Rite and Reason: Must the imperfection of Christian communion rule out sharing in the one eucharist, asks Andrew Pierce.
The participation of an Anglican priest in the concelebration of Mass in Drogheda on Easter Sunday has sparked public controversy. Emotive language in the media suggests that a raw nerve, somewhere, has been (or, perhaps, should have been) touched by this event: there has been talk of angry bishops, new reformers and sham eucharists.
Analysis of the issue has, to date, been more concerned with ecclesiastical politics than with substantive theological issues. And even then, there is little to report: both archbishops of Armagh have issued holding statements, indicating that they would like more information. So what is this controversy about?
Those who participated in the liturgy - priests and faithful alike - have spoken positively of the event's significance. Supporters of the liturgy, in Drogheda and further afield, have urged that today's context, where such religiously and tribally enmeshed cultural landmarks as the Somme and the 1916 Rising are being commemorated inclusively, obliges the churches to do more than simply sit on a viewing platform.
After having all too often embodied the sacralising of exclusivity in Irish society, North and South, Irish Christianity was offered an alternative vision, a reconciliation of memories, by the liturgy in Drogheda. On the other hand, explicitly negative public comment seems to have come from those not directly involved in the event, and simply to have appealed to the current view on eucharistic hospitality taken by the Roman Catholic magisterium, in eg, the 1994 Catechism of the Catholic Church.
As a debate, this does not look promising: one party appeals to context rather than rules, and the other to rules rather than context. A key theological task, faced by all churches, is that of resisting a simple playing-off of rules against context, and to find instead ways of reinterpreting rules in ever-changing contexts.
But rules and discipline are not the same as doctrines or dogmas: rules do not embody salvific truth, and must be devised and applied with care, and - when necessary - changed. Rules and discipline should follow from doctrine and dogma, not vice versa.
An awkward arrangement of horse and cart marred the 1998 document, One Bread One Body, issued by the Catholic Bishops' Conferences of England and Wales, Ireland, and Scotland, which offered an understanding of eucharistic doctrine that appeared to be drawn from the rules governing eucharistic hospitality.
The caution exhibited by Archbishops Brady and Eames, in their responses to the Easter eucharist in Drogheda, presupposes their acute familiarity with the legacy of western inter-church division, and in particular with the ways in which the eucharist has functioned as an emblem of the very divisions that it ought to have subverted.
The work of the Anglican Roman Catholic International Commissions (ARCIC) has certainly helped to underline the extent to which Anglicans and Roman Catholics are able to recognise the reality of their communion with one another.
Yet undoubtedly there is a growing frustration among Anglicans and Roman Catholics (and among other Christian denominations, too) that there is an imbalance in the regulating of ordinary church life that serves to reinscribe, without challenging, traditional sources of division.
A vital phrase of the Decree on Ecumenism, issued by the Second Vatican Council in 1964, referred to baptised Christians in non-Roman Catholic traditions as enjoying "a certain, though imperfect, communion with the Catholic Church", a form of words echoed by Pope John Paul II in his 1995 encyclical on ecumenism, Ut Unum Sint.
Regrettably, it seems easier for divided bodies to acknowledge and police the imperfection and inadequacy of their existing communion than to celebrate its reality. But exceptions to this tendency - such as John Paul II's ecumenical concelebration in Belize in 1983 - provide welcome reminders that the Drogheda celebration is not an isolated event.
Many ecumenists will take comfort from the widespread support - thus far, at any rate - for the liturgy at Drogheda, which confirms that there is a consensus among many of the faithful that the churches' existing, separate liturgical lives take insufficient note of other Christians and their traditions.
Acknowledging the reality of an imperfect communion may demand much more than an optional, annual ecumenical service, but must the imperfection of our communion rule out sharing in the one eucharist?
The response to the Easter Mass in Drogheda highlights the way in which Roman Catholic eucharistic doctrine and church discipline interact: the eucharist both expresses and realises the unity of the Catholic Church, and church discipline safeguards that expression of unity in the eucharist by ruling out eucharistic sharing (except in a few circumstances).
At this point, however, it seems that the "rules" lose sight of the tension that was held together in the teaching of Vatican II: how might the eucharist bring about Christian unity? And how might church discipline assist in making clear this aspect of the eucharist?
Perhaps the lasting significance of the Drogheda event is its attempt to imagine, in ways both discriminating and creative, what Christian unity might be like for a people who have known it only imperfectly - by its absence.
Dr Andrew Pierce is lecturer in ecumenical studies at the Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College, Dublin.