Greetings, my friend! How are you today?

Alas, not well, Salviati. I had thought that my parish priest was an Anglo-Catholic like me, but this Sunday we used the liturgy of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer for our mass!

Oh? What of it? Surely the standard, historic liturgy of our church is acceptable for Sunday worship?

It may be acceptable insofar as it is valid, but the communion service of the prayer book is lacking in sacrificial language, and thus it is not truly catholic.

Surely, my friend, the catholic Church is there wherever the sacrament is validly administered. What must it be then to be ‘truly catholic’?

Well, while the sacrament may be there, and the congregants receive the true body and blood of Christ, but the prayer book service is not within the historic Church’s understanding of the mass as a sacrifice.

While I cannot deny that the intention of the authors who devised the current form of the prayer book service was undoubtedly to downplay the idea of the ‘sacrifice of the mass’, at least as it had hitherto been misunderstood,² they still, clearly and deliberately, wove a very clear, rich sacrificial theology throughout the service.

Most notably, Simplicio, the prayer of oblation within the service asserts that, having received the holy communion, we ask God that we

entirely desire thy fatherly goodness mercifully to accept this our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving [… and …] offer and present unto thee, O Lord, ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and lively sacrifice unto thee.

Certainly the word sacrifice is used there — but it is first metaphorical, as a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving (which we may surely offer without any sacrament of bread and wine), and second of an offering of ourselves. The catholic doctrine asserts that the mass is the offering of the body of Christ, but this prayer asserts only an offering of ourselves.

What, then, is the body of Christ? Is it not the Church itself, the body of all who have been baptized and so renewed and grafted onto the body of Christ?

It is by offering ourselves, our whole lives, and by doing so collectively as a community in receiving the sacrament together, that the mystical body of Christ is offered for sin. For by the holy communion we are fulfilled as members in the body of Christ; as Augustine says, whereas normal food becomes part of our body, the heavenly food of the body of Christ makes us part of it. We are lifted up to the heavenly altar where Christ, sacrificed since the foundation of the world,³ continually, mysteriously, pleads for our sins. It is most affirmatively not by Christ being newly or repeatedly immolated upon our meagre tables of wood or stone that any effective sacrifice for sin is made; but rather by the privilege the sacrament has granted us of being brought to that invisible high feast.

The prayer of oblation, though, comes after the distribution of the consecrated elements, and is not part of the eucharistic prayer as is in early and mediaeval liturgies. Surely something must be said for the relation between this ancient position and the meaning?

True, but the words are present, and are undoubtedly connected with the communion itself, first by their position — only the prayer of our Lord himself (with its petition for ‘daily [i.e. supersubstantial, i.e. eucharistic] bread’) intervenes between the reception of the sacrament and the petition for acceptance of our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, and our oblation of ourselves, our souls and bodies — and secondly by the text, which begs that by ‘faith in [Christ’s] blood’ (the same faith by which we have fed on Christ in our hearts), ‘we and all thy whole Church may obtain remission of our sins, and all other benefits of his passion’, and that ‘all we, who are partakers of this holy Communion, may be fulfilled with thy grace and heavenly benediction’.

Further, the rubrics direct that the prayer should be said with the remaining consecrated elements still standing on the altar — the priest will yet make the final communion before the ablutions at the end of the service. Alas, this rubric is nowadays often ignored and the ablutions done before the post-communion prayers; but the intention of the prayer book is there.

But even if you say the prayer of oblation is sufficient in its sacrificial theology, it is optional. There is also a prayer of thanksgiving, which may be said instead, which contains no mention of a sacrifice.

It is true that the prayer of thanksgiving contains no explicit mention of a sacrifice or oblation, even a metaphorical sacrifice of ‘praise and thanksgiving’. But the idea of an oblation being offered by the Church is inescapable in any orthodox theology of the dominical sacraments, and even in the prayer of thanksgiving, the sacrifice is clearly invoked, albeit in an implicit way. The grammar of the prayer is somewhat obscure, so allow me to excerpt from it and delete certain clauses irrelevant to my argument — I hope that, comparing it with the original, you will agree that my excisions do not distort the meaning.

