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Before the Eucharist, a Familial Morality Arises

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Before the Eucharist, a Familial Morality Arises Journal of Moral Theology, Vol. 6, No. 2 (2017): 15-31 Before the Eucharist, a Familial Morality Arises Matthew Sherman S POPE FRANCIS HAS articulated in a number of his writings, to realize fully who we are as moral creatures is to sit at the feet of the Incarnation, the perfect synthesis of God’s mercy A and human creation. As Pope Francis explained years ago, as Cardinal Bergoglio of Argentina, I dare to say that the privilege[d] locus of the encounter is the caress of the mercy of Jesus Christ on my sin. In front of this merciful embrace…we feel a real desire to respond, to change, to correspond; a new morality arises…. Jesus is encountered, just as two thousand years ago, in a human presence, the Church, the company of those whom he assimilates to himself, his Body, the sign and sacrament of his Presence.1 It should be no surprise, then, that Pope Francis chose to devote several of his public addresses to the importance of encountering Christ in the Eucharist. As the Pope explained in a February 2015 General Audience, “The Eucharist is the summit of God’s saving action: the Lord Jesus, by becoming bread broken for us, pours upon us all of His mercy and His love, so as to renew our hearts, our lives, and our way of relating with Him and with the brethren.”2 In a February 2014 homily, Pope Francis called the Eucharistic celebration a theophany, wherein “God approaches and is with us, and we participate in the mystery of the Redemption.”3 To participate in the Mass is to allow ourselves to be available to God’s mystery most fully and, in that mystery, to encounter the merciful embrace of Christ Himself. 1 Jorge Cardinal Bergoglio, “The Encounter with Christ,” www.catholic education.org/en/religion-and-philosophy/spiritual-life/the-encounter-with- christ.html. 2 Francis, General Audience, February 5, 2014, www.adoremus.org/0414 PopeFrancis.html. 3 Francis, Homily at Casa Santa Marta, February 10, 2014, www.adoremus.org/ 0414PopeFrancis.html. 16 Matthew Sherman To encounter the Eucharistic Christ is to recognize that we must respond to this redemptive love in our own lives. This is why the Eucharistic celebration is only realized when we see others as a reflection of the face of Christ. Pope Francis notes that these “others” include the elderly, children, the rich and the poor, the immediate neighbor and the stranger, families and those who are alone.4 In order to encounter Christ’s merciful embrace in the Eucharist, we must embrace others as Christ’s very Body. Far from lending itself to privatized or atomistic practices, the Eucharist always draws us into the corporate life of Christ. The work of morally responding to Christ, and to the Eucharist, is the task of all Christians. In what follows, I focus on Pope Francis’s hopes of rooting ethics, and family ethics, in a Christic and Eucharistic encounter. I illustrate that this is not a new development but rather the latest such articulation in a century of sacramental-moral reflections. While differing ecclesiologies have informed family ethics throughout the last one hundred years, it is instructive that these distinctive lenses on the family’s theological identity can each be understood as having a common sacramental backbone, which draws the family into service within and for the world. To demonstrate this thesis, I draw upon several sources spanning the past century. Firstly, this essay looks at the liturgical movement, specifically the work of Virgil Michel, O.S.B., who uses a Mystical Body of Christ ecclesiology to argue that the liturgy is both nourishment for family unity and a source of social transformation. Secondly, this essay examines John Paul II’s Christifideles Laici, which draws upon a People of God ecclesiology to argue that the family is formed through sacramental grace in order to be a domestic covenant of self-gift. Thirdly, this essay explores the more recent theologies of Florence Caffrey Bourg, who stresses an ecclesiology of sacramental virtue, and Julie Hanlon Rubio, who stresses an ecclesiology of hospitality and forgiveness. Taken together, Bourg and Rubio argue that the family is a domestic church, a unit of Eucharistic welcome efficaciously acting in the world. Fourthly, I return to Pope Francis through a particular examination of his encyclicals. Lumen Fidei and Laudato Si’ exemplify Pope Francis’s use of an ecclesiology of unity, which shapes the family’s vocation of solidarity and stewardship in the Church and in the world. Fifthly and finally, I demonstrate that Pope Francis’s sense of familial unity is consonant with his Eucharistic reflections in Amoris Laetitia, his Apostolic Exhortation on the family, as well as the wider familial and