Eucharistic Affirmations

Editor’s note: Earlier this month, I interviewed Dr. Kevin A. McMahon, editor of Exploring the World’s Foundation in Christ: An Introduction to the Writings and Thought of Donald J. Keefe, S.J., published recently by Ignatius Press. Dr. McMahon was kind enough to send me an essay by Fr. Keefe, who died in 2018, that was not included in the collection he edited. This is that essay. It was published 25 years ago, in the June 1999 edition of The Catholic World Report. It is somewhat long (read it in short sections if need be!), brilliant, fascinating, instructive, challenging, and edifying.

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Over the past several years it has been borne in upon devout Catholics that their own devo­tion to the Eucharist is less widely shared by their co-religionists than they might have supposed. One recent survey found that 70 percent of the nominal Catholics who responded did not believe in the Real Presence. While no research on the subject is avail­ able, it would be surprising not to find that there are just as many self-identified Catholics who deny the concrete reality of the Sacrifice of the Mass—the recognition that the Mass is the re-presentation of Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross. For Catholics this is the more fundamental truth, of which the Real Presence is simply an implication.

It is evident that many Catholics no longer consider Christ’s Lordship to be historical—that is, to be Eucha­ristic. And it is equally evident that such people no longer consider themselves to be engaged in the authen­tic historical worship of the Lord of history. Thus, they can hardly identify themselves as members of the histor­ical Roman Catholic Church, which lives solely by that historical worship.

Accompanying this diffidence among Catholics is a corresponding loss of acquaintance with sacramental realism across the board. Much of this ignorance, and much of the corresponding insouciance with respect to the Eucharist, could be considered innocent when it appears among the laity. The popularity of these atti­tudes is the product of contemporary catechetics, and the intimations of a sofa fide approach which has become increasingly prevalent over the past 35 years—especially with the proliferation of manuals announcing the sup­posedly revolutionary character of the 1972 Rite for the Catholic Initiation of Adults. The revisionist catechetics of the past quarter-century have succeeded all too well in dumbing-down the faith of two generations.

At the same time, for budding Catholic theologians it has become common, even customary, to undertake gradu­ate studies in non-Catholic universities whose theology faculties have little grasp of, or interest in, the sacramental sustenance of the Roman Catholic communion. The consequence has been a general loss of academic famil­iarity with the res Catholica in the colleges and universi­ties. For the past decade, at least, a confident assertion of the sacramental realism by which the Church lives, and particularly of Eucharistic realism, has been accounted “fundamentalist.”

Ignoring sacramental reality

In the institutions of higher education, staffed by the­ologians who routinely emerge from such indoctrina­tion, an often naively anti-sacramental outlook is com­monplace. The prevailing view of theological method is simply uninformed by the sacramental concreteness of the historical Catholic tradition. Still less is it influenced by the development of the metaphysical level of theolog­ical inquiry which is required for the systematic explo­ration of that Catholic tradition. The widespread lack of information about Catholic tradition, and the lack of understanding of theological method, combine to pro­ duce a real ignorance about what it means to undertake theology from a Catholic perspective—that is, to be con­cerned about the questions which arise out of the Catholic faith.

The longstanding disinterest in systematic theology is particularly manifest in the utterly uncritical exploita­tion of non-theological methodologies for theological purposes. This in turn leads to the commonplace em­phasis upon the positive theological disciplines in con­temporary theology. For the most part, these disciplines are controlled by an understanding of historical method whose protagonists have never found it necessary to come to grips with the Catholic faith in the historical objectivity of her sacramental efficacy. In other words,  these theologians have never grappled with the reality of the Sacrifice of the Mass.

It should be evident enough that failure to come to terms with the historicity of the Sacrifice of the Mass writes finis to the Catholicity of a theologian’s endeav­ors. Yet that point can scarcely be suggested in Catholic precincts today. Anyone who raises such an argument can expect to encounter a chorus of ad hominem mock­ery—which is always the rallying cry of the ignorant.

