Eucharistic Coherence vs. Episcopal Incoherence

'It is the bishops, not our Eucharistic theology, who have made a mockery out of what is perfect,' Our Blessed Lord in the Most Holy Eucharist.

From Catholic Stand

By an Unknown Centurion

The American shepherds met last week to draft a document to make the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Jesus and His sacrifice on the Cross more coherent. Really? Well, there is nothing incoherent about the Holy Eucharist.

Let me say at the outset that I commend the U.S. body of bishops for finally focusing on the Holy Eucharist as the greatest remedy for our personal and societal ills and the greatest weapon in the battle for souls. I cannot applaud, however, their decision to punt on a potentially “divisive” issue in a desire to be collegial and conciliatory with the minority of left-wing bishops.

Our bishops have failed to teach about the Eucharist for a few generations.  What we have is not Eucharistic incoherence but episcopal incoherence, and cowardice in applying the established teaching, coupled with their collective failure to make the Eucharist widely available at Mass and at Eucharistic Adoration.

Episcopal Incoherence

Last week, the incoherence of an entire association of bishops was on full display; the reception of Christ by the same public supporter of abortion will be celebrated and sanctioned as worthy in Washington D.C. but disallowed as a sacrilege in Springfield, Illinois.

It is the bishops, not our Eucharistic theology, who have made a mockery out of what is perfect, with their policy instituted by an enemy within, Ted McCarrick.  McCarrick wrote the decree of Cardinal Ratzinger and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and misled the U.S. Bishops. It is this same falsified McCarrick policy which has been ratified since 2004 and remains the policy of the U.S. Bishops today.

True there are many good and holy bishops, a handful of whom are also courageous and outspoken but the bureaucratic behemoth seems all too often to pursue a  captivating, capitulating path of least resistance. This mutiny of the Barque of Peter has been largely unopposed.  Many unwitting bishops who favor a false unity are almost completely unaware of the impending doom or are too concerned with their image and want to avoid conflict.

Clerical Cowardice

Those on the side of Eucharistic integrity within the USCCB had unstoppable momentum a few short months ago, in June 2021, when they voted 168 to 55 to draft a document on Eucharistic coherence, over the vehement objections of the minority (about 25%) of the left-wing of the Church.

Those in favor of a Eucharistic document designed to correct the Bishops’ incoherent policy on the Eucharist and finally replace the fraudulent McCarrick policy with one based upon faith and reason had the high ground, the votes, the support of faithful Catholics, and the wind of the Holy Spirit at their back.

Yet the document presented for a vote at the USCCB annual meaning elected instead to ignore the will of God. During this Passion of the Church, the Body of Christ had again been sold out, not for pieces of silver, but for modernist virtues of total tolerance of an irrational desire for inclusion, and capitulating to a vocal minority of enemies within, and presenting a false face of unity.  Remember the first time bishops made a near-unanimous decision; it was to betray, reject, and abandon Jesus as He was led away from the Garden of Gethsemane.

However, unanimity is not fidelity, and compromise, especially of one’s core beliefs, is the opposite of courage. The problem is that many of those in the small but vocal minority of bishops not only know there is a war raging for the soul of the Church but they are actively waging it, while, with few notable exceptions, those in the majority are either clueless, preferring to paper over the growing cracks undermining the integrity of the Church, rather than reinforcing them. The majority of bishops merely had to include the established teaching of the Church, and Canon Law (#915) but they ceded ground and with it their religious and moral authority which has been in near-constant retreat against the secular culture for years.

St. Paul, whose Eucharistic Theology consists of a scant few verses, makes sure to admonish the Corinthians and all Catholics about the worthiness required to receive the Body and Blood of Christ, and the disastrous ramifications of such unworthy reception both in this world and the next. On the contrary, the bishop’s lengthy document on the Eucharist is entirely devoid of language on the worthiness to receive Holy Communion and the potentially damnable consequences of receiving unworthily.

Thus, assuming the bishops’ latest program to get more non-practicing and former Catholics to return to the Eucharist is successful, without setting forth clear guidelines on who should and who shouldn’t present themselves for communion, aren’t they potentially causing greater profanation of the Eucharist, and causing many to be sick, die or bring judgment upon themselves, (1 Corinthians 11:28-30) as well as those who are ultimately responsible for this profanation, the bishop’s themselves? It’s not just the Catholic pro-abortion politicians who need to be admonished, but also the divorced and remarried, those in a state of mortal sin, those who have missed Sunday Mass for no good reason (in dioceses which have not lifted the Sunday obligation) those who don’t believe that the Eucharist is the Body and Blood of Jesus, and those who aren’t in full communion with the Church.