We most heartily thank thee, for that thou dost vouchsafe to feed us […] with the spiritual food of the most precious Body and Blood of thy Son our Saviour Jesus Christ; and dost assure us thereby […] that we are very members incorporate in the mystical body of thy Son, which is the blessed company of all faithful people; and are also heirs through hope of thy everlasting kingdom, by the merits of the most precious death and passion of thy dear Son.

The prayer of thanksgiving thus asserts that, by consumption of the holy communion, we are assured that we are incorporate in the body of Christ — that very body sacrificed for the sins of the world. The strong implication of the eucharistic sacrifice cannot be avoided even in this prayer.

Indeed it is the combination of the prayer of oblation and the prayer of thanksgiving which fully express the offering made to God by the holy communion; it is a great shame that the letter of the rubric does not permit both to be said in one service.⁴

The prayer, though, defines the body of Christ also as the ‘blessed company of all faithful people’, and thereby disavows, or at least weakens, the idea you put forth earlier, that the holy communion is an instrument by which we are joined in this sacrifice.

Certainly. By baptism we are permanently made members of the body of Christ. The prayer cannot be interpreted in any way which asserts that those who lose their faith after baptism lose their life-long membership of the Church. The holy communion completes our membership; consuming the sacrament completes the sacrifice; but lack of communion does not negate our membership or our sacrifice.

But there is also another sacrificial part of the eucharist which is missing from the prayer book service: the oblation of the elements themselves, and not of ‘ourselves as the body of Christ’. In the Roman canon, for instance, this is both of the unconsecrated bread and wine (Te igitur, Hanc igitur, Quam oblationem, and at the offertory by the Orate fratres) and of the consecrated sacramental body and blood (Unde et memores, Supra quae, Supplices te rogamus). Surely here is a genuine defect?

Well, first, this verbal oblation of the elements cannot truly be thought of as a sacrifice in and of itself, but rather a verbal expression of the same actions which the priest is performing in taking the bread and wine and consecrating them. It is a means of making the sacrifice of praise, and of thanksgiving for the divine creation and for the institution of the sacrament — remember that eucharistía means ‘thanksgiving’, and that the early eucharistic prayers were principally giving thanks, as like grace at meals — and a symbolic gesture hinting at the greater, heavenly sacrifice explained previously. If it were a true offering of these elements qua offering, it would mean that there was a sense in which Christ is newly sacrificed within the service, which would deny that Christ’s sacrifice was singular, once made, and only-sufficient; therefore it cannot possibly be correct. Since, as a verbal action, it is a part of the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving — that part which is made by the priest alone, as Laud says — it is covered implicitly by the prayer of oblation’s first mention of sacrifice.

It is thus true that there is no explicit mention that the bread and wine are offered, but it is no defect. Furthermore, a remnant of the oblation of the unconsecrated elements does in fact remain within the beginning of the prayer for Christ’s Church, when the priest (or intercessor), having completed the offertory, asks God the Father to ‘accept our alms and oblations’. These words are only to be said when there are alms and oblations, and it is not clear whether this means the bread and wine, or the money collected for the poor, or both; nor, if both is meant, what form of words should be used when a collection of money is made but no offertory of bread and wine, or vice-versa. Nonetheless the words are present at the offertory, and easily allow of such an interpretation.

The American and Scottish churches, it should be noted, have re-instated this verbal and symbolic offering within the anamnesis of the eucharistic prayer, despite its tendency to confuse as to the true sacrificial nature of the mass.

What, then, of the black rubric? Does it not assert Zwinglianism, or memorialism, or some other doctrine coming from the excesses of the overenthusiastic continental reformers, and not the catholic doctrine? Do not such doctrines imply all rejection of the sacrificial understanding of the eucharist, and thus suggest that all you have said must be read in a different light?

You make a good point! The black rubric does depart from some understandings of catholic doctrine here, albeit no means all.

Let us examine the text in question.

No adoration is intended, or ought to be done, either unto the Sacramental Bread or Wine there bodily received, or unto any Corporal Presence of Christ’s natural Flesh and Blood. For the Sacramental Bread and Wine remain still in their very natural substances, and therefore may not be adored; (for that were Idolatry, to be abhorred of all faithful Christians;) and the natural Body and Blood of our Saviour Christ are in Heaven, and not here; it being against the truth of Christ’s natural Body to be at one time in more places than one.

