Reflections of a stormy petrel

I'm not sure about the rest of Europe, but in Ireland that would not be the case. Churches are not exactly in short supply.

Your final comment strikes me as rather broad and sweeping. My experience is that Protestants have a fairly clear idea of what sacred space means. I can recall a conversation about this with my Minister many years ago. I was asking why one particular place was set aside for worship, why would God care that we went to Church, rather than worshiping elsewhere?

His answer impressed me, he asked me to look at it another way, in his view there was nothing inherently special about a Church building, the 'sacredness' came from the decision of the worshipers to set a special place aside for worship. As such the place should be respected, but not worshipped.

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Ask him whether God has any hand in sacraments.

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I'm not in contact anymore, and, I have to be honest, I'm not sure I quite understand the question.

I think he would have said that God has a hand in everything, but that sacraments are special because they are the times we make declarations or promises directly to, or explicitly, before God. I would never have discussed the issue in those terms, but I do recall conversations about the difference between Church and State marriages and the purpose of baptism.

Is that different in the Catholic Church? Indeed I now realise that i'm not even sure exactly what all of the sacraments are.

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In general, Catholics and, I think, Orthodox, recognize seven sacraments: Baptism, Confirmation, Eucharist, Confession, Priestly Ordination, Marriage, Last rites. Most Protestants tend to admit only two, Baptism and Marriage. But the really serious and important distinction is one that goes to the core of the difference between the two: that is, that to Catholics, Orthodox, and Eastern churches (Armenian, Copts, etc.), the Sacrament is an action that begins with and centres upon God. The Eucharist is the presence of God Himself in the Host, as the Host, and it is centred upon Jesus' words at the Last Supper: "Take, eat: this is My Body which is given up for you. Take, drink: this is My Blood". The other sacraments likewise go back to God, with the priest acting only as His agent. That is why the space which is dedicated to these sacraments is objectively sacred - rather than, as your pastor said, subjectively held sacred by the use the faithful make of it. You will see in the entrance of some Catholic, Orthodox or Eastern church building, a variant on Jacob's words at Shiloh: "How terrible this place is! This is the house of the Lord." Protestants, on the other hand, place all the emphasis exclusively on prayer. They reject the notion that there is an objective presence of God (although the Lutherans do have a variation on the idea, which I believe they call Consubstantiation) and place the whole emphasis on prayer. That is why the Pope said that Protestant communities cannot be properly called Churches, but rather "communities of prayer". They do not accept one of the cornerstones of Catholic, Orthodox and Eastern theology. That is not to say that their prayer is not acceptable to God - "Wherever two or three of you are gathered together in My name, I am there among you" - but, in the Catholic view, they are cut off from the most powerful and efficacious means of Grace and deification.

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To put it another way, the Sacraments, instituted by Christ, aren't merely signs or human acts, but the means by which God directly effects particular graces. They are the tangible aspect of particular spiritual realities. This is not out of absolute necessity; God is in no way limited to the Sacraments as means for conferring grace. However, the Sacraments, simultaneously material and spiritual, are the means most fitting our nature as simultaneously material and spiritual beings, and God has therefore made them the normative means for the reception of the graces associated with them.

(FWIW, these days, Extreme Unction/Last Rites is more typically termed the Anointing of the Sick, at least in the United States, as it is used more widely than it used to be, in situations which do not necessarily involve the immediate danger of death.)

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Thanks for this. I always thought Communion was described as a sacrament in the Church I attended.

I'm fascinated that you say that Protestants do not believe in the objective presence of God. I'm aware that at communion it was not believed that we were eating the flesh of Christ, or drinking his blood. But i'm equally aware that there was a general belief that God was there, that he was listening. Indeed there was a belief, often stated, that he was everywhere.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you mean by objective?

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The universal presence of God is not something anyone - or at least any Christian - disagrees with. My point is however that, yes, the older Christian churches (bear in mind that this not a Catholic peculiarity) do hold that the consecrated wafer and wine really are God, His flesh and blood. That is what He said and that is what we believe. That was, incidentally, what caused the final break between Luther and Calvin at the notorious Marburg conference. Luther kept repeating: "This-is-my-body!" and argued that if Jesus' words could be held to contain a different meaning than their own plain one, then you might as well read them to mean: "The fox ate the hedge-sparrow".

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To clarify this, when Jesus walked in Galilee, He was God, in the full meaning of the word; "I and the Father are one"; "he who has seen Me has seen the Father". At the same time, you cannot say that God was not, at one and the same time, universally present as He always is; or that, by being incarnate in one physical human body, He had ceased to be everywhere. However, He was also present in a specific place and in a specific way. In the same way, we believe God to be the Host and the Wine, in the manner in which He was (and is) the man Jesus of Nazareth.

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One final (some hope,,,) question on this. When you say you believe God to be the Host and the Wine (capitals are used because this is now God we are speaking of?) does that mean that the host physically changes into flesh and the wine into blood, or that it stays the same physically but is now (this is very difficult to put) somehow a part of the substance of God?

The wine still tastes like wine and the wafer like wafer, for example?

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Thomas Aquinas has made a famous philosophical investigation of the concepts involved, which is at the core of Catholic teaching on the issue - other churches may not agree on it, though, the Orthodox certainly don't. I do not feel up to dealing with the whole concept, but I would say that, yes, the Bread and Wine are God incarnate in them, just as the man Jesus, body and faculties and individuality and all, was also and at the same time God. If you think about it, the one thing is not much more unlikely than the other.

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Indeed, it makes more sense than what I was told the Catholic Church believed.

Thanks for taking the time, it is appreciated.

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maglors-finch.livejournal.com

Sorry for barging in (I occasionally read your weblog): the two sacraments most Protestants admit are Baptism and Eucharist. I can't think of any Protestant Church that considers Marriage a sacrament.