This Weeks Readings at Mass

It was likely providential that the readings at Mass from the Book of Maccabees (in the NO-JW) during the Bishops’ meeting seemed directed toward them and ultimately served as a stark contrast to their capitulation. On Monday, we heard how many of the faith leaders conformed to the kingdom of the world. On Tuesday we read about the righteous Eleazar who refused to partake of what was unworthy for him to eat, even refusing to take the easy way out, opting to die instead as “a model of courage” for the people.

Similarly, on Wednesday we heard of the saintly mother who encouraged and exhorted her seven sons not to consume what was unlawful for them to eat even when the result of their refusal was certain death. On Thursday was the story of Mattathias who refused to forsake the teaching of his faith and refused to sacrifice to the idols of his day as many others had done, even being so moved by zeal for the Lord that he slew a fellow Jew at the altar of false sacrifice.

Compare the faith and zeal of these Jewish martyrs to the cowardice of today’s bishops. Did not the bishops act completely contrary to the righteous ones from the Book of Maccabees, by compromising with the world, taking the easy way out and forsaking the teaching on unworthily consuming what is forbidden, where those faithful ones in ancient Israel chose to die rather than violate it?

The sad part is that our bishops easily abandoned the law on the reception of the Eucharist, the closest equivalent to the Jewish prohibition on eating pork, not under threat of death but under a misplaced desire to appease and unite with internal enemies of the Church.

Counterfeit Consensus

Why do many of our bishops feel it is necessary to try to portray the Church, in a fallen world as spotless? Why do they insist on painting a false picture of unity, that our bishops who are deeply divided, need to speak with one voice? Is it better to speak with one voice if that voice only speaks words of confusion? Such a dishonest strategy is not avoiding schism, it’s just concealing the hidden schism that already exists – between those who believe in everything the Church has always taught, and those who don’t and want the Church to get in line with the world.

When did collegiality become the highest ideals of Catholic bishops? What if Paul chose to agree with Peter instead of publicly rebuking him for his hypocrisy in the handling of the Gentile question? Would the Church have emerged from the First Century or beyond the borders of Judea? Or if the bishops in the Early Church just sought consensus with brother bishops who promulgated heresies, working out joint statements that would be acceptable to the Gnostics, the Montanists, and Arians, and orthodox Catholics alike? How different would the Church and the world look today had they handled the Lutheran heresy more like they handled the earlier heresies? Would our Nicene Creed be any longer than “I believe in God” had the American bishops been the ones gathered in Nicea in 325 A.D?

Many faithful Catholics have come to know quite well who some of the enemies within the episcopacy are, and feel betrayed by a bishops’ conference which prefers counterfeit collegiality over truth. We have also come to know the names of the holy, outspoken, and orthodox bishops who oppose them.

We all know we are a divided Church – we always have been and always will be until the Bridegroom returns. Any attempt to force a false consensus is sheer folly, especially with such deep theological divides, between good bishops and bishops who live despicable, double lives, who don’t believe in the supernatural or the sacraments, and who wish to remake the Church according, not to the Holy Spirit, but the Spirit of the Age.

Any such statement with consensus as its goal will be reduced to the least common denominator, devoid of clarity. Any document on Eucharistic coherence born from such a desire to compromise would be worthless. Instead of their overarching concern for consensus among the deep state of the Church and the ruling elites, they should do the one job for which they were ordained, and teach, sanctify and govern their flock.

Based on every objective standard and metric, the U.S. bishops as a whole have failed miserably in their God-given duties. How many hundreds of thousands of souls are being lost on their watch because Catholics in the United States live secular lives without any reference whatsoever to God. Because most of our bishops don’t say a word about it, they consider themselves to be “good Catholics” because of the tacit approval of their religious superiors.

Yet where is the sense of urgency? Where are the calls for prayer and fasting, rosary campaigns and processions, reconciliation and adoration marathons? If the bishops really believed in the immeasurable graces which they safeguard and distribute, would they have kept them locked up, and with them our Eucharistic Lord, who wishes to heal them? How many dioceses chained up their churches during Covid and ceased the public celebration of Holy Mass, which is the source of the Church’s power?

Whatever the watered-down document on the Eucharist destined to collect dust, it will be worthless unless it not only addresses but fully marshals all of their efforts, by word and action, with all its resources and bureaucratic committees, toward a Spirit-led, organic, top-down, bottom-up reclamation of a belief in the Real Presence and restoration of Mass participation among all whom they have driven away or allowed to fall away. Anything less is not only incoherent but futile.