Mansfield Fox

Law student. Yankees fan. Massive fraggle. Just living the American dream.

Sunday, July 18, 2004

Where Should the Presumption Fall?

It's the clear teaching of the Church that a person in a state of mortal sin should not receive the Eucharist. ("Anyone conscious of a grave sin must receive the sacrament of Reconciliation before coming to communion." - Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1385) But it's not always obvious whether one has committed a "grave" sin; many sins seem to me to lie in a gray area between the mortal and the venial. If you pig out an totally unnecessarily large meal, that's obviously just a venial sin. If you sleep with your brother's wife, that's obviously a mortal sin. But what about, say, telling a joke about someone behind their back? Mortal or venial? Or take lying. The Catechism is clear that some lies are venial sins and some are mortal sins. If you tell a woman her haircut looks nice when in fact it looks terrible, that's (I presume) a venial sin. If you tell a lie that puts others in danger (if, for instance, you tell Mike, falsely, that Tim is sleeping with his wife, hoping Mike will become enraged and beat up Tim) that's a mortal sin. But is it a venial or a mortal sin to tell a panhandler that you don't have any money when in fact you do?

Now, all this ambiguity and uncertainty is an excellent advertisement for the services of a spiritual director. But many people (the Fox included) don't have SDs, and even people with them are sometimes called to make on-the-fly spiritual decisions of this nature. (For instance, if you encounter and lie to the aforementioned panhandler on the way to Mass; unless your SD operates like one of those celebrity concierge services, you're going to have to figure that one out on the fly.) Which brings me (finally) to my question: if you've done something that you think might be a mortal sin, but you're not certain and there's also a real possibility that it's a venial sin (or maybe no sin at all), should you or should you not receive the Eucharist? When one is unsure of one's worthiness to receive, where should the presumption fall?

This is a tough one for me; there seem to be good arguments on both sides. On the one hand, respect for Our Lord's body would seem to counsel for erring on the side of not receiving. The Catechism, after all, reminds us that sacrilege against the Eucharist is especially grave. (2120) It might therefore make sense to establish a kind of buffer zone around the reception of the Eucharist, and not receive it unless one is really confident that one is free from grave sin. On the other hand, the Catechism instructs us that "It is in keeping with the very meaning of the Eucharist that the faithful, if they have the required dispositions, receive communion each time they participate in the Mass." (1388) That would seem to counsel against unnecessarily avoiding reception, which suggests that the presumption should be in favor of receiving the Eucharist, unless one is actually conscious of having committed a grave sin.

I mean this as an actual, and not a rhetorical, question. Anyone with an opinion on this subject, please feel free to email me. In keeping with my secret plan to break the Internet through excessive blogging, I'll post any future developments.