I am really interested in what our Anglo-Catholic brothers and sisters think of this article, I understand that the RCC doesn’t administer both kinds during communion to their congregations, only to the clergy but do you receive both kinds or are you so close to the Tiber that you only receive the one? How does the RCC justify this? How can they go against the word of Jesus Christ? XXX. Of both Kinds. The Cup of the Lord is not to be denied to the Lay-people: for both the parts of the Lord's Sacrament, by Christ's ordinance and commandment, ought to be ministered to all Christian men alike. I must confess I really don’t understand why Anglo-Catholics don’t just join with Rome. I myself am moderately high church CofE but I am minded that I am a member of a reformed church, the Church of England, I do, though, happily affirm the creeds that I believe in the holy Catholic Church etc because that is the basis on which our Anglican Church was founded. Thanks in advance for the help.
In most Roman Catholic Churches (certainly in England) Holy Communion is normally given under both kinds now. I only knew one Anglican Church where Holy Communion under both kinds wasn't the norm; I expect it has changed. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says that the Sacramental sign is more perfect and complete when Communion is given under both species. Roman Catholic Reasons: 1. Our Blessed Lord is received sacramentally, spiritually and really under each species. He cannot be divided as he is living. 2. Holy Communion under one kind celebrates the belief that Christ is fully present and there is no idea of half holy Communion. 3. Practically it is hard to give Holy Communion to large numbers of people (2,000 every Sunday in big Cathedrals) the Anglican Cathedrals I have visited usually had Eucharist congregations of 70-100. 4. It is hard to give the chalice safely and with dignity to large numbers of people. 5.Some churches only have one or two chalices and both the traditional Classical or Gothic style are quite small (as opposed to the post reformation very large Communion Cups). Also Altar wine is expensive and if you have large congregations (in some places five or six Masses on a Sunday) it would be very expensive.
I don’t buy that business about the wine being to expensive, not with the wealth the RCC has accumulated and it’s not the churches place to deny both kinds, as instructed to do so by Christ. Thanks Edmundia for the explanation.
I believe that the Romans do serve holy communion in both kinds now... Having changed their doctrine yet again
I fairness that is not a change of doctrine so much as a change in liturgical practice. Orthopraxy as against Orthodoxy. This liturgical change for them happened following Vatican II and has continued to grow in terms of widespread adoption. The Traditionalist expression have, I think in the main, stayed with the practice of communicating the faithful in one kind. Theologically I don't think that this is a big deal, because Christ is indivisible and there is not sense in which they are missing out. There is no doubt that the Biblical evidence suggests that the practice of the primitive Church was to communicate in both kinds. (see 1 Corinthians 10:16) Article 30 argues for the retention, or the recovery of, depending on your perspective, of the ancient orthopraxy of the church.
I have thought this to be the theological reason for the manual act of the Fraction; wherein a piece of the host is added to the chalice. The obvious implication is to indicate the unity of the elements. I do this at my parish and it drives my organist crazy. It was not a part of the traditional prayer book ritual, though interestingly it remained in the Lutheran communion service. But they've always had a more refined sense of what a real presence means. I agree more with objection 4 than number 3. This is more a people problem than a logistics problem. Our Western societies have gotten kind of lazy and don't like to wait in the line. But if you attend the Divine Liturgy in the Eastern tradition, you will see all of the communicants getting in the line and receiving from the same spoon. I've seen services where this took 25 or 30 minutes. Of course, the Post Vatican II Roman solution was to have anyone and everyone become a chalicist; which speaks to the point about dignity. Then you end up with people trying to self-instinct and things like that. This is why the priest ought to consecrate a pitcher or two of wine if he has a large parish. The chalice(s) can be refilled between 'tables' (which is a full altar rail of communicants) as needed. And a first heard about the point about the price of altar wine when I did a parish profile for an LCMS parish at one point. There's was one of two parishes in that particular city that did not have weekly communion. So, I asked the pastor about this and he told me the board of elders had popped out the excuse of the cost of the wine. They were buying Taylor port, not a genuine Portuguese wine. The stuff's about $8 a bottle at my local grocer. He told me he had informed them he would buy the wine out of his pocket if they would let him serve weekly communion. Then the real reason came out, they hadn't had weekly communion in anyone's memory. They reached a compromise and inserted a weekly Wednesday mid-day communion service which was always lightly attended and thus not a stress on the budget.