Another result of this process, in which avowedly Catholic catechetical instruction and theological educa­tion has distanced itself from the authentic Catholic tra­dition, has been a marked closing of the ranks among Catholic exegetes and Church historians. Marching in lockstep with their colleagues, most of these academics would simply excommunicate from the ranks of profes­sional scholars anyone who dares to approach his theo­logical studies from a Catholic doctrinal perspective. Long ago von Harnack decreed, “Catholica non legun­tur.” This seems particularly true among young Catholic scholars who are anxious to establish and/ or maintain their academic credentials. If they are concerned about their careers, they will find it necessary to enlist in, and persist in, this servile mentality. In point of fact, that is now as true of supposedly Catholic fac­ulties of theology as it has long been else­ where.

Veritatis Splendor on human nature

The anti-metaphysical thrust of such Neo-Modernism has wreaked havoc across the board, not merely upon exegetical and Church-historical studies. In moral theology, whose interest for Catholics has always depended upon the inherent historical significance of human acts, the impact of this trend has been particularly destructive. That intrinsic significance of human action is not empir­ically demonstrable; it can be defended only on the grounds of sacramental realism—as the defenders of the “natural law” have lately been taught by the Pope in his monumental encyclical, Veritatis Splendor. The insistent references to Baptism and the Eucharist throughout that magisterial presentation of the traditional moral doc­ trine have puzzled most Catholic moralists, accustomed as they are to regarding as an abstract, nonhistorical, ideal criterion the “human nature” that underlies natur­al law morality.

It is therefore noteworthy that the Pope, in setting out the criterion of morality, dealt with human nature in its full historicity, and linked that criterion directly to the sacramental worship of the Church. So understood­ that is, as sacramental—the universality of “human nature,” that by which it is properly taken as the criterion for all morality, is understood to be concretely actual in the world, and to be given as free, as the free moral norm of all free conduct, freely to be appropriated.

Thus “human nature” as presented in Veritatis Splen­dor is historical man: created good in the beginning, fallen through the sin of the first Adam, redeemed by the sacri­ fice of the second Adam, and in him, as Head, raised to the right hand of the Father. This historical understand­ing of “nature” as universal, free, fallen and redeemed, and glorified in Jesus the Christ, is poles removed from the classic “rational animal” of Thomist moral specula­tion, although John Paul II has praised St. Thomas and his theology more than any Pope of modern times.

As the Pope has spelled it out, “human nature” is an objective, free, moral reality. It is actual in the world, yet it has no empirical realization which can be made the object of the positive sciences. Nonetheless, human nature is a reality, concretely given in history, as the crite­rion by which all morality is tested. Clearly, the historical objectivity of such a criterion can only be sacramental, signed by the Church’s sacramental worship, and freely appropriated only through personal participation in that signing. To recognize this, however, is effectively impossible for a generation of moralists who, while they may think of themselves as loyal Catholics, are the prod­ucts of training every bit as rationalist, as determinist, as conformist, as alien to the free and spontaneous exercise of moral authority and responsibility, as that of their positivistic and relativizing oppo­nents.

It is the lack of a sacramental conscious­ ness among moral theologians that has produced the current impasse between the relativists on the one hand and the natural law theorists on the other. The former quickly reduce morality to poli­tics, while the latter are forced to choose between a dehistoricized, ideal moral criterion on the one hand, and a juridical one on the other. Both require a passive conformity that is alien to the free spontaneity which moral conduct—in other words, covenantal fidelity­—has always presupposed.The consequence is the current rediscovery of the dilemma which four centuries ago ini­tiated the dispute de auxiliis, a nonhistorical, and there­fore totally false, moral problematic which can only be resolved through a return to the sacramental objectivity of the moral order of history. Yet again, this is a notion as incomprehensible to most theologians today, and to• most historians, as it would have been to the Dominican and Jesuit controversialists of four centuries ago.

The corollary to the sacramentality of the moral order is the sacramentality of historical existence, or historical objectivity. If the standard of free moral conduct is the sacramental unity of life, then all life—and all history­—can be measured against this same standard. Consequently, the freedom of historical objectivity requires the free and sacramental resolution of the otherwise insolu­ble problem of “the one and the many,” which every his­torical reality and institution represents in one way or another. The alternative is a futile quest for either an empirical or an abstract moral freedom. The former pro­duces only one more political ideology, and the latter one more dehistoricization of freedom. The only free objectivity is sacramental: no alternatives exist.

