¹ The notion that there is a paradigm shift between the pre-Conciliar rites and those of today (as distinct from models of the relationship being either evolution or reform) is derived from Kuhn, T.S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (second ed., Chicago IL, 1970)Google Scholar.

² The fact that this practice is still countenanced by Canon Law (Canons 945–58) shows incoherence between the Council's eucharistic paradigm and that of the legislators. It might be objected that the legislators had to legislate for actual practice and in 1983 (just after a decade after the new rite's appearance) this practice was still part of Catholic life and piety and therefore had to come within the provisions and regulations of the code. However, the persistence of the practice, itself enabled if not encouraged by its sanction within the Code, represents a subversion of the message of the rite, and the dissonance caused by the unresolved consequence of an earlier theology may (as has happened so often in the past) negate all the fundamental reform intended by the Council.

³ It is worth recalling that at many Masses no one, other than the priest, actually received Communion. Indeed, given that the distribution of Communion was a separate rite that was used as needed, it was not unusual in a situation where several priests were celebrating severally on different altars in a church for a priest to instruct the server to tell anyone (including the server himself ) who was attending ‘his Mass’ and wanted Communion that he was not going to give Communion to anyone as his Mass would be over in time for them to get Communion from the priest-on-duty saying Mass on the high altar. Those theologians today who are enamoured of the ‘beauty’ of the unreformed rite or who stress how beneficial it was ‘in forming many in holiness’ should be given these practical details of the rite – which were not abuses for they were formally sanctioned by law within it – as test case to see if they could explicate, and then be willing to defend, the theology underpinning such praxis.

⁴ Phrases similar to this are found in virtually all post-Tridentine catechisms intended for memorization.

⁵ The limiting case illustrating this point is that many attended Mass in buildings where many of the seats did not provide a view of the sanctuary due to the presence of pillars or the like, and the need for people to see the centre of the action was not a major concern of architects. Today no one would plan a building with side aisles separated by columns or a cruciform building where only those directly in front of the sanctuary area could see it.

⁶ And this is quite distinct from the paradigm shift in formal theology.

⁷ The GIRM 85 and the RS 89 express a clear preference for not using the tabernacle (and modern rubricians duly follow this up with recommendations: cf. Paul Turner, Let us pray: A Guide to the Rubrics of Sunday Mass (Collegeville MN, 2006), 130–1). However, such ‘preferences’ miss the point: it is logically impossible to be at a meal at a table and then eat other food than that on the table, and still claim one is at a meal. It is possible in a fast food outlet, but are we happy that such eating provides the image for the Lord's banquet!

⁸ Across the continent of Europe it is virtually unknown for communion from the cup to be given at a Mass in a parish. In the few places where it does occur (England and Wales) it is often a case that it occurs on weekdays but not on Sundays (‘not practical’) while there is a noticeable tendency among younger clergy to restrict this to the relatively few occasions envisaged in documents of the immediate post-conciliar period. This lack of theological understanding can also be seen in the re-appearance of the communion paten to discourage reception in the hand and create again a theology of the Eucharist as ‘the sacral commodity.’

⁹ They did not actually control the meaning because people manufactured meanings from their own experience which were often so bizarre that when they are encountered now by folklore researchers they express doubts that the people whose understandings they are studying ‘were ever really Christian’! In effect, the ‘control’ that Latin offered was illusory, the human imagination is always more fertile than canonical control mechanisms of bishops.

¹⁰ Conservatives who argue that one can avoid the situation where people ‘misunderstand’ the Eucharist through faulty translations or deviations from the rubrics have to face an unpleasant fact about human perception: either one accepts that one cannot control what meanings people will take from events in which they linguistically participate, or one does not allow that participation. In short, they must return to a rite in Latin and de-emphasise other participation (in effect, return to the rite as it was in 1962) or accept the new open situation with its greater demands. The sort of work engaged in by Vox Clara, or the agenda of Liturgiam authenticam of 2001, is an attempt at ‘a half-way house’ and so will ultimately frustrate the conservatives for it will not achieve their aim of epistemic limitation, while it will alienate others who cannot see the problem, and promote factionalism in the Church. The Church set out on an adventure in opening up to the vernacular, just as it set out on an adventure when Trent rejected it when it first became an issue, and like it or not one must accept that we cannot see the outcomes of our actions in the openness of created time.

