't be surprised at a confused response.
Speaker 2:Theology is the sum of intellectual reflection on the experience and expectations of regular humanity. It's not simply the confabulation of strange ideas about God and the Bible. When regular people are having a hard time experiencing the world they inhabit, it's no wonder they might have a hard time coming to terms with the body of Christ. In fact, in our age, were the pollster to ask the random person if she believed in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the person might best respond by clarifying what do you mean by real? What do you mean by presence and what do you mean by Christ? Maybe such clarifications have always been the most appropriate response to that particular question in every age, but in our age it would probably be the most understandable. Real, what do you mean Body? What's that Christ you mean? The one mentioned in the Bible? All of those are follow-up questions that would not be out of place at all for anyone who would be approached on the street and queried about his belief.
Speaker 2:Fortunately, we have resources to address these concerns, as well as examples of how to celebrate the positives of our age and place. If we pay good attention to a number of the encounters the disciples had with Jesus, when they themselves were wondering whether he was really the Son of God or was the Promised One, the Christ, we can find ways to be the best of our belief to these questions, as well as the best way to address the concerns we share in our confused world. Remember, this is our world. It's the one given to us as the product of our forefathers and their decisions. We don't get to live in the world of our parents or their parents, or of the first century or of the 15th. Our time is now as it is. Now, the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist is to be for us, here and now, truly and really present to us amid the ruin and the remodeling of our lives. As we search, we'll find what we need. After all, it is what Jesus promised us in the real presence. Back in just a moment. Welcome back to our final segment, faith in Verse.
Speaker 2:We have a poem today called TV Time. It used to be all that time ago. The programs on TV were there and gone. We had to look at the schedule so and plan to see when they were on. The networks worked to advertise and tease us with their plans, thereby moving quick to entice the spirits of their undying fans, and we were fans, more than anything else, of what they broadcast so regularly, sitting to absorb all they offer us and sell with the ads that hit us so squarely. But miss an evening, and it was gone your chances to see and absorb the hour, even if the evening was long, if your planning was off, the time went sour.
Speaker 2:Now, though, it's a wholly different day. When the programming disappears, we have a hundred different ways to watch all we pursue and miss and hold dear. No need to worry. There is no more prime time where all eyes are turned in one direction, never a sole evening or just one line, no point at which we reach inflection, and so time's value has cheapened, so we need not value the hour or day, since all will come to us. Even though we wait Our anticipation phrase, we can safely go on past and just ignore all there is in patience and in hope. When everything is just there, more and more time lost and gone becomes but a trope that's TV time. What it means to be a living Catholic is to encounter the presence of Christ in our lives in every way. I hope that we can continue to explore that in the weeks to come.
Speaker 1:Living Catholic is a production of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City for Oklahoma Catholic Radio. To learn more, visit okcrorg.