History as a theological category

For the bulk of the Catholic academy, this is a hard saying. In those scholarly precincts, the Augustinian supposition that history is a theological category has had few advocates since the triumph of Voltaire’s Essni sur les Moeurs, published in 1756.The notion that the cat­egories of objectivity are theological remains too outre for serious consideration, even though, since the French Revolution, the Romantic alternatives to that proposition have been exposed in their absurdity.

If history is to be the realm of morality, and therefore to possess an inherently free, morally significant unity, that intrinsic free unity can be grounded only in the tran­scendentally free unity of One Flesh of the Christ and his Church—the New Cove­nant instituted by the Eucharistic sacrifice. No other freely immanent historical cause of the free unity and free, moral (that is, salvific) significance of history is conceiv­able. Nor has one ever been proposed. In fact, the need for such a cause has rarely even been recognized.

Nonetheless, the covenantal imma­nence of the One Flesh, the Eucharistic immanence of the Second Adam and the Second Eve per modium substantiae, is that by which the Christ transcends history as the Alpha and the Omega. Only thereby is he the lord of history, the head whose lordship is the liberation of history from futility (Rom 8:19ff). Apart from the free affirmation of that lordship, we can only fall back on a pagan worldview. But in a post-Christian culture, the golden melan­choly of paganism is no longer an option. It is obvious that the methodological/ metaphysical, theological statement of Christ’s lordship must identify the Event of his immanence in history as the Prime Analogate of his­torical reality—which is to say, of reality as such.

There is no speculative middle or neutral ground available for disinterested occupation by the uncommit­ted academic ethician or moralist. Either it is by Jesus the Christ’s institution of the Eucharist at the Last Supper that his One Sacrifice transcends history, or history is not transcended, and can only proceed entropically, to nulli­fy all that is historical.

(The effort to find moral meaning in the inexorable processes of nature dates as far back as 600 BC, when Anaximander associated justice with the immanent goal of cosmic dynamics. Current versions of the same theory can be found, for example, in liberation theology. In his Evolution and Guilt, Juan Segundo interprets graces as a countervailing dynamic somehow in continuity with the immanent necessities which, on the subhuman lev­els of reality, pit evolution against entropy. Segundo identifies sin as resistance to evolution—with inevitably dualist consequences.)

Apart from that Eucharistic institution, every con­crete historical entity is inescapably committed to frag­ mentation and to necessity—to what the Catholic tradi­tion, following the Old Testament, has named flesh (sarx). This is the merely pragmatic realm of necessary fragmentation and consequent futility, finally to be lost in the obscurity and dissolution that is death, the very sign of “fleshly” or sarkic existence. In such circumstances, one can­ not affirm that Jesus is the Lord: in fact, his name vanishes from history. This final product of liberal Protestantism’s “higher criticism” was announced in the 19th cen­tury. Paul Tillich repeated it a century later in his Systematic Theology. John Meier’s reduction of Jesus to a “marginal Jew” is in the same vein.

To repeat: there is no other free, intelli­gible order in history than the one which is grounded in the free unity of the Eucha­ristic One Flesh, and none has ever been proposed. The gift of this free unity is the work of the Christ the Head which Paul designated “recapitulation,” the restora­tion, by the Head, of the free unity freely rejected in the Original Sin which, in the Beginning, caused the fall of man and man’s universe. Recapitulation is the gift of the Spirit by the Head to his bridal Church; it is a gift of freedom, freely to be appropriated through participation in the sacramental worship of the Church, whose free historic­ity integrates into her communion the entirety of histori­cal humanity, for all of whom Christ died.

The doctrine of salvation given uniquely through the life, death, and Resurrection of the Christ is today as much disdained—if not reviled—as it was when Paul preached on the Areopagus. Yet, in the course of the 3000 years since the Yahwist began the meditation on how evil could occur in a creation that is fundamentally good, no other doctrine has emerged to provide a solu­tion. No other theory of good and evil can affirm the freedom and responsibility of man in a world in which evil is a present reality and a constant temptation. Every other explanation of evil proceeds from our fallen ratio­nality and can only confirm its fallenness, for such explanations proceed inexorably to the normalization of “flesh.” Inevitably they conclude in a rationally justi­fied institution of, and apologia for, the fragmentation and determinism which are the universal human condi­tion. Thus these theories ultimately conclude with an affirmation of the very condition from which men have always sought to be saved.

Such utopian, soteriological constructs have troubled the world since the Renaissance, and never more so than in the century that is now closing. In this century the implacable application of deadly force has become the normal solution for the problem of evil. The gulags, the concentration camps, the boat people, and now some 50 million fetal corpses bear desolate witness to this effort.

The gift of life

The single alternative to the immanent rational necessity of dissolution and death is the free appropria­tion of the gift of life, the One Flesh that is the free unity lost by the sin of Adam. Through Original Sin man be­ came “flesh” simply: without unity, without freedom. Paul taught that it is for freedom that Christ has freed us. Our freedom in Christ is freedom in the Christus totus, in the One Flesh of the New Covenant. Therefore it is nup­tially ordered, an entry into free responsibility, into free authority, into the dignity of the free imaging of the Triune God which no despotism, no totalitarian pro­gram for the rational administration of the human, can withstand. This imaging, this full expression of human dignity, is the exercise of nuptial fidelity, the celebration of life. The celebration is radically Eucharistic. Not for nothing has the Church found in the Eucharistic Una Caro the Bread of Life, the medicine of immortality, the remedy that we should not die.

Only the Eucharistic immanence of the risen Christ in history warrants the marital symbolism which under­writes every free society the world has ever known, for only within that symbolism is freedom itself removed from the necessary fragmentation of “the flesh,” wherein freedom connotes a jungle, and its absence a cage. Again, that ancient dilemma—the political expression of the perennial problem of “the one and the many”—has no rational or empirical solution. A free human community is beyond the power of fleshly man to imagine, much less to construct, as every utopian political construct has testi­fied. Every rationalistic effort to force that necessary frag­ mentation into a necessary unity finally means the sub­ mission of a depersonalized herd to an absolutely irre­sponsible ego. It leads, in other words, to what C. S. Lewis over 50 years ago characterized as the abolition of man.

This most appalling of centuries should at least have made obvious the permanent fatality of the autonomous mind. We have seen the absolute failure of the monadic rationality of monadic man, whose unity is founded on the utter irresponsibility of unconditioned power. Yet recently it is again evident that the lesson can be ignored. An indignant refusal to acknowledge the obvious paral­ lel between the ideology which produced the Shoah and that which produced Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton has been the badge of political correctness for decades, although the Pope’s implacable honesty has seriously undermined that complacent insolence.

The notorious “mystery clause” in the US Constitu­tion which provided the alleged basis for Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey so exalted an anarchistic vision of personal free­dom as to demand a separate universe for its every expression. Still, to criticize that rationale is to be lumped with “the religious right.” The late Senator Goldwater had provided a similarly mindless reduction of the meaning of political freedom to autonomy some years earlier. It is not accidental that these absurdities were each pronounced in the interest of upholding the right of women to abort their children—a “right” whose exercise is the most universal assertion of personal irre­sponsibility the world has ever seen.

The meaning of freedom

For the Senator, for the Justice, for the politically cor­rect academicians—as for J. S. Mill a century and a half ago in his Enlightened essay On Liberty—freedom is con­ceivable only as a “freedom from.” This view leaves no room for the nuptially-ordered covenantal fidelity, the “freedom for,” upon which the civilization of the Western world was founded—and with whose decline it will founder.

While it should be immediately obvious that the interpretation of human responsibility as covenantal, or nuptially-ordered, offers the only view of freedom which does not set us at each other’s throats insofar as we are free—the only view then which can be profitably discussed—the current discussion will have no part of it. Even in the world of scholars, academic freedom has been reduced to sedulous membership in a claque of we­ sayers incapable even of discussing freedom.

The discussion of the meaning of moral freedom can­ not but lag yet more fatally when those who would defend that traditional understanding of freedom can no longer recognize its paradigm and its foundation in the nuptial unity of the marital symbolism of the Eucharist. For only within that sacramental signing does personal freedom and responsibility and authority find its constitutive expression—not in the suppression of the free and authoritative responsibility of other per­ sons, but in the nuptial affirmation of the complemen­tary dignity of an irreducibly, personally distinct spouse. Until the recent triumph of the ideological ban­ishment of joy from the world, the nuptial union had been the central subject of liturgical celebration even in the pagan cultures of the Old World.

It is precisely the “Good News” of the Christian reve­lation that the Kingdom of God is present among us, and thus that personal freedom, authority, and responsibili­ty are nuptially ordered. Paul’s interpretation (Eph 5:32) of the Catholic meaning of Gen 2:24 underwrites John Paul II’s insistence that fidelity to the primordial nuptial order of the Good Creation images the Triune God in whose likeness we are made. Responsible freedom cannot image the solitary Monad of the pagan divinity, whose transcendence is his irresponsibili­ty. his alienation from all that is historical. The freedom, authority, and power of the pagan gods are absolute, so as to bar their realization in history.

In sum, those who do not affirm the equal and noncompetitive authority of the man, the woman, and their irrevocable nuptial covenant-grounded in the One Flesh instituted by the One Sacrifice of Jesus the Christ—as the foundation of all social order, can finally affirm only their own personal autonomy, their own per­ sonal irresponsibility, as the foundation of society. In concrete terms, this means to submerge themselves in the impersonal autonomy of a faceless totalitarianism wherein all personal responsibility vanishes in the per­ sonal identification with autonomous, coercive authority. This is authority identified simply and solely as power—the view of authority that is presupposed by every form of idolatry, old or new.

Authority that is autonomous is authority that is unlimited. To affirm it, as with Nietzche’s  Übermensch, is to proclaim the death of God, and so to enter upon that culture of death which once in Carthage sacrificed in­fants in a holocaust. Today the same sort of power guards from profanation by unbelievers the modern holy of holies: the truly satanic abortion mills that have polluted American cities since the wholly dishonest abortion decisions of the Supreme Court in 1973. In those decisions the rule of law was effectively over­ turned through the raw exercise of judicial power. As the late William Bentley Ball remarked, “When five justices of the Supreme Court … tell you that there is a funda­mental right to kill a human being, you know that we can no longer say that we Americans live under the Rule of Law.” This was a recourse to judicial irresponsibility which stains the history of this republic as irrevocably as the Final Solution stains Germany’s.

God of the living

We should not be mistaken: the neglect of the Eu­charist, the denial of the Eucharistic sacrifice, is the restoration of idolatry, for we have no other basis for the worship of the Lord of history than this. All the auton­omies relied upon by the Reform and the Enlighten­ment—whether of faith, of scripture, or of reason, or of power—have failed us. Unless the nuptially ordered New Covenant is acknowledged as concretely imma­nent in the world, in the One Flesh of the Eucharistic cel­ebration, we are left to our sins—the most radical of which, underlying all the rest, is the wor­ship of a false god, whose gift is always death. Only the God of Jesus the Christ, the Eucharistic Lord, is the God of the living.

The “Good News” of the Kingdom of God, the New Covenant instituted on the Cross, is historically present among us only as the sacramental Event of the One Sac­rifice, which instituted the One Flesh of Christ and his Church. Apart from our free participation in and our appropriation of this nuptial order—concretely given, effec­tive ex opere operato, by God’s deed and not by ours, in the celebration of the Eucharistic liturgy of the Catholic Church—the hu­manistic program for the dehistoricization of man’s world would proceed unopposed. Beginning with the denial of the sacrifice of the Mass, inexorably thereafter it would reduce the Church’s worship to mere sub­jectivity. This reductionism could end only with the eschatologization of the Church, her removal from history, and the consequent reduction of history to insignificance. The Church’s sacramental mediation of the risen Christ, of the One Name by whom we may be saved, would have been denied, and history has never had any other intrinsic significance.

With this denial in place, history is longer thought of as intrinsically significant, whether for salvation or damnation. History must in consequence be understood as signed, not by life eternal victorious over death, but by death as normal. Death then lacks significance, quite as life lacks significance. We have seen this equation played out through most of the past century, and the end has not yet arrived. When the index of a woman’s sexual freedom becomes her freedom to abort her child, what comparably fatal self-indulgence must a man’s sexual freedom not find—what equivalent Sein zum Tode? Paul spelled out the abominable alternative to masculine fidelity (Rom 1:26-27).

