Who may preside at Mass?

Canon B12  No person shall consecrate and administer the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper unless he shall have been ordained  priest by Episcopal ordination …

At its recent synod, the Archdiocese of Sydney passed a resolution to the effect that no action would be taken to prevent what is called lay-presidency of the Eucharist.  In the future, therefore, people who have not been ordained to priests’ orders by a bishop may be found presiding at Masses within the jurisdiction of the Archbishop.

Setting aside the political manoeuvrings that, in part, underlie this move, we need to reflect on why it is a regrettable step.  It has to be said at the outset that the folks of Sydney are not alone in supporting this development.  There are many Anglicans, including some in this diocese, who promote lay presidency as a way of coping with the shortage of priests or even as a desirable thing in its own right.

It is highly likely that the history of the Church includes, at various times and places, incidents of Christians other than those in priests’ or bishops’ orders presiding at the Eucharist.  Canon 15 of the Council of Arles (324) forbad diaconal presidency at the Eucharist, to which subject it would only have turned its corporate attention had such a such a practice been prevalent.

This article is not concerned with the question of whether such liturgies are “valid”, in other words whether they are actually Eucharists.  The notion of Masses “working”, by which people mean whether or not they are a context for the Real Presence of Christ in the Sacrament, is not a very helpful discussion.  Such an understanding of the Mass risks reducing our worship to a magic trick: take some bread, a cup of wine and water and get the magician-priest to utter the words of the spell and hey-presto – of perhaps more appropriately hocus-pocus – the elements transubstantiate!  Rather, we need to focus our minds on what is appropriate within the parameters of the Catholic Order that provides the framework of Anglican Church life.

We need to start by understanding that the Mass is primarily an act of worship celebrated by the gathered Christian community.  The priesthood that offers the Liturgy is the Royal Priesthood of all believers – the community of the Baptized.  Within the assembly, various functions are assigned to various people: reading, leading the intercessions, administering chalices and, of course, presiding.

Since the Mass is the pre-eminent event of the Christian community that celebrates it, it is appropriate that the president is the person who presides amidst that community day by day: the episcopally ordained priest.

The question then, of course, arises as to why the president of a Christian community needs to be a ministerial priest.  Many others are able, so the observation goes, to do what she or he does just as well, so why reserve this role to the clergy?

In grasping the appropriateness of this provision, we need to understand the nature and place of a local congregation.  Every parish church is part of the network or federation of communities that comprise the Catholic Church.  A local congregation is, however, more than a branch of the denomination to which it owes its obedience, it is the manifestation of the Church, in her fullness, in that particular place and at that specific time.  The priest, with her or his universal orders, but appointed to a distinct context, embodies that integration of local and catholic.  She or he is, at one and the same time, the presence of the local in the great assembly and the guarantee for the individual congregation of its participation in the Catholic Church.

The Church in training, ordaining and appointing priests, is in the business of providing presidents for ecclesial communities or it should be.  However, a number of factors have conspired over the centuries slowly to undermine this model and we find ourselves in a bit of a mess.

One of the factors that began early on was the confusion that developed as those with priestly orders began to enjoy status.  The network of complementary ministries and functions that comprised the edifice of church society began to crumble.  For a variety of reasons, the priestly caste emerged as the dominant office: to the point that many theologians in the Middle Ages thought that there was no order of bishops as such, they being just priests with classy appointments and even more power.

In the wake of this development, people of all sorts began to pursue the acquisition of priests’ orders, of whom many had very little contact with the role of presidency within a Christian community.  This, in turn, led to a divorce in peoples’ minds of the link between priesthood and presidency.  Without their own congregations, these priests would celebrate their own mass with just a server (often another priest); these masses proliferated in the Middle Ages and for this reason, amongst others, the notion of the Eucharist as an act of a gathered Christian community was obscured.

Working from the liturgical side, further pressures were applied.  As the Liturgy became an ever more clerical affair, most of the laity became estranged from it, often pursuing their own distinct devotions elsewhere in the building – the Mass became a spectacle rather than a participatory occasion.  The one thing that most lay people did (and that only seldom) was to receive Holy Communion.  This became the focus of their attention and understood as the purpose of attending the Mass; the role of the priest was seen almost, as it were, to fabricate the product for that Holy Communion.

The Reformers set out to strip away from the Mass what they saw as corrupt doctrines and practices and restore the pristine ancient liturgy.  What they failed fully to grasp was that they were also beholden to the Mediaeval corruptions.  They, too, focused the principal point of the Eucharist on the devout reception of the Sacrament as a memorial of Christ’s Sacrifice on the Cross.  The Low Mass, rather than the High, became the model of celebration, which fostered a highly private and individual approach to participation at Mass.

From the middle of the nineteenth century, liturgical scholars of all hues have, on the basis of fuller knowledge, sought to recover the original pattern of Eucharistic celebration, in which search the Parish Communion Movement, pioneered at S John’s Grainger Street, played a significant role.

Whilst on paper, huge strides have been made, old habits die hard and there is a considerable distance to travel before we can consider ourselves to have succeeded.  Once again, we shall need to return to our understanding of a Christian community.

Perhaps influenced by our consumer society, too many Christians view the Parish Church as a product into which they can buy if they like its style – particularly that of the Vicar.  They fail to recognize that an ecclesial community should be a synthesis of every individual’s commitment to Christ and His Gospel; within that network the priest, as president, has an important role to play, but does not of him or her self constitute the substance of the congregation.

Parish priests equally have to embrace this truth by embracing a model of presidency that enables the skills of all members to be offered and drawn upon.  This, however, does not mean that anyone should be given a go at whatever they want to try (including presiding at the Eucharist).  The president’s role comprises more than the sum of a number of tasks.  Rather, it is a role that facilitates the unity, vibrancy and development of a community.  However, in order to fulfil that function, to it properly belong certain of the specific jobs and prerogatives that Catholic order accords it, which include presiding at the Mass, the pre-eminent event in the community’s routine.

The fact that others within the gathering might be able to discharge certain of those functions more skilfully is neither here nor there (though action should be taken about manifestly incompetent clergy) any more than people would seek to replace a parent, when we feel that a better one might be available.  Indeed, this analogy throws up a further consideration, in that, increasingly, we seek to find ways of supporting parents, who struggle with one aspect or another of their responsibilities.  Both congregations and the wider Church should see their duty in much the same light; rather than seeking to emasculate the priest by ever greater curtailment of her or his role.

Briefly, at the end of this reflexion, we shall turn our minds to a factor that presses on this issue – the perceived shortage of clergy.  It is, surely, a fact that we no longer have sufficient priests to sustain the infrastructure left to us by previous generations.  This, some say, is a cogent argument for proceeding to lay-presidency.  However, we might reflect, rather, that the problem actually lies in refusing to accept that many of the communities are no longer viable.  Rather than piling parish upon parish in a single-priest benefice, we should be looking to reconstitute our network of Christian communities in a way that can properly be managed by smaller corps of priests.

Lay-presidency within the Catholic context will encourage isolationism of the local from the Universal and undermine the internal cohesion of that local community.  It will foster the individualism that has taken us so far from a proper understanding of the corporate nature of the Church and the responsibilities that places upon us.

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