Just a thought..................why are so many people on this forum so concerned and interested in the practices of the Roman Catholic Church ? It seems ver strange to me. I joined the Forum as a Roman Catholic "guest" and am very happy to be here as a guest, but I thought that it would all be about Anglicanism and i never thought I would see references to the cost of Altar Wine, Padre Pio, John Henry Newman, Fatima and many other Roman Catholic topics. I thought we'd have discussion and questions about anglican music, history, clergy, Anglican spirit, Anglican humour ,architecture.
I think those people are a bit envious of Rome, always looking across the Tiber to see what they’re doing over there.... they’re also probably just unaware of the riches and stores of our anglican tradition, so they don’t know what to discuss
Edmundia, I hope you do not take it as an offense. A lot of us have many questions or doubts regarding the Roman Church, but generous and respectable Roman Catholics are always welcomed here to speak to us on this topic when possible. You are one of them, and I appreciate your input whenever you have something to say on the matter from a Roman point of view.
In the CofE, the Sacrament Act of 1547 (still in force) mandates that Holy Communion should be received under both kinds unless necessity dictates otherwise. Today, the doctrine of necessity could apply for example to an alcoholic for whom the slightest amount of alcohol could be problematic or to a coeliac should a low gluten host be unavailable. The Act was introduced to deal with the Medieval error of withholding the cup from the laity. In the Roman tradition, the Priest is required to consume the Precious Blood in order to complete the Sacrifice of the Mass. My diocese was one of the most ritually advanced in the hey-day of Anglo-Catholicism. I'm not an Anglo-Catholic but in my late teens I attended Masses at several parishes in my diocese which were still ritually advanced but HC was always under both kinds. (With the exception of the Mass of the Pre Sanctified on Good Friday.) The Anglican Reformer's evidently felt that in very exceptional circumstances it wasn't necessary to physically receive the elements at all. If the individual truly repented of his sins and firmly believed that Christ suffered death upon the Cross for his redemption "he doth eat and drink the Body and Blood of our Saviour Christ profitably to his soul's health, although he do not receive the Sacrament with his mouth." (See The Communion of the Sick, BCP 1662.)
Thank you for the kind comments ; I will always try to give views,opinions and what ,I hope, is the belief of the RCC. Anyone who wants a good,clear,literate,charming guide Catholicism would enjoy Msgr Alfred N.Gilbey's book WE BELIEVE, it is not long,nor too "heavy"; the first three chapters are hard going with much about natural philosophy and the Ways to Know God (of Aquinas) , but all well explained and I am certain published and available in the USA as well as England where it had high sales.
I was more interested in the Anglo Catholic position but wondered what the RCC position was. This forum can be mostly about the RCC from what I’ve read. Thanks for your replies. Most helpful.
It's possible that I "don't get out much", but I've never heard of any Anglo-Catholic objecting to Article 30. Communion in both kinds is an apostolic and Early Church practice, and Anglicans of all parties have been perfectly happy to adhere to it. I've known Anglo-Catholics who uphold the doctrine of comingling (the blood is in the body, and vice versa), but never to the point of denying anyone the wine... only to assure those who can't take the wine that they are fully communed even only with the bread.
I strongly support Article XXX and would not consider joining an Anglican parish which did not follow it. I have somewhat of a strong perspective on the Blood of Our Lord, and my appreciation for the Anglicans in facilitating its presence, which I would like to share with you, inspired by David Kemp’s comment, which I agree with: In Mesopotamia, under Turkocratia, modern day Iraq and Iran, the Church of the East and other churches struggled to obtain wine for the Eucharist, since the region was not a wine producing region and the Muslims interfered with wine acquisition. This was still a problem as recently as the late 19th century, when Anglican missionaries contacted the Assyrian people and began supplying their impoverished church with beautiful mew vestments and other ecclesiastical material. I doubt the Chaldeans had this problem, being mostly in Baghdad, and I believe that in Syriac churches Rome took over, whicj include the Chaldean, Maronite, Syro-Malabar, Malankara and Syriac Catholic churches, there was a tendency to not do communion in both kinds pre-Vatican II. Now, prior to the Anglican intervention, the Assyrians did not give up on communion in both kinds. Their rubrics, like those of all Eastern churches except for the Armenians, specify a mixed chalice (recall that in ancient Roman and Greek culture, and presumably the cultures of most surrounding lands, drinking straight wine was considered uncivilized, and the Greeks and Romans would prepare kraters with wine, water, spices, fruit