The Oxford Handbook of Sacramental Theology by Hans Boersma

Author:Hans Boersma
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2015-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

ROBERT DALY, S.J., ON SO-CALLED “DESTRUCTION” THEORIES

Daly faults these theologians on three points: (1) a “narrow” interpretation of the axiom in persona Christi that “eliminates” an ecclesiological interpretation in favor of a Christological interpretation; (2) an over-emphasis on the words of institution at the expense of other aspects of the Eucharistic Prayer and accompanying ritual; and (3) an interpretation of eucharistic “action” whose dynamic is expressed as a movement from Christ to the priest to the church (rather than from Christ to the church to the priest), which Daly believes leads to an over-emphasis on “priestly power, position and privilege against which many have protested” (Daly 2000: 240). Although Daly concedes that Lumen gentium (n. 10) and Sacrosanctum concilium (n. 48) seem to conform to the earlier tradition of Bellarmine that was taken up by the Magisterium, he believes the force of this tradition weakened by Paul VI’s addition of the epiclesis in the 1969 Missale Romanum. Although Paul VI left the “traditional Western overemphasis” on Jesus’ words of institution intact, Daly believes that the addition of the explicit epiclesis warrants the discarding of the traditional scholastic notion that the words of institution are the “essential form” of the sacrament. To justify this sweeping change, he appeals to Kilmartin, who lays the blame for the “modern average Catholic theology of the Eucharist” on post-Tridentine theologians, who sought to find the visible sacrifice of the Mass in the separate consecration of the elements and proposed a “mystical mactation” of Christ at the level of sacramental signs. “Thus,” Kilmartin says, “they espoused the idea of a sacrificial rite, the structure of which was the sacrifice of the self-offering of Christ in the signs of the food. This is a pre-Christian concept which is now generally discarded in current Catholic theology” (Kilmartin 1998: 294–295). In fact, according to Daly, the scholastic tradition exemplified by John Paul II’s Dominicae cenae “reflects the same kind of confusion as that caused by Trent when it used offerre to refer both to the historical sacrifice of the cross and to the phenomenological, history-of-religions liturgical-ritual sacrificial act of the eucharistic celebration, not attending to the fact that sacrifice, in the history-of-religions sense of the word, had been done away with by the Christ event” (Daly 2000: 245). In this confusion, the baroque tradition that stretches from the sixteenth century to John Paul II ultimately neglects the Eucharist’s Trinitarian dimensions, its ecclesiological perspective, and its eschatological goal.

Whether they realize it or not, Kilmartin and Daly unwittingly find themselves at the end of a long line of Protestant critics of late medieval and post-Tridentine eucharistic theology. Although its roots sink deeper into older Lutheran histories of philosophy and theology, the modern critique is best known in the Anglican genealogy that purports to unmask the persistence of “medieval errors” in post-Tridentine sacramental theology that begins with A. W. Haddan’s Apostolic Succession in the Church of England (Haddan 1869), finds its most influential form in B. J. Kidd’s The Later Mediaeval Doctrine

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