Column How do we know what they know?
By JEANNETTE BATZ
Growing up, we always set an extra
place at the dinner table, and when I was old enough to do the dishes, I asked
why. Practical Aunt Mary said it was to make anyone who dropped in feel
welcome. My grandmother, a romantic, said the extra plate was for Jesus present
among us.
Later that year, when the parish priest came over to school to
lecture about the Holy Eucharist, both of my family's explanations meshed
easily into his formal description of the Last Supper. Transubstantiation
didn't faze me: Of course Christ turned his body into bread and wine to feed us
all, just as my widowed mother fed me with her body's milk, energy and
sacrifice.
My child self recognized the same love in both kinds of meals --
and that message survived all subsequent theological overlays. Which is why I
did a double take when my friend Jenny told me her dad, a lifelong devout
Catholic now in the final stages of Alzheimer's, is no longer allowed to
receive communion.
When the volunteer eucharistic minister at the nursing home first
withheld the sacrament, Jenny called her parish priest. "The volunteer said he
could no longer receive communion because he didn't know what it was," she
complained to the priest.
"That's right."
"How does she know what he knows?"
"Oh, come on," the priest said wearily. Why, he'd had a
parishioner with Alzheimer's just recently, and he'd had to stop giving that
man communion, too.
Jenny was furious. She wanted to know why the Catholic church
spent so much of its energy building a foundation for the dignity of the
unborn, then pulled it out like a rug when an older mind failed.
Trying to be fair, I asked just how bad Joe -- a warm, gregarious
Italian we all loved to joke with -- had gotten. "He doesn't always know my
name," she answered. "But one day when I came off the elevator, he looked up
and said, 'You belong to me!' and held out his arms."
Joe was baptized as an infant. The woman he married became a
Catholic at the time of their wedding. They sent all four children to Catholic
schools -- kindergarten through, in one case, the doctorate. Listening to Jenny
talk, I felt her anger pulsing in my veins, too.
So without saying much to Jenny, I began casting about for an
explanation that made sense.
Eventually, someone mentioned an article The Washington Post
printed years ago about a priest with Alzheimer's. I called the reporter, Laura
Stepp, and she remembered immediately. "I watched him celebrate Mass, and it
was slow and painstaking but it was also very moving and felt very meaningful,"
she told me. "When he served communion, he had someone helping him, but he held
the ciborium. The idea that someone with Alzheimer's couldn't receive communion
is absurd."
Warmed by our mutual indignation, I was tempted to agree and hang
up, but I felt obliged to point out that Joe wasn't as cognitively aware as the
priest must have been. "Doesn't matter," she replied. "Who are we to say that
they don't know? Before my grandmother died, I went to visit her on a Sunday
morning. She couldn't talk, but as soon as I put my arms around her, she leaned
toward me with this big smile on her face. I sang 'Amazing Grace' and rocked
her, and I know she knew what I was doing. On some level, they know until they
are dead."
A friend who is a hospice chaplain recently told me about staying
a few extra hours with a woman who was supposedly comatose, far beyond
cognition. Looking around the woman's room for clues, Susan took her hand and
started talking: "You've been a mother and you've taken care of other people
all your life, and you probably never thought you'd be here, where it's loud
and there are indignities and you have to wait, and --" She felt the woman's
hand move and glanced at her face. Tears were rolling down her cheeks.
In Eucharist we make "a single exception to a law of science,"
Msgr. Ronald A. Knox wrote in 1956. "We admit there is something we come across
in our experience which can communicate energy without losing energy in
itself." In other words, we are willing to shatter our rational assumptions and
posit Christ's presence without proof.
But we are not willing to grant the possibility that, after 82
years of devout faith, a core of recognition might outlast the socially
appropriate responses.
For the record, Knox does note that Eucharist is more than
cognitive: "When a man lies on his deathbed, it is through his body that
sacramental grace comes to heal him." I tried to imagine Jesus hosting a dinner
at the nursing home and waving Joe away.
Unfortunately, Jesus didn't set the historical precedents for
pastoral decisions about Eucharist, which were nuanced even in the Rev. James
O'Kane's Notes on the Rubrics of the Roman Ritual, published in 1872.
"Communion is not to be given, in any circumstances, to those who
are insane and who have never had the use of reason," he wrote. "If, however,
before they became insane, they evinced pious and religious sentiments, they,
according to the decree of the Council of Carthage, may be admitted to its
participation at the close of life, provided there be no danger to be
apprehended of discharging the stomach or of other indignity and
inconvenience."
The indignity and inconvenience of stomach discharge would hardly
be my criteria, but I appreciated his generosity of spirit. Jenny's priest made
no similar offer; no promise of Eucharist at the deathbed; no suggestion of a
regular blessing in lieu of the host.
Hoping the current doctrines said more about disability, I called
Catholic University. Fr. Gerard Austin, OP, was out of town; the PR woman
called him with the question. "You're to check the U.S. Bishops Guidelines in
Origins, June 29, 1995, paragraph 20," she said.
Dogged by now, I hunted down the reference, "Guidelines for
Celebration of the Sacraments with Persons with Disabilities." But I started
with paragraph 19, which defines the Eucharist as "the summit and the source of
all Christian worship and life."
Paragraph 20 said the person must "be able to distinguish the body
of Christ from ordinary food, even if this recognition is evidenced through
manner, gesture or reverential silence rather than verbally." Pastors are
encouraged to consult with family members, psychologists and experts on
disability. "Cases of doubt should be resolved in favor of the right of the
baptized person to receive the sacrament."
I suppressed my "Eureka!" and tried to be logical. The bishops'
main question seemed to be whether someone can distinguish the Eucharist's
significance. If Joe couldn't do so, why fuss about the theology and ideology
of bringing him the sacrament?
Why? Because for 82 years he's been told it's the center of his
faith, the bringing-to-life of his relationship with God.
Because his wife and family know it's what he'd want.
Because no other human being can be sure what's happening within
the mysteries of his consciousness right now.
St. John Chrysostom wrote that "the time for communion is ... when
you have a pure conscience and your life is purified from sin." I'm willing to
bet there's more purity -- some accumulated over a faithful life, the rest
forged by illness' theft of control -- in Joe's soul than in that of most
communicants.
We do still believe he has a soul, don't we?
Jeanette Batz is a senior editor at The Riverfront Times,
an alternative newspaper in St. Louis.
National Catholic Reporter, January 31,
1997
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