With the denial of the objective offering at the Mass of Jesus the Christ’s One Sacrifice, in his Person, there ceas­es to be recognized, and soon ceases to be affirmed, a his­torical foundation for human dignity. It then becomes inescapable that man will either despair of finding any historical significance, salvific or otherwise, or that he will proceed to establish his own historical significance by a process of self-salvation. The latter can only come about through the rationalistic identification of the cause of evil, and the institution of a program to extermi­nate that evil.

Thus begins the epoch characterized by a secular politicized consciousness, whose utopian project re­ quires man’s flight from the irrationality of historical freedom and dignity. Clearly, the program for the elimi­nation of evil from the world can tolerate no opposition; the authority to pursue it can only be absolute. The alter­ native would be to compromise with evil. This realiza­tion in turn leads to the suppression of personal dignity, freedom, responsibility, and authority. All these things must give way to “the one thing necessary”—survival in the face of an absolute threat to the secularized self. Salvation is now thought to be achieved through the submergence of the self within the anonymity and irresponsibility of mass man.

Salvation by dehistoricization, by pro­grammatic flight from the unhappy self—whose unhappiness is his incapacity wholly to immerse his consciousness, and his conscience, in the impersonal subjec­tivity of secular man—is the single secular solution to the problem of evil. It was also the single pagan solution. And the quest for that salvation cannot but conclude, over and again, in the need for the abolition of man, therefore leading to the public praxis, the worship, of death. The popularity of this salvation schema has furnished the grounds for the current “culture war,” for it constructs a consciousness which must anathematize the Catholic faith in the Resurrection. The lust for death cannot abide with the love of life.

The Church as enemy

By that faith in the Resurrection, man in the concrete is above all historical and free, a mystery incapable of identification with any immanent despair whatsoever. Rationalist schemes for salvation schemes must incrimi­ nate the free personal assertion of the personal dignity, authority, and responsibility of man as man, for that optimism stands directly athwart the utopian agenda, which always entails the elimination of personal uniqueness. George Orwell’s terrible image of the human future—a boot heel grinding the human face forev­er—is becoming familiar to us as political correctness. Like all idolatries, it lives by the fear it inspires. Christian hope has been traded in for a dull despair; joy is sup­planted by existential terror—the philosophical “dread” which, with the politicization of reality, ceases to be nameless: its public expression is the servile conformity characteristic of the camps, of the Gulags, and lately, the campuses.

Outside the Eucharistic worship of the Lord of history in the Catholic Church, the quest for redemption from evil by pure thought, by the political institution of an abstract, ideological salvation from the cause of evil, has become the normative public praxis of the Western, post-Christian world. It did not die with the Soviet state. Rather, its proponents perceive, with intuitive clarity, that inculturation into the secularized con­sciousness is the single effective alternative to Catho­licism. They now increasingly recognize the Church to be so counter-cultural as to have revived their ancient charge that the faith is the enemy of humanity. Six years ago, Patrick Buchanan was excoriated for having dared to assert the existence of a culture war. Today the reality of that con­flict is a common premise of liberal ideolo­gy. The routine secular praise for cultural diversity does not include the cultural (and still less, the political) diversity that is Catholicism. The highly touted legal protection guaranteed to counter-cultural protest under the First Amendment protection of free speech is routinely and even piously denied to those who protest the legal establishment of the culture of death.

It is true that much anti-abortion pro­ test has been both inspired and undertaken by Evangelical Christians-whose “fundamentalism” is now widely ascribed also to those Catholics who have remained loyal to their tradition. Nonetheless it is the faith of the Catholic Church, as pro­ claimed by the sitting Pope, that is regularly ridiculed and reviled by the knowledge class and in the media. The Evangelical churches draw more than their fair share of contempt from the “talking heads,” but are not the main target of the secular reaction. The fashionable antipathy today is, and long has been, a quite virulent anti-Catholicism.

One might suppose, given the awesome accomplish­ments of the contemporary science-achievements commonly attributed to the methodological atheism, the Darwinism, that is inextricably linked with the pop­ular image of scientific sophistication-that the current secular triumphalism would be happy merely to await the disappearance of the Catholic faith, regarding that disappearance as inevitable. In theory the secular ideol­ogy should see the Church as clearly incapable of surviving the scientific method. The Catholic faith, by that logic, should collapse before the utopian prospects which are apparently rendered universal and inevitable by the accelerating success of scientific control over time and space.

