Sir, - One inevitably has to ask why certain Anglican clergymen are increasingly encouraging Catholics to accept Anglican Holy Communion? Would these same clergymen unreservedly receive the Communion of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass if it were offered to them at a Catholic celebration?
Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, has not been the only setting for a high-profile, unilateral sacramental sharing. Some months ago, at an episcopal installation in Kilkenny's medieval Catholic Cathedral, all but two Catholic members of Kilkenny Corporation, to the consternation of the Catholic Bishop of Ossory present, took Anglican Holy Communion by express invitation.
The scriptural understanding of the Catholic Holy Mass and the Anglican Holy Communion are still demarcated by two distinct faiths, whereas Catholic and Orthodox Eucharistic belief has been consistently and authoritatively in agreement from the earliest centuries to the present day.
Within Irish Anglicanism it has not been so. Since the 16th-century Protestant Reformation, its thinking and theology on the Holy Communion or the Lord's Supper have oscillated and vacillated due to the influence of extreme forms of continental Protestantism mediated by English puritanism, the anti-Catholic Twelve Irish Articles (1566) and Archbishop James Ussher's Calvinistic 104 Articles of Religion (1615) and the more balanced theology of the English Caroline divines. Thereafter Irish Anglicanism was moulded largely by English Anglican thought in the succeeding centuries. Irish Anglican thinking today has been historically conditioned therefore by a disparate theological heritage.
There has been as yet no authentic, definitive, mutually authorised agreement between the Catholic and Anglican Communions on such fundamentally related vital issues of the meaning of the Holy Eucharist, the unity of the Church and the ministerial role of Apostolic Authority. Hence it is still contrary to the Catholic conscience and sensus fidelium, which ought to be respected, to receive Anglican Communion.
There is a real distinction between conscience and optional interpretation, between the Catholic conscience informed by an unbroken Apostolic tradition, and the defining and ultimate Protestant principle of private judgment in matters of faith and the conduct of life. In effect the President of Ireland, the Kilkenny Corporation (bar two members) and such personages as the Lord Mayor of Dublin and Mrs Jean Kennedy Smith, United States Ambassador, have become de facto Anglicans, having broken communion with their respective bishops and separated themselves from the unity of the Catholic Church.
Furthermore, the public reception of the sacrament of the Protestant faith raises the spectre of what that Anglican sacramental test meant for Catholics through the Penal era. On this score alone, Catholic sensibilities should be respected, not exacerbated. The same Eucharistic principle was and still is involved.
Reverting to my original question - the ultimate reason why Anglican clergymen wish to swell their congregations with Catholics invited to receive their Holy Communion on Sunday morning - I ask: is there a hidden, concerted agenda here? Is not Anglicanism in the Republic of Ireland passing through a serious crisis of identity? Since 1870 the Anglican Church in Ireland has been shorn of its former privileged status as the established church, imposed by law, by the coercive order of its founder Henry VIII in 1536. Its visible support by a now vanished Anglican ascendancy, the large land-owning and mercantile classes and the last vestiges of the British imperial tradition has been virtually eroded. Is that Church now seeking reinvigoration by the incorporation of members of the upwardly-mobile, middle class Catholics, especially in suburban Dublin, by means of the Trojan horse of dishonest intercommunion?
Are we witnessing yet again, in a new guise, the historic and mischievous anti-Roman animus, the perennial "mark of protest" against the teaching of the sole Apostolic See of the West? At all events, Anglican dignitaries and clergymen should not seek to undermine the core doctrines of the Catholic Church, which are not simply weather-vane laws and regulations. The Anglican Holy Communion is not interchangeable with nor one and the same reality as the Catholic Mass.
What a sad spectacle is the false diplomatic silence of the Catholic bishops (with the exception of Archbishop Connell) who are failing in their primary apostolic duty to explain to their faithful people what precisely this doctrinal issue involves, for which several of their own predecessors, and even more numerous religious and priests, laid down their lives rather than deny their faith. While avoiding highly contentious liturgical practices, with their divisive repercussions for Catholic holders of state, civil and political offices, surely mutual respect, understanding, friendship can still be priorities for Irish Catholics and Anglicans in 1998? - Yours, etc.,
Dr Thomas S. O'Flynn,
OP, St John's College, Oxford.