Vatican urged to address sharing Communion issue

The issue of sharing Communion should be "appropriately, adequately and successfully" addressed by the Vatican, an inter-church meeting was told in the North yesterday. It was also told that the description of Reformed churches in the Vatican's Dominus Iesus document last September as not churches "in the proper sense" was "most unfortunate".

The World Council of Churches/Roman Catholic Church Joint Working Group, meeting at Newry, Co Down, until Thursday, was addressed by the president of the Irish Council of Churches, Canon Ian Ellis, yesterday.

He hoped it would give "urgent consideration to the very pastoral as well as theological issue of eucharistic sharing" following the One Bread One Body document on Communion by the Catholic bishops of these islands in September 1998.

He said it told Catholics it was not permissible to receive Communion, the sacrament of Reconciliation, or the Last Rites from ministers of the Reformed churches. It also laid down "extremely restrictive conditions" under which members of other churches could receive in the Roman Catholic Church.

"In all charity, I have to say I find this document ecumenically retrograde and very unhelpful. Furthermore, the roots of Reformed churches clearly do not lie in the Reformation itself but in the Gospel of Jesus Christ and in the earliest apostolic Christian community."

One Bread One Body and Dominus Iesus had given rise to "very live issues here in Ireland and I believe that discussion of them needs to be pursued at the highest level in our churches".