Apotheosis of Consumerism

Though the presence of Christ has been central to Eucharistic theology, Thomas O’Loughlin (The Eucharist) argues that in Tridentine Catholicism”the dominant thinking about the event of physical engagement with the Eucharist was imagined in terms of a sacred commodity. The priest ‘confected’ the Eucharist, it was reserved for adoration and the wick, it was received when someone chose to receive Holy Community, and one could ‘get communion’ ‘outside of Mass’” (36).

One effect has been the detachment of the Eucharist from daily life: “the Eucharist was declared central by theologians, and certainly was at the centre of a great deal of religious fuss, but it was also distant from people in a variety of ways. Between its own language and its practice, there was almost a complete dissonance, between its claims as the sacrament of love and the reactions it evoked.” The detachment of Eucharist from everyday discipleship is symbolized by the separation of baptism and Eucharist: “In contrast to the east, the western churches had long separated Eucharist from initiation: baptism made on a Christian – and a member of Christendom – and the Eucharist was a boon that was, to all intents, a completely separate gift” (37).

Related to this was the dominance of private Eucharistic practice, in which the encounter was thought to take place “in the depths of the soul and as such . . . did not have any real relationship . . . with other members of the church” (40). O’Loughlin cites a 1932 Eucharistic Congress in Dublin, attended by hundreds of thousands, where only the bishop ate and drank the bread and wine (36-7). Behind all this he rightly sees lurking a dualism of nature and grace, according to which grace has to be experienced in opposition to nature and the Eucharistic meal has to be an event of a different order (66-70).

Because of these missteps of Eucharistic practice, O’Loughlin argues, the church’s meal divinizes cultural patterns: “While recent popes would inveigh mightily, and correctly, against a world of individualized consumerism, they did not see the irony that in permitting and promoting older forms of liturgy and older visions of the presbyterate, they were promoting a liturgy that was the apotheosis of such a consumerist individualism” (41).