sacramental reflections of the past century. An ecclesiology of unity supports not only the family’s mission of teaching and enacting 4 Francis, General Audience, February 12, 2014, www.adoremus.org/0414 PopeFrancis.html. A Familial Morality Arises 17 solidarity but also a Eucharistic theology of encounter and response, whereby the sacramental gift we receive demands an ever-widening community with, custodianship for, and forgiveness among God’s creation. VIRGIL MICHEL: RESPONDING WITH THE LITURGICAL LIFE Pope Francis calls our attention to the communal nature of the Eucharist. As the embodiment of Christ’s love, the Eucharist calls us out of ourselves and into the embrace of our neighbors. This use of the Eucharist’s personal call yet communal import is analogous to what the liturgical movement wanted to achieve through its call to enact the liturgical life. On the American side, the liturgical movement was forged in the early twentieth century, in the period during and between the World Wars. As long-standing imperial powers faded and as genocidal dictators vied for power in their place, many sought theological models which privileged the power of Christ over human tyranny and which privileged relationship over impersonal and political institutions alone. In this climate, the liturgical movement looked to the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ, a sacramental font of grace making Christ available to all believers. While the institution of the Church was real, the emphasis here was on the role of the clergy in bringing about Christ’s sacramental proximity to all Christians. This way, the sacraments could be a source of graced social equality and unity over and against the tyranny and atomism seen in society. Therefore, about eighty years before Pope Francis, Benedictine Fr. Virgil Michel asserted that the Christian family could be a means of combatting society’s excessive emphasis on autonomy. As Michel explains in a 1936 lecture, “Over against the extreme individualism Christianity stresses the kinship of all men as fellows in the mystical body of Christ in which all men are brethren of Christ and common children of our common Father in heaven.”5 Like Pope Francis, Michel believes that the missional call of Christian love is best witnessed through an encounter with Christ himself. Christian morals are a response to the activity of Christ upon us. In a 1928 lecture to Catholic women of the Central Verein organization, Michel refers to the “moulding powers of the one true Sacrifice eternal of the Altar.”6 By encountering and receiving the Eucharistic Christ, a Christian becomes “another Christ, burning with His own zeal to spread His 5 Virgil Michel, “The Unchristian Character of Modern Life,” given during the 1936 Winter Lecture Series on Christian Home and Family Life in the Modern World, at the Diocesan Teachers College, St. Paul, MN. St. John’s Abbey Archives, folder Z 32:1: Conferences, Lecture notes. 6 Virgil Michel, “The Liturgy and Catholic Women,” Orate Fratres 3, no. 9 (1929): 275. 18 Matthew Sherman kingdom in the hearts of men.”7 To encounter Christ in the liturgy, Michel advances, is to become the kind of person who “will everywhere radiate the life of Christ.”8 The Mystical Body theology Michel uses here is a means of explaining the unifying power of Christ’s embrace. Just as we are each conformed to Christ’s embrace, so we must embrace others with Christ’s love. Michel’s conception of the liturgically-informed life has great import for the family at large because Christian witness can have its greatest effect in the family, and it is through the family that a communal example of Christian living can radiate into the world. In a number of articles, which appeared in Orate Fratres in the 1930s, Michel argues that the liturgy should serve as a source of the family’s identity and everyday living. Michel explains that the marriage liturgy itself is a source and template for Christian life. The sacrament of marriage is one of “mutual giving over of each one to the other.” This mutual offering is done at the foot of the altar, which is, in turn, “merged” with the self-offering of Christ in the Mass. “Thus,” says Michel, “the Christian family takes its rise out of the central liturgical life of the Church, as is most fitting and proper for it as a miniature of the mystical body of Christ.”9 Michel offers a vision of family life that finds its origin and grounding in the Mass itself. The family can be identified by its mutual self-giving of spouses, a giving which is also an offering to God. Moreover, the communion of the spouses is strengthened by Christ’s offering of Eucharistic communion. This communion empowers the spouses, and their children, to be a unit of the Mystical Body. Their place in the Mystical Body is not only found in church, though.
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