In Response to “Virtual Communion” as a Sacramental

By The Rev. Matthew S.C. Olver, Ph.D.

“Sacramental” is not a term that Anglicans often use, though it is quite common in the Roman Catholic world. Here is how the Catechism of the Catholic Church speaks about sacramentals:

1667 "Holy Mother Church has, moreover, instituted sacramentals. These are sacred signs which bear a resemblance to the sacraments. They signify effects, particularly of a spiritual nature, which are obtained through the intercession of the Church. By them men are disposed to receive the chief effect of the sacraments, and various occasions in life are rendered holy.”

The characteristics of sacramentals:

1668 Sacramentals are instituted for the sanctification of certain ministries of the Church, certain states of life, a great variety of circumstances in Christian life, and the use of many things helpful to man. In accordance with bishops' pastoral decisions, they can also respond to the needs, culture, and special history of the Christian people of a particular region or time. They always include a prayer, often accompanied by a specific sign, such as the laying on of hands, the sign of the cross, or the sprinkling of holy water (which recalls Baptism).

1669 Sacramentals derive from the baptismal priesthood: every baptized person is called to be a "blessing," and to bless. Hence lay people may preside at certain blessings; the more a blessing concerns ecclesial and sacramental life, the more is its administration reserved to the ordained ministry (bishops, priests, or deacons).

1670 Sacramentals do not confer the grace of the Holy Spirit in the way that the sacraments do, but by the Church's prayer, they prepare us to receive grace and dispose us to cooperate with it. "For well-disposed members of the faithful, the liturgy of the sacraments and sacramentals sanctifies almost every event of their lives with the divine grace which flows from the Paschal mystery of the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Christ. From this source all sacraments and sacramentals draw their power. There is scarcely any proper use of material things which cannot be thus directed toward the sanctification of men and the praise of God."

I suggest a couple of reasons that the church both should not move forward with encouraging people to partake of bread and wine at home while watching a live-streamed mass and also not propose the category of “sacramental” for such an activity. First, sacramentals exist as a category that Anglicans have (de facto), so that isn’t the issue. We bless things like water, ashes, and palms (we could list a host of other items that Anglicans use as sacramentals) and treat them as more than ordinary but without labeling them a sacramental. Rather, sacramentals are supplemental devotional actions (particularly the Eucharist and the Daily Office) beyond what are considered the central acts of prayer and worship for the church. While Sacramentals sometimes bear a relationship to certain sacraments, they are never simply a pale reflection or a lesser version of what the Church calls a “sacrament.” The scenario imagined here looks enormously like the Sacrament of the Eucharist, but it is not the Eucharist. 

This is not to say that there might not be grace in the action. In fact, I’m sure there is. God never denies those who seek his grace. However, the error here is committed by the church, not the individual Christian. To set before individuals such an action might lead them to think this is the Eucharist--and therby communicate something we are not permitted to tell them, since this is not what we received--and thus may end up deceiving. Furthermore, we should not presume that all Christians can tell the difference between the “sacramental” virtual Eucharist and the Sacrament of the Eucharist. This is one way that sacramentals are clearly distinct from sacraments. 

Second, I think the motivation for this type of spiritual activity is motivated by a misunderstanding of the nature of the Eucharist itself. A maxim I repeat to my students is that “Everything flows from a proper understanding of what it is the Church does when it gathers to celebrate the Mysteries of Christ’s Body and Blood.” 

When we come to the question of the Eucharist, high church Anglicans and Roman Catholics often quickly move to the category of “consecration.” This is understandable, as the term is used both in the Latin West and (starting in 1662) in the BCP tradition. But both traditions' use of consecration reveal that they are working from a slightly skewed posture. The eighth- and ninth- century eucharistic debates in the West set the scene for a lopsided approach to the Eucharist in general, one that focused on what happens to the Bread and Wine in the Eucharist in a way that obscured the larger question: “What is the Eucharist?” 

The celebration of the Eucharist is first an action, which distinguishes it from the Daily Office, which is primarily a reading service. The Eucharist is an action because it is a sacrifice. 

The Eucharist is what catholic Christians understand to be the most praiseworthy action we can do when we gather for “the principal act of Christian worship on the Lord’s Day and other major Feasts” (1979 BCP, p. 14). To clarify the proper distinction between the Office and the Mass, we do well to answer the question, What is the Eucharist? 

Alexander Schmemann’s discussion of sacrifice in the first chapter of For the Life of the World sets a beautiful vision that summarizes the basic assumptions behind sacrifice for Jews — assumptions which were inherited by early Christians. Schmemann said God made the human creature first as a priest; that priest is placed in a garden of creation, depicted in Genesis with intentional parallels to the tabernacle and temple. What does a priest do? A priest offers sacrifices. What are sacrifices? A sacrifice is the offering to God of what the creature understands to be a gift from God. This offering is made as a way of acknowledging that God is not like me at all, but is in fact God — the One from whom all things flow. In this approach, sacrifice is the most fundamental, the most primordial expression of doxology to the God of the universe.

The Eucharist is a sacrifice not because it involves the death of Jesus — though it certainly is a sacrament of his death. The Eucharist is a sacrifice not because we lose anything in the process — in fact, just the opposite, though we offer everything to God in the Eucharist.

