Our People

Homily for the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ

Our Lady Star of the Sea Church

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
10/6/2007

On 22nd September 1871 Bishop Lawrence Shiels excommunicated the 33 - year-old foundress of the Josephite Sisters, Mary MacKillop. Her resolution, independence and success had won her admirers but also enemies, and the whispering campaign reached ears of the bishop who reacted with alarm and cut her off. Thus, one internet site names her "Patron Saint of Opponents of Church Authority": NOT, I suspect, a title approved by Pope John Paul II when he beatified her, nor one Mary MacKillop would have wanted herself. Mary of the Cross was always a woman of the Church and harboured no bitterness. Rather than defy her ‘poor, dear’ bishop, as she called him, she obeyed and was soon exonerated by a commission of other bishops and reinstated. Her vision for her congregation was in due course confirmed by Rome.

Nonetheless it must have been an ordeal for her to be cut off from the "communion of saints and forgiveness of sins", as Holy Communion and Confession are described in the Apostles' Creed. Perhaps as a result of getting it so wrong with Mary MacKillop – excommunicating one who was ultimately one of the Communion of Saints herself – excommunication has not been common in Australia since, but this week past it has been much in the news.

As you have no doubt heard, the NSW Legislative Assembly voted to legalise several grotesque activities: the cloning of human embryos with only one genetic parent, making hybrids with three or more genetic parents, embryos made from eggs of aborted baby girls and even animal-human crosses. All would be legal, as long as they are killed in experiments soon after their manufacture. The Bishops of New South Wales spoke out vigorously against this abhorrent new direction for science and law; but the media, dazzled by dubious promises of cures, was bored with talk of ethics and so decided to make the issue ‘excommunication’ which has a much more dramatic ring to it.

They demanded to know: Would the Cardinal be excommunicating Catholic politicians who voted for cloning and the rest? He'd never suggested any such thing, he said. But would he refuse them Holy Communion at the Cathedral? He didn’t think so, he said; we don’t go in for excommunicating people much here in Australia.

Of course, it is common knowledge that anyone who destroys early human life or assists that to happen is, under Church law, automatically excommunicated if they understand the gravity of what they are doing and the canonical penalty attached. Much more important, the Cardinal pointed out, is the fact that no Catholic politician, or any other pro-life politician, could, if they had a well-formed and informed conscience, countenance the production and destruction of human beings as if they were lab rats. To do that would surely loosen their bonds with Christ and his Church, and any Catholic doing that would have to ask himself or herself whether they should be approaching Holy Communion.

Well, the radio shock jocks, Sydney Morning Herald editorialists and some politicians went ballistic, with lots of name-calling including one politician comparing the Cardinal to ‘that serial boofhead Sheik Al Hilali’! Yet was what the Cardinal said so strange? Doesn’t every Catholic know that going to Communion isn’t or at least shouldn’t be automatic? That they shouldn’t go just out of habit or because there is a queue there to join? That they have to be a baptised and communicated Catholic themselves, have to believe in the Real Presence and the faith and morals of the Catholic Church? That they mustn’t be conscious of any grave, unconfessed sin? That they must (normally) have fasted for one hour and otherwise be well disposed to receiving the Sacrament? Above all, we have to be in Communion with Christ and his Church before we receive the Sacrament of that Communion with Christ and his Church.

This is no new thing. In the Second Reading (1 Cor 11:23-36) we heard a first-century bishop named Paul, writing to some troublesome politicians, reporters and shock-jocks in Corinth, to remind them how sacred the Eucharist is. He recalls the Institution of the Eucharist. How on the night Jesus was betrayed, he took bread and wine, gave thanks, and said “This is my Body, which will be given up for you… This is the cup of my Blood, the Blood of the new covenant. Do this in memory of me.” Apparently he had to remind them of the seriousness of what they were doing at Communion because some were taking it for granted. The very next sentence after our reading (v 37) is especially telling in our present circumstances: “Whoever, therefore, eats the Bread or drinks the Cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the Body and Blood of the Lord. Let a man examine himself before he eats of the Bread and drinks of the Cup.”

Of course, God did not will to remain safe in his heaven but so loved the world he gave his only Son, gave him over into the hands of sinful men. As Cardinal Pell said this week, when reporters were clearly annoyed that he was not excommunicating people left, right and centre, the Church is for sinners and it would look pretty silly without them, rather like a hospital without patients. God gave himself into our hands as a fragile babe at Christmas and as an innocent victim at Easter. At Corpus Christi we consider the awesome thing that God gives itself into the hands of sinful men yet again, at every Holy Communion, as we receive the host into our hands and tongues and persons.

As God did not will to remain always safe in heaven, He does not will to remain always secure in the tabernacle. Later today, He and thousands of others will brave the elements for the Corpus Christi procession through the streets of Sydney – and I hope many of our parishioners will be amongst them. Next year, He and half a million people will meet at the Papal Mass in Randwick. Today, He and a few dozen shall be face to face here in Watson’s Bay at the Consecration. At each place we know God may well be received into souls less than perfectly ready. But at the very least, we must be ready and willing to be transformed by Him, even as He transforms bread and wine. We must not stubbornly resist conversion to his ways, as if we knew better.

We must receive God at Communion not just out of habit, not just because there is a queue there and we have always joined it, but as an expression of a genuinely Christian life and as food for that genuinely Christian life, a lived especially for the life and love of the little ones of this world – the orphans and widows, the new-born and the soon-to-die, the refugees and the dispossessed, and the most powerless of all, those newly conceived in the lab and soon to be destroyed.

When we say Amen to the Sacred Host and the Chalice before us, we say Yes to embracing the life of the Gospel. We say Yes to receiving Christ and taking Him out to the world thereafter: out to our homes, our workplaces, our shopping centres, our schools, our leisure activities, even our parliaments. And then we bring that world back to Christ next week at Mass, we ask that he transform it with bread and wine into the Communion of Saints.