Holy Communion
It’s a funny and perhaps unexpected thing (because one might think there would be only a few) that each of you receives Communion at Mass in a way that is uniquely your own. You might think you all fall neatly into a few categories (ie. palm under palm, on the tongue, kneeling etc.) but you’ve got your own way of receiving Our Lord. If Pope Benedict, when asked how many ways there are to God, responded, “as many ways as there are people,” we can say the same thing about how many ways there are to receive Communion at Mass.
Pope Benedict, however, wasn’t just being cute. He was teaching a truth about the way God relates to us. God comes to us through our circumstances, through our individual story. And Pope Benedict was decidedly “Augustinian” in this outlook, not unlike our new Holy Father, Pope Leo XIV.
Saint Augustine understood that God prefers the few in order to save the many. He saw this as God’s method, His way of communicating His life to us. As we said in Mass last week, it is the same way a mother loves her child. She says, “You are my favorite. I prefer you.” And that same mother could say the same to all of her children. In Saint Augustine’s view, this is how people come to know the love of God. We come to know it, he would say, when we come to see that we are favored by God.
You can see why Saint Augustine would view everything through this lens. Those of you who’ve read his autobiography, the Confessions of Saint Augustine, know that he saw how gratuitously the grace of his conversion came to him. He understood that he did nothing to earn the new life that was given to him in his 30’s, nor anything to deserve the life given to him when God formed him in his mother’s womb.
An “Augustinian” pope, therefore, like Pope Leo XIV, is likely to see everything through this lens as well - that God communicates His life to us by preferring us, favoring us, and causing our personal conversion, in order to draw others into our communion. After all, isn’t this the method we see Christ employing in the Scriptures. Who are the disciples, for example, but those who were preferred by Him. And who are the Apostles, chosen from among those disciples, but those men to whom Christ said clearly, “It was not you who chose Me, but I who chose you.” This is God’s method. He prefers the few for the sake of the many.
You can hear this in Christ’s words at the Last Supper. “This is my blood, which will be poured for you (the few) and for many.” But first, for you. Right there in the Scriptures we see that Christ speaks to us with language that is Eucharistic and priestly, “priestly” here understood as Christ’s choosing men to lift from the dunghill to seat with the princes of His people (ie. Psalm 113). He did this with the Apostles. He certainly did this with Saint Paul! He did this with Saint Augustine. And He just did this last week with Rob Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV.
Whether a spiritual “Augustinian” like Pope Benedict, and or a spiritual and formal Augustinian, like Pope Leo, both men see the human person as called to communion through their individual experiences of life. This is different than individualism, which would have us forget about