The answer I tell my students is this: in the Eucharist, we offer to God everything that has been given to us: bread and wine, as symbols of all of creation; our selves — our souls and bodies — as St. Paul enjoins us in Romans 12:1, as living and spiritual sacrifices; and in our verbal praise and thanksgiving, we offer God that which he first gave to us, which is everything. And he returns what we have offered back to us as that which we need the most: Jesus himself. And we, in response, offer ourselves back to God in our living and in our dying, to be and to become the Body of Christ that we have received, and to show forth in our lives what we have received on our lips. In the eucharistic action, we ask the Father to unite our sacrifice with the once-for-all sacrifice of Christ which, as John Chrysostom reminds us, is inexhaustible and thus what Jesus still pleads on our behalf as our great high priest and mediator on his heavenly throne in the majesty on high. And it is only when our sacrifice is united with that of Christ that our sacrifice could be acceptable and pleasing to the Father.

The consecration of the Bread and Wine as the Body and Blood of Christ is constitutive of the Eucharist. But it is only part of the story. We don’t have the sacrament of the Eucharist so that we can have a consecrated species, though that is certainly one of its effects. We have the Eucharist in order to praise meetly and rightly the God revealed in Jesus Christ. That doxology involves a number of things which are gathered together in the one act called the Eucharist, which is a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, a spiritual sacrifice that is both material and supra-material. 

The Eucharist is the “wonderful exchange”: we respond to God’s initiative in creation, in the calling and redemption of Israel, in the incarnation and paschal mystery of Christ, and in the creation of the Church (which is why we recount all of this in a posture of praise as we begin the Church’s great eucharistic prayers). We respond to God with what God has first given us: we read the Word of God back to God. Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it this way when speaking of the Psalms, and it also applies here: “God has told us what he wants to hear from us.” 

We pray to God, appealing to what God has already done (“O God, who did _____…, please now act in accord with yourself…”). We offer to God gifts, i.e., that which was first given us: creation, symbolized in bread and wine; ourselves (soul and body); the orientation of our hearts; the words sung with our lips. We offer all to God for all that God has done. We have nothing to give; only what God has first given. We offer this as a sacrifice, for this is what a sacrifice is: the primordial act of praise that acknowledges that God is that which is not: One who creates, gives, supplies. And God gives back to us the sacrifice that we offered to him (and which he already gave to us)—he gives this all back to us as that which we need most: Jesus the Lord. But that gift of Christ is only actually received if (as Louie-Marie Chauvet puts it) if it is “verified” in our lives and in our hearts. Otherwise, we eat and drink to no avail, or even to our damnation. Hence the famous prayer of Thomas Aquinas before Mass: “Grant unto me, I pray, the grace of receiving not only the Sacrament of our Lord’s Body and Blood, but also the grace and power of the Sacrament.”

To set up a sacramental which is a pale shadow of the Eucharist and make it all about getting something from the Eucharist is to so obscure the Eucharist and the kinetics of the Gospel that it requires us to do something potentially quite grave: to engage in an act of violence against the Sacrament itself. But I think that the introduction of such a sacramental fundamentally wounds the Christian’s perception of the Sacrament and reduces it to a way to get the things that I want/need. It reduces the sacrament to a mechanistic, consumeristic exchange, when it is rather the most sublime form of doxology of the God of the Scriptures, the true union and communion of the Head and its Body, of the Bride and the Bridegroom. 

Under quarantine, the priest celebrates without a congregation, or is only receiving. That is not normative, nor is it ideal. The nature of the Eucharist means that it is not outside the realm of possibility, if other factors make impossible the presence of the people, or their safety in receiving the Sacrament. This is why the Church has taught that one can receive, by desire, the fruits of the Eucharist even when one is not able to receive the sacramental physically. We can receive the power of the Sacramental without Christ’s Sacramental Body and Blood. The Eucharist is the normative means for receiving it, but not the only means. And this is because of the nature of the Eucharist.

Moreover, the nature of the Eucharist means that one can receive only in one kind and still receive all that is given in the Eucharist: Christ himself, and the fruit of his saving work. Otherwise, the Eucharist is reduced to a mere commodity, a receptacle like other receptacles. Aquinas wrote that Christ is contained in the Eucharist not like how a body is contained in a room. Otherwise, the priest who eats 10 hosts at the end of Mass “gets more Jesus,” which is obviously absurd and impossible. If one has a cold and chooses not to receive from a common cup out of charity for the rest of the body, we would not say that they receive only part of Christ. 

This period of “COVID-tide” has placed enormous challenges on the church and has posed questions to which Christians have provided various responses. I don’t pretend to have all the answers. But I do hope that the Church might set aside at least this one attempt to respond to the desire for the Eucharist. 

The Rev. Dr. Matthew S.C. Olver is assistant professor of liturgics and pastoral theology and the director of St. Mary’s Chapel at Nashotah House Theological Seminary, where he has taught since 2014. In 2018, Fr. Olver completed his doctoral work at Marquette University on the influence of Hebrews on the origin and theology of the Roman Canon. Before moving to Wisconsin, he was for seven years the assistant rector of Church of the Incarnation, Dallas, and undertook his previous studies at Wheaton College and Duke Divinity School. He is married to Kristen and they have two elementary-aged children. He assists at Zion Episcopal Church, Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, and was a member of the Anglican-Roman Catholic Consultation in the U.S. (ARC-USA) from 2006 to 2014, which produced ‘Ecclesiology and Moral Discernment’. He is a regular contributor to Covenant, the weblog of The Living Church, and has published in The Journal of Ecumenical Studies, The Anglican Theological Review, Nova et Vetera, Studia Liturgica, and Antiphon. He is a priest in the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas.