The pandemic’s mass: an Anglo-Catholic essay on certain Eucharistic issues raised by COVID-19

2021 ◽  
pp. 000332862110607
Author(s):  
Matthew S.C. Olver

This article explores a number of issues related to the challenges introduced by the COVID-19 pandemic as it concerns the celebration of the Eucharist and attempts to do so from an Anglo-Catholic perspective. The article considers the overarching question of the extent to which the Church is willing to be open to practices that do not fully express the ideal or the fullest expression of the liturgy in light of serious mitigating circumstances. The following constellation of issues related to the Eucharist and the pandemic are examined: the prohibition against celebration of the Eucharist in light of the historical realities about the frequency of communion reception; the basis in the prayer book for the practice of spiritual communion and reception of communion in one kind; the theological challenges of so-called “drive-by Communion”; and the thorny question of a priest celebrating the Eucharist with no other persons in the church building ( sine populo).

1993 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 450-475
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Yeo

‘For a bishop to live at one end of the world, and his Church at the other, must make the office very uncomfortable to the bishop, and in a great measure useless to the people.’ This was the verdict of Thomas Sherlock, bishop of London from 1748 to 1761, on the provision which had been made by the Church of England for the care of its congregations overseas. No Anglican bishopric existed outside the British Isles, but a limited form of responsibility for the Church overseas was exercised by the see of London. In the time of Henry Compton, bishop from 1675 to 1713, Anglican churches in the American colonies, in India and in European countrieshad all sought guidance from the bishop of London. By the 1740s the European connection had been severed; the bishop still accepted some colonial responsibilities but the arrangement was seen as anomalous by churchmen on both sides of the Atlantic. A three-thousand-mile voyage separated the colonists from their bishop, and those wishing to seek ordination could not do so unless they were prepared to cross the ocean. Although the English Church claimed that the episcopate was an essential part of church order, no Anglican bishop had ever visited America, confirmation had never been administered, and no church building in the colonies had been validly consecrated. While a Roman Catholic bishopric was established in French Canada at an early date, the Anglican Church overseas had no resident bishops until the end of the eighteenth century. In the words of Archbishop Thomas Seeker, this was ‘a case which never had its parallel before in the Christian world’.


Moreana ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 51 (Number 197- (3-4) ◽  
pp. 115-137
Author(s):  
Daniel Lochman

John Colet knew Thomas Linacre for approximately three decades, from their mutual residence in Italy during the early 1490s through varied pedagogical, professional, and social contacts in and around London prior to Colet’s death in 1519. It is not certain that Colet knew Linacre’s original Latin translations of Galen’s therapeutic works, the first printed in 1517. Yet several of Colet’s works associate a spiritual physician—a phrase linked to Colet himself at least since Thomas More’s 1504 letter inviting him to London—with Paul’s trope of the mystical body. Using Galenic discourse to describe the “physiology” of the ideal mystical body, Colet emphasizes by contrast a diseased ecclesia in need of healing by the Spirit, who alone can invigorate the mediating “vital spirits” that are spiritual physicians—ministers within the church. Colet’s application of sophisticated Galenic discourse to the mystical body coincided with the humanist interest in Galen’s works evident in Linacre’s translations, and it accompanied growing concern for health related to waves of epidemics in London during the first two decades of the sixteenth century as well as Colet’s involvement in licensure of London physicians. This paper explores the implications of Colet’s adaptation of Galenic principles to the mystical body and suggests that Colet fostered a strain of medical discourse that persisted well into the sixteenth century.


2019 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 235-246
Author(s):  
Alexey L. Beglov

The article examines the contribution of the representatives of the Samarin family to the development of the Parish issue in the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The issue of expanding the rights of the laity in the sphere of parish self-government was one of the most debated problems of Church life in that period. The public discussion was initiated by D.F. Samarin (1827-1901). He formulated the “social concept” of the parish and parish reform, based on Slavophile views on society and the Church. In the beginning of the twentieth century his eldest son F.D. Samarin who was a member of the Special Council on the development the Orthodox parish project in 1907, and as such developed the Slavophile concept of the parish. In 1915, A.D. Samarin, who took up the position of the Chief Procurator of the Most Holy Synod, tried to make his contribution to the cause of the parish reforms, but he failed to do so due to his resignation.


Author(s):  
Ruqaya Saeed Khalkhal

The darkness that Europe lived in the shadow of the Church obscured the light that was radiating in other parts, and even put forward the idea of democracy by birth, especially that it emerged from the tent of Greek civilization did not mature in later centuries, especially after the clergy and ideological orientation for Protestants and Catholics at the crossroads Political life, but when the Renaissance emerged and the intellectual movement began to interact both at the level of science and politics, the Europeans in democracy found refuge to get rid of the tyranny of the church, and the fruits of the application of democracy began to appear on the surface of most Western societies, which were at the forefront to be doubtful forms of governece.        Democracy, both in theory and in practice, did not always reflect Western political realities, and even since the Greek proposition, it has not lived up to the idealism that was expected to ensure continuity. Even if there is a perception of the success of the democratic process in Western societies, but it was repulsed unable to apply in Islamic societies, because of the social contradiction added to the nature of the ruling regimes, and it is neither scientific nor realistic to convey perceptions or applications that do not conflict only with our civilized reality The political realization created by certain historical circumstances, and then disguises the different reality that produced them for the purpose of resonance in the ideal application.