¹¹ I developed some aspects of this question in ‘The Eucharist as “The Meal that should be”,’ Worship 80(2006)30–44Google Scholar.

¹² We see this in the example already cited of distributing communion from the tabernacle. The new rite clearly saw the reception of communion from bread and wine consecrated at the actual Eucharist as the situation that should exist; however, in the late 1960s the universal practice was to consecrate large ciboria (deliberately designed so that they could contain enough wafers for many Masses) occasionally, and then have only the priest's large bread actually consecrated at most Masses. The framers of the GIRM knew that this practice would change slowly and so did not formally ban the use of the tabernacle at an actual celebration. Accepting the logical outcome of the underlying theology of the new rite means that the former practice now simply has to cease and be treated as a practice ‘to be avoided’ lest scandal be given to those laypeople celebrating the Eucharist.

¹³ The actual object is a table and this is, therefore, the basic sign; ‘altar’ is a particular theological perspective on what happens at the table.

¹⁴ Pre-conciliar catechesis encouraging the ‘apostolate of the laity’ often used the slogan “make your workbench an altar” to stress the notion that ordinary work participated in the work of salvation and could be a vocation in a manner equivalent to that of a priest going to the altar. Implicit in this slogan is that the altar in the church building is the workbench of the priest: there he was the operator of the opus operatum. However, the table is not a workbench in any sense: the table is the place of celebration, it is where the family rejoices with Christ. By analogy, the table is where the banquet is enjoyed and it is not the food-preparation worktops that one finds in a kitchen.

¹⁵ Some commentators even argue that one of the needs of the Church is that this process should be put on a fully professional basis in the way it is in corporations that have to supply services over whole regions, see the approach of D.R. Hoge, The Future of Catholic Leadership: Responses to the Priest Shortage (Kansas City, MO, 1987), 86–107 where it is the option that is seen as least ‘problematic’ in that it does not require changes in Canon Law.

¹⁶ On this question of size of communities and its links to the number of priests, see O’Loughlin, T., ‘How many priests do we need?’ New Blackfriars 86 (2005) 642–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁷ See O’Loughlin, T., ‘Translating Panis in a Eucharistic Context: A Problem of Language and Theology,’ Worship 78 (2004) 226–35Google Scholar.

¹⁸ P. Turner, Let us pray, 127.

¹⁹ See Woolley, R.M., The Bread of the Eucharist (London 1913)Google Scholar, passim; and Erickson, J.H., ‘Leavened and Unleavened: Some Theological Implications of the Schism of 1054,’ St Vladimir's Theological Quarterly 14 (1970) 155–76Google Scholar.

²⁰ See O’Loughlin, T., ‘The Praxis and Explanations of Eucharistic Fraction in the Ninth Century: the Insular Evidence,’ Archiv für Liturgiewissenschaft 45 (2003) 1–20Google Scholar.

²¹ See Woolley, The Bread of the Eucharist, 1–22.

²² There is no other attestation of the practice of sharing a cup in either ancient Jewish or secular sources (see Meier, J.P., ‘The Eucharist at the Last Supper: Did it happen?’ Theology Digest 42(1995)335–51)Google Scholar. The recent work by McGowan, A.B. (Ascetic Eucharists: Food and Drink in Early Christian Ritual Meals, Oxford 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar which has shown that in many early communities, and continuing in places at least until the third century, water was used instead of wine in the Eucharistic cup; but while this has sparked several other studies (e.g. Daly-Denton, M., ‘Water in the Eucharistic Cup: A Feature of the Eucharist in Johannine Trajectories through Early Christianity,’ Irish Theological Quarterly 72(2007)356–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar), it is not pointed out that if both water or wine were being used, what was common was the fact that both were drunk from one cup.