Louvain Studies 26 (2001) 313-333

The and John D. Laurance

“Restorationist,” an old ecclesiastical term, has received new coinage in the so-called “liturgy wars” in the . Their opponents1 use it of those who sometimes give signs of wanting to return to the pre- Vatican II Church, a time of a strictly regulated liturgy (no inculturation or adaptation), a faith-practice dominated by extra-liturgical devotions, and an unquestioned obedience to Rome. Consequently, when a group of undergraduate students at Marquette University recently asked me to help inaugurate a regular with Benediction on campus, I had to wonder whether this was a manifestation of that same nostalgia, or of a new movement of Holy Spirit in the Church to reclaim something authentic and essential to full Catholic life. We may still be living too much in the aftermath of Vatican II for any definitive answer to that question. Nevertheless, it may not be too soon to re-evaluate the practice of eucharistic adoration past and present in light of both such differing visions of Catholic life and recent develop- ments in sacramental theology, especially regarding the Church's celebra- tion of the Eucharist.

The ‘Problem' of Eucharistic Adoration Today

In his study of eucharistic worship outside of , Cult and Con- troversy, Nathan Mitchell begins with a startling question: “How [through the history of the Church] did the Eucharistic action become a eucharis- tic object?”2 In other words, how did the Church come to regard the

1. E.g., Rembert Weakland, O.S.B., “The Liturgy As Battlefield,” Commonweal 129 (2002) no. 1, 10-15; and M. Francis Mannion, “Agendas for Liturgical Reform,” America 175 (1996) no. 17, 9-16. For an assessment of the logical effects of “restora- tionism,” cf. Robert Cabié, “Les inconséquences des détracteurs de la réforme liturgique,” Bulletin de littérature ecclésiastique 101 (2000) 3-14. 2. Nathan Mitchell, Cult and Controversy: The Worship of the Eucharist Outside Mass (New York: Pueblo, 1982) 4. 314 JOHN D. LAURANCE

Eucharist more as some thing we adore than as a reality in Christ that we do? The liturgical theologian, Edward Kilmartin, S.J., seems to echo Mitchell's concern by observing that, according to the , “the primary goal [of the conversion of bread and wine into the Body and ] is the making of the sacrament ‘for reception by the faithful,' and not to serve as object of adoration.”3 The fact is, as Mitchell suggests, Christ's presence in the Eucharist is understood much differently in the Church now than it was before Vatican II. One reason for this change undoubtedly is the council's emphasis on the Church itself as a “sacrament” of Christ. Three of its four ‘constitutions' – , Lumen Gentium, and Gaudium et Spes – deal primarily with the Church, either in its essential nature or in its self-expression in the liturgy as one of its basic activities.4 In these constitutions the Church is proclaimed as the “universal sacrament of salvation,”5 an identity in which all its members share. Therefore it is not only in the that Christ is present in the Church, but also, and in a very real way, in each of its members. As a result of this renewed awareness of the sacramentality of the Church, most Catholics today no longer see themselves as they once did, as mere children of a “Holy Mother, the Church.” Rather, like St. Paul, they have come to understand that they, too, possess the Holy Spirit as thin