2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 15-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ingrid Brühwiler

This article examines public education and the establishment of the nation-state in the first half of the nineteenth century in Switzerland. Textbooks, governmental decisions, and reports are analyzed in order to better understand how citizenship is depicted in school textbooks and whether (federal) political changes affected the image of the “imagined citizen” portrayed in such texts. The “ideal citizen” was, first and foremost, a communal and cantonal member of a twofold society run by the church and the secular government, in which nationality was depicted as a third realm.


Author(s):  
Charles Hefling

This book surveys the contents and the history of the Book of Common Prayer, a sacred text which has been a foundational document of the Church of England and the other churches in the worldwide community of Anglican Christianity. The Prayer Book is primarily a liturgical text—a set of scripts for enacting events of corporate worship. As such it is at once a standard of theological doctrine and an expression of spirituality. The first part of this survey begins with an examination of one Prayer Book liturgy, known as Divine Service, in some detail. Also discussed are the rites for weddings, ordinations, and funerals and for the sacraments of Baptism and Communion. The second part considers the original version of the Book of Common Prayer in the context of the sixteenth-century Reformation, then as revised and built into the Elizabethan settlement of religion in England. Later chapters discuss the reception, revision, rejection, and restoration of the Prayer Book during its first hundred years. The establishment of the text in its classical form in 1662 was followed by a “golden age” in the eighteenth century, which included the emergence of a modified version in the United States. The narrative concludes with a chapter on the displacement of the Book of Common Prayer as a norm of Anglican identity. Two specialized chapters concentrate on the Prayer Book as a visible artifact and as a text set to music.


2021 ◽  
Vol 103 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-26
Author(s):  
Ruth A. Meyers ◽  
Katherine Sonderegger

These essays were presented at the Jubilate conference at Christ Church Cathedral in the Diocese of Southern Ohio on 2 November 2019. Meyers urges the expansion of images and metaphors used to speak of the mystery of God in liturgy while not abandoning classical masculine language for God. Expanding our language is essential, she argues, both to speak the truth about God and to uphold the dignity of every human being. Sonderegger contends that masculine language for God is a settled matter in the church and in liturgy, and that this is compatible with a particular vision of Christian feminism, one centered on the material conditions of living women.


2017 ◽  
Vol 114 (4) ◽  
pp. 542-557
Author(s):  
Kenneth L. Waters
Keyword(s):  
The Face ◽  

In what ways are the Johannine Epistles a response to empire ideology and propaganda? These Epistles proclaim a more complete and correct cosmology, a greater Savior and soteriology, a better pedagogy, a truer doctrine, a sounder koinōnia, and a more nurturing paterfamilias; moreover, they do so while indicting schismatics, who, in the view of the elder, represent the face of the empire. Although the resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ drive the elder’s witness and ministry, he must still shape his message to counter the encroachment of empire in the church and on the mission field.


Author(s):  
Paul Cliteur

This chapter discusses the difference between a nonsecular or religious critique of religious ethics and politics and a specifically secular critique. It introduces the central notion of a secular critique, autonomy, and its two types, moral and political. Moral autonomy entails the separation of religion from ethics. The ideal of making that separation is called “moral secularism.” The opposite of moral autonomy is “moral heteronomy.” An extreme case of moral heteronomy is discussed: Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his own son when God commanded him to do so. Next, the importance of political autonomy and political secularism is illustrated with reference to the conflict between the king Ahab (the model of a secular ruler) and the prophet Elijah (the model of a religious leader). Some stories in the holy scriptures of the monotheist religions held in common by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are unfavorable toward secularism (both moral and political).


2014 ◽  
Vol 83 (4) ◽  
pp. 1014-1018
Author(s):  
Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp

Last week, sandwiched in between updates on Beyoncé's trip to the West Coast and sighting of the latest super moon, the Huffington Post featured an article by power preacher Lillian Daniels entitled “Spiritual But Not Religious? Please Stop Boring Me.” Daniels lamented her situation on long plane flights, where she had to endure the stories of fellow travelers who, upon finding out she is a minister, confessed their rejection of religious institutions in favor of finding spirituality in sunsets and walks on the beach. Inevitably, they would present their experience to her as a revelation: “Like people who go to church don't see God in the sunset! Like we are these monastic little hermits who never leave the church building. How lucky we are to have these geniuses inform us that God is in nature.” Daniels' article represents a backlash coming from the institutional end of the spectrum, but her plea for loyalty to religion-in-community was met by many who found her (apparently, according to the comments section) insulting, condescending, and close-minded.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document