The black rubric asserts that the natural body and blood of Christ are not the substance of the consecrated bread and wine. By natural, it is clear from the penultimate clause, is meant the physical human body of Christ, which was born of Mary, died punctured by physical nails, then pierced by a spear, visibly wrapped in linen and laid in the tomb (as invisibly, in Sheol, by Christ the gates of death were broken and the gate of everlasting life opened); the physical body whose wounds were later touched by St Thomas, who determined them to be physically real; the physical body which was assumed into heaven at the Ascension. That this body of Christ is in heaven, and not with us, ought to be obvious to every faithful Christian; for if it is with us, there is no resurrection, no ascension, and (as St Paul says) our faith is meaningless.

But the black rubric — even in its 1552 form (which spoke not of denying a ‘corporal’ but a ‘real and essential’ presence of this natural body) — cannot be interpreted as denying ‘realism’ in the sense that there is some change in the elements at the consecration to be, contain, or represent the mystical body and blood of Christ; even the black rubric cannot bear to talk of the consecrated bread and wine without attaching, each time, the adjective ‘sacramental’. We can’t even say with certainty that there is any historical intention in the black rubric to anathemize a realist understanding: it cannot be forgotten that, though most of the reformers themselves were more in thrall to Calvin and Zwingli than to Luther, the Anglicanism of history has generally seen Lutheranism as its Protestant peer, whatever minor mutual suspicions may exist about this or that detail of doctrine; and thus the tendency was probably, even then, to tolerate their position. The Lutheran teaching of ‘sacramental union’ — despite some misapprehensions, a mere assertion that there is a real presence in the elements, not (as transubstantiation) an attempt to philosophically explain its nature — is entirely within this understanding of the black rubric’s teaching on the real presence.

What, then, of eucharistic adoration?

Here indeed the black rubric departs from some understandings, although not all, of the catholic position. The Eastern church, for instance, has never widely practiced eucharistic adoration; neither, though, has it ever needed to condemn it as the black rubric does. (The Eastern church holds, in effect, the same teaching on eucharistic change as does the Lutheran church, in that it asserts the reality of, but does not philosophically define the means of the change in the elements.)

Perhaps here the black rubric can best be understood as something of an over-reaction in historical context to a church in which eucharistic adoration had become the laity’s principal means of interaction with the great sacrament. The reformers rightly acknowledged that as an abuse, but took their objection too far in forbidding it outright.

The 1549 prayer book enjoined, and the 1662 prayer book as interpreted through the Lincoln judgment allows, the most basic prayer of eucharistic adoration in the service, the Agnus Dei — provided it is sung while communion is being received, and not as a prelude to the distribution. I maintain that this is the most doctrinally consistent and clear placement for it, given that the adoration intended thereby is directly connected to the effect (mercy, peace) hoped for by reception; but the recently-authorized alternative liturgies, officially of subsidiary canonical but equivalent doctrinal status, have allowed it to be used as an anthem before the distribution. I would agree that at the present time there is unlikely to be confusion about the meaning of the Agnus Dei in this position.

Regardless, the facts that the Eastern church has never practiced any form of adoration, and that in the West adoration has historically led to terrible clerical abuse of the sacrament, ought not to be ignored. In the spirit of the twenty-eighth article, whenever we take the sacrament without consuming it directly, we are doing something for which there is no scriptural warrant. That is not to say, as if we follow a regulative principle of worship, that they ought not to be done, but rather that they ought to be done carefully. In particular since we cannot understand the nature of the real presence, it is not clear what we are adoring when we gaze at the consecrated bread. While the Roman Catholics have a clear idea that what they are worshipping thereby is the body of Christ, we must be more modest: we have no dogma on the issue, and ultimately the question is a mystery too great for us to contemplate. Whatsoever we do with the consecrated bread, we ought to consider its proper use to be consumption, the only action we may take with the eucharist which achieves the holy purpose of the sacrament: as mentioned, bringing us into the heavenly communion and sacrifice, completing our communion within the body of Christ. This probably also underlies the Eastern reluctance to adore the sacrament, since they also have historically been reluctant to reduce the metousíōsis to transubstantiation, instead, as us, embracing the mystery of the change.

Have I satisfied your concerns, Simplicio?

Well, I’m not sure. I’ll definitely take another look at the service, though …