and so on, much like mulled wine; the Church only ever used wine dilluted with water, hot water in the case of the Eastern Orthodox, based both on the flowing of blood and water from the side of our Lord and a desire that the consecrated blood of our Lord should be warm, like blood) or straight wine. So the Assyrians simply conserved the wine they had and dilluted it as much as possible, beyond the level that would have been preferred, until the Anglican missionaries assisted them and delivered them from that problem. But then in 1915 the Turks killed most of the Assyrians and Syriac Orthodox off, as well as a massive number of Armenians and Pontic Greeks. I believe the final tally had the highest casualty rate, something like 90%, among Assyrians and Syriac Christians, excluding the Maronites, the highest body count, of several million, and a 60% casualty rate, among the Armenians, and the Pontic Greeks, due to the post war population exchange with Greece, were the most completely ethnically cleansed, so that remaining Byzantine Rite Christians in the region, Melkites and Antiochian Orthodox, tend primarily to be a mix of Syriac, Arab, Jewish and Greek ethnicity, speaking either Arabic or in a few towns, Syriac. The postwar assistance of the Anglicans was invaluable. So for me the blood of our Lord is critical to the Eucharist, for communion with our Lord and also in light of the blood shed by Christian martyrs in his name. I was recently outraged when I read a proposal from some liberal TEC parish that blood-related terminology should be removed from the Eucharist to avoid somehow trauamatizing people who have some psychological horror of blood. To do that would be a betrayal of Anglicanism, which reintroduced communion in both kinds to the English after it had been wrongly suppressed, and would be a betrayal of Anglican Christian martyrs around the world, including contemporary Anglican martyrs in Africa, Pakistan and China, as well as martyrs from other churches that the Church of England and the Episcopal Church historically had a good relationship with, such as the Assyrians and Armenian churches. I also am very unhappy when I see TEC churches using white wine instead of red wine in the Eucharist; this act strikes me as contrary to the spirit of Article XXX, which was written during a time when my understanding is that white wine production in Europe was minimal and it was a luxury item, which people would not think to use for Holy Communion. It does not make sense, even with a Zwinglian Eucharistic( theology, which the celebrated Anglican monk and scholar Dom Gregory Dix supposed Cranmer had, to use white wine, because the symbolic value would be diminished. And from a Calvinist spiritual presence perspective, Lutheran ”consubstantiation”** or an Anglo Catholic transubstantiation** perspective, it seems contrary to liturgical piety. Are there canons regulating what is allowed as communion wine in the Church of England? And do any of these have force in the Episcopal Church? Because the use of white wine in an otherwise traditional TEC parish, one which I greatly liked and was technically a member of, greatly bothered me. * I think Dom Gregory Dix was a bit unfair with Cranmer on this point, and he also deprecated the 1549 BCP, much beloved of Anglo Catholics; I think the so-called Black Rubric, found in the 1552 and 1662 BCP editions, considered in conjunction with the rest of the 1662 BCP, has the effect of implying a Calvinist idea of the Real Presence; for this reason I prefer editions like the Elizabethan or the 1928 American Book which lack the Black Rubric. ** Lutherans dislike the term consubstantiation, but it seems to me to be a legitimate shorthand for their “in, with and under” Eucharistic theology; likewise the Orthodox dislike transubstantiation as they do not subscribe to the Thomistic idea of accidents and essence, and I expect many Anglo Catholics would object to the term for reasons of continuity with Anglican theology, but in the latter two cases, it does again seem a useful shorthand for the idea, held by many Anglo Catholics, that the bread and wine do become the actual body and blood of our Lord. But I feel obliged to notate that I am using it only for convenience, and not to cause offense to Lutheran or Anglo Catholic members.
I have to confess I greatly prefer the revised form of this office in the 1928 American Book, insofar as the older books seem to imply that all illnesses are a divine punishment (I also greatly dislike the service, printed in some Irish BCPs, for the Visitation of Prisoners, in that in it the minister delivers a statement presuming the guilt of the accused and encouraging them to accept and welcome their punishment, something which would not be pastorally helpful for the minority of prisoners wrongfully imprisoned).
I have to confess I love the Tridentine Mass, but I would love it more if, pursuant to Vatican II, the faithful could receive in both kinds. I am not a fan of the Novus Ordo Missae and I really wish it had not been used as a template for Rite II in the 1979 BCP, and the related Lutheran Book of Worship (and Series 3 in the C of E Trial Liturgies, which led to the ASB, and then Common Worship, which drives me crazy).