Interesting discussion, by the way.

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Yeowchh!!!
You are right, of course. Pure stupid carelessness on my part. My apologies to all Protestants.

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dustthouart.livejournal.com

His answer impressed me, he asked me to look at it another way, in his view there was nothing inherently special about a Church building, the 'sacredness' came from the decision of the worshipers to set a special place aside for worship. As such the place should be respected, but not worshipped.

This is pretty much exactly what I meant by "not having a true grasp of sacred space," lol. Basically the "we are church" mentality where we bring the sacredness with us wherever we worship. If that's the case, why not have it in a mini-golf pavillion, or on a rooftop of a nightclub? And there are Protestants who would read this and think "Yeah! Great idea! Bring God to the peoples!" And that's exactly what I mean. So... yeah.

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Then there is the confused idea that holding something sacred independently of what we bring to it (that is, to hold it actually sacred) would constitute worship of the sacred space or object: "...the place should be respected, but not worshiped." As though the worship of church buildings were a common error.

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All is clear. "not having a true grasp" means 'have a view different to yours'. I'll try to remember not to express such laughable views in the future.

I also have to say that the idea that Church Buildings, or more often items in Church Buildings, were worshiped in the Catholic Church was a common perception in my community growing up. It was an interpretation, (or misinterpretation), which now seems to have faded away since the clergy in Northern Ireland have started to speak to each other.

Some of the things which were believed by each community about the other in the sixties and the seventies were totally bizarre.

Edited Date: 2009-04-29 09:22 pm (UTC)

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All is clear. "not having a true grasp" means 'have a view different to yours'.

Given mutually exclusive positions (i.e. whether sacredness is objective, with its basis in divine sanction, or subjective, with its basis in popular assent), one or the other must be true.

Some of the things which were believed by each community about the other in the sixties and the seventies were totally bizarre.

Although Ireland in the 60s and 70s no doubt represented something of an extreme, the basic confusion between sacred objects and objects of worship is inherent to Protestantism, producing phenomena like Protestant iconoclasm. That is not to say that all (or even nearly any) Protestants are as bad as the full extension of Protestant ideas.

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Deleted my own earlier self-reply. I guess what I'm trying to get at is this: let's try not to personalize the disagreement, and I particularly don't want to drag in the Irish conflict, by the end of which both sides had an awful lot to answer for.

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Agreed. I was irritated by one statement, or more accurately by one small part of one statement, and hit back.

However I am not meaning to drag in the Irish conflict into this in any tit-for-tat, or blame game way - the conflict had almost nothing to do with theology. And I suspect that most of the active 'combatants' had little understanding of the teachings of their Church.

I mention it only because I am trying to put in context the misinformation that I was given about the beliefs of the Catholic Church.

I hope I have never criticised anyone else's belief, or their understanding of any belief I may hold.

My purpose in joining these discussions is to learn something, precisely because the view I was given of the beliefs of the Catholic Church growing up are so out of line with what I have heard on Fabio's Journal.

I did get irritated at the comment "This is pretty much exactly what I meant by "not having a true grasp of sacred space," lol" Mainly because of the lol, but that was an emotional response after a bad, bad week at work, I took the comment, perhaps incorrectly, to be mocking and it made me angry.

To be more sensible about it, I do take issue with the statement and with your defense of it "Given mutually exclusive positions (i.e. whether sacredness is objective, with its basis in divine sanction, or subjective, with its basis in popular assent), one or the other must be true."

I don't take issue with what you say, it is a logical statement, but to my mind does not get to my probvem with the original statement.

To say of someone who holds a different position to yours, that they do not have a true grasp of sacred space, or any other issue, is, in my mind at least, arrogant. They may well fully grasp the concepts and the ideas and have reached different conclusions. Saying - you don;t understand can only be a way of avoiding discussion.

By the way, mentalguy, I was in no way irritated or made angry by anything you said, so I hope it does not appear that I was personalising anything I said in response to your comments.

(I am now interested in knowing what your deleted reply said...)

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(I am now interested in knowing what your deleted reply said...)

It was a reference to the Irish conflict which I seriously doubt you would have found offensive, but which constituted a rabbit hole in the discussion I really didn't want to start down. I only mentioned deleting it since (if anyone noticed its disappearance), I wanted to be clear that I had removed it and not Fabio.

By the way, mentalguy, I was in no way irritated or made angry by anything you said, so I hope it does not appear that I was personalising anything I said in response to your comments.

That's good to know. I didn't take anything you said personally. Mainly I was concerned that you might have taken dustthouart's comment more personally than necessary.

I did get irritated at the comment "This is pretty much exactly what I meant by "not having a true grasp of sacred space," lol" Mainly because of the lol, but that was an emotional response after a bad, bad week at work, I took the comment, perhaps incorrectly, to be mocking and it made me angry.

To be honest, I had much the same reaction she did; at least in my case (and I strongly suspect in hers) it wasn't so much mockery as frustration. During the 60s and 70s in particlar, a large swath of the Catholic world internalized a number of Protestant ideas in this area which over the ensuing decades utterly devastated the Church, leading to monstrosities which I expect even a lot of Protestants would be appalled by. Some regions were more affected than others, hence the knowing comments above regarding the Netherlands and Austria; my impression is that Ireland was comparatively untouched. (Of course, as fpb noted, that isn't to say that all the Catholic problems are the consequence of Protestant imports.) At this point, we're just beginning the long task of picking up the pieces and putting things back together. So there is a certain underlying frustration there. Then there's the issue that what your minister described isn't even what many people consider the term sacred to mean, so it's kind of like ... where to even begin?

(I'll give it a shot in another reply, though.)

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