Clinton's Communion adds to Catholic bishops' difficulties

So far it has been a tale of two presidents, one prime minister, one ambassador, and one Holy, Roman, Catholic and Apostolic Church. The issue is Holy Communion, the problem the Catholic church's unyielding stance on the matter.

What brings it centre stage once more is the apparent conflict between the Southern African Conference of Bishops and the White House over the context in which President Clinton received Communion at a Catholic church in Soweto on March 29th, two weeks ago yesterday. The bishops say they didn't know in advance that President Clinton, a Baptist, and his wife Hillary, a Methodist, were going to receive Communion in the church. The decision to allow them do so was made by the local priest, they said last week, adding that the local bishop had not been asked.

"It is doubtful whether the priest applied his mind to the conditions that needed to be fulfilled," they said, indicating he was wrong to give Communion to the presidential couple.

However, White House spokesman Mr Mike McCurry said this week that the President was "pleased to receive the invitation from the [local] bishop and thought it was appropriate and took Communion." Mr McCurry was responding to the criticisms by the Archbishop of New York, Cardinal John O'Connor, who said "the action taken by the priest in South Africa, however well intentioned, was legally and doctrinally wrong in the eyes of the church."

Mr McCurry said "Cardinal O'Connor may not be familiar with the doctrinal attitude towards the Holy Eucharist that the conference of bishops in South Africa brings to the question."

Whatever the ins or outs, misunderstandings or misrepresentations involved in this instance it is but the latest episode in an apparently ever-increasing number of breaches of the Catholic Church's teachings on interchurch communion by lay Christian public figures, including Catholics. Furthermore, all those involved have done so quite deliberately, and none has expressed regret for it afterwards.

President Clinton had no regrets about receiving Communion in South Africa, according to Mr McCurry. Here at home, the President, Mrs McAleese, has indicated that not only does she not regret taking Communion at Christ Church cathedral in Dublin on December 7th last, but that she intends doing so again.

Another Catholic who took Communion at Christ Church, (on December 21st), the American ambassador, Mrs Jean Kennedy Smith, has said she has been taking Communion in Protestant churches "for years". She too intends continuing to do so.

Those two Catholic public figures are but the tip of an iceberg headed the way of authority in the Catholic church, whereas Mr Clinton and his wife might well be said to be representative of impatient mainstream Protestantism on the issue.

Within the Anglican communion there is an at times barely disguised impatience with the Catholic Church's stance on the issue, not least in the context of the Windsor Agreement (1971, clarified 1979) on the Eucharist, produced by the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC). It is still being considered by the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith after all these years. That level of agreement is what prompted the British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, an Anglican, to take Communion at Mass with his Catholic wife, Cherie, until written to by Cardinal Hume, who suggested it was best that people respected each other's traditions.

Indeed such is the level of dissatisfaction both within and without the Catholic Church concerning its stance on interchurch communion, and generally from the more theologically literate, that some sense a crisis ahead of the magnitude that followed Humanae Vitae 30 years ago. What they feel will precipitate the crisis, at least within these islands, is a joint document on inter-church Communion being prepared by the Catholic Bishops of Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales.

The joint document is expected to clarify the Catholic position and to restate that it is not permissible for a Catholic to take Communion in a Protestant/Anglican Church, or for a Protestant/Anglican to do so in a Catholic Church, except in extraordinary circumstances.

As outlined in the Vatican's Directory on Ecumenism (1993) these circumstances can be reduced to two: a danger of death, and pressing need, as determined by the local bishop, in which instances the person must ask for Communion spontaneously, must be unable to receive Communion in his/her own church, must have substantially the same faith as Catholics about the nature of the sacrament, and must have the proper moral disposition.

Whereas it may be a personal tragedy for the Blairs and other convinced Christians in interchurch marriages that they can never receive Communion together because of these Catholic Church strictures, it is on the public and symbolic level that they have the most powerful impact. They sustain division overtly, even while a substantial body of authoritative opinion exists within the Catholic church itself that this need not be so.

We in Ireland are particularly affected by this. The divisions in western Christendom are probably more central to our problems than any other single factor. This being so, we have a moral right to demand that all churches work tirelessly to resolve rather than sustain their differences. In fairness, the Church of Ireland and the Presbyterian churches in particular have been investigating the sectarian beam in their own eyes of late.

This has not been a noticeable feature of Catholic Church consciousness on the island. It has tended to hold to the role of oppressed rather than oppressor, and seems blind to a view that it might itself be contributing to the bitter sectarian hatred on our island by sustaining the divisiveness within which that hatred flourishes.

And where inter-church Communion is concerned, it could be argued it does so from a basis which seems to owe more to Aristotelian philosophy than the spirit of Jesus Christ. Is it not a peculiar way of "respecting" and loving your neighbour to say "you are not worthy to receive our Communion", or "your Communion is not worthy for us to receive"?

And is it not a tragedy that, for example, the one institution guaranteed to oppose Mr David Trimble, a member of the Church of Ireland, and the President taking Communion together at a Church of Ireland service would be the Catholic Church?

The notion may be hypothetical, but is not beyond the bounds of possibility these fine days. And how powerfully such an event would speak to all the Irish people, of good neighbourliness and better times ahead. Far more, perhaps, than any amount of wordy exhortation from not-an-inch churchmen.