Yet this is not the case. The attacks on Catholicism, accurately focused upon its central nuptial symbolism, have only increased in scope and in intensity over the past half-century. Nuclear physics, computer science, and modern medicine have transformed the world of man. But these remarkable scientific advances have not, it appears, sufficiently damaged the Church so as to allow secular confidence in her imminent disso­lution.

It is curious that a chain of circumstances so propi­tious for the triumphalist secular view have not prompt­ed a simple neglect of the res Catholica. But it is not so: the counter-cultural presence of the Church is all too evi­dent. The public efficacy of Catholic sacramental wor­ship is confirmed, however inadvertently, by the need obviously felt by secular liberals to attack the Church with a vituperation which would be unacceptable anywhere else. This animus is particularly evident in the crucial current debates over the legalization of homosexual “marriage” and of abortion.

The Good News

It is therefore possible to conclude that, from the perspective of the Catholic tradi­tion, the news is not all bad. In fact, the Good News, with whose preaching in and out of season the hierarchy of the Church is charged, is still widely—perhaps even generally—perceived as Good, as respon­sive to the human hunger for freedom and for joy which no sustenance but the Bread of Life can satisfy. In the concreteness of human history, whose free objectivity can only be sacramental, man’s self-expression is objectively complete only in the wor­ship of the Lord of history through the sacramental and nuptial imaging of the Trinity. Man as historical is man as freely responsible, man as possessed of personal dig­nity—which is to say, man as covenantally faithful, as Eucharistically sustained and fulfilled. Only in the Eucharistic liturgy does he realize the image to which he is made, by participation in the One Flesh of the New Covenant.

It is not incidental or accidental that our Lord is pre­sent to us under the forms of bread and wine, for his one Sacrifice, Eucharistically transcendent to the erosion of fallen historicity, alone nourishes our freedom, respon­sibility, authority and dignity, strengthening us against the fatal dissolution to which all things temporal are submitted-an erosion that the speed of modern com­munication has rendered nearly explosive. The hunger for a food which can transcend our sarkic futility, our mortality, is universal, and no sola fide abstraction can alleviate it. It is by his Eucharistic immanence as the Bread of Life and the Cup of Everlasting Salvation that the Lordship of Jesus the Christ is effective in history, ex opere operato, which is to say, yet again, by his deed and not by ours. Deprived of this food, of the medicine of immortality, we are left to our own devices.

That a culture of death should then ensue is inevitable, for there is simply no immanent necessity for man to live in his own fragmented and deterministic world. He becomes an epiphenomenon of an indifferent universe, as dispensable to it as were the dinosaurs. The silence of the infinite spaces which frightened Pascal seems now to appall us still more, for the immensity of those spaces is lonelier than the 17th-century science could imagine. In Pascal’s time, we should recall, Christ’s transcendence over space and time was still taken for granted. A century and a half later, Laplace, a product of the Enlightenment, could deny the need for “that hypothesis” in physical sci­ence, and before the 19th century was out, Renan and Loisy had joined von Ranke in denying its pertinence to the similarly liberalized study of history. Henceforth, absent Christ’s Lordship, the muteness of the quasi-infini­ty of space and time could only echo our own emptiness, our own futility. The cur­ rent popularity of the earnest quest for indices of life orbiting other stars than ours, promoted by the late Carl Sagan, only be­trays our despair of life on earth. Konrad Lorenz had the honesty to accept the obvious implication of our newly discovered autonomy: in the universe of man, we are forever alone.

In the Old Testament, covenantal infidelity connoted banishment from history. In the New Testament, it connotes damnation freely cho­sen and affirmed. The object of that choice, the refusal of the free unity of the good creation, is an unqualified loneliness. As Sartre discovered (and he was not alone in this discovery), hell becomes other people. The “flesh” has always entailed that fragmentation and dissolution. The only remedy is the One Flesh of the Church’s wor­ship. Participation in that worship can only be free, but the freedom to be free is given to us all. It is the same with the responsibility attending that freedom. We are creat­ed in Christ, whether we will have it so or not, and in him are made for joy. Only in union with him can freedom find expression, which is always also self-expression. We each discover our reality in Christ, or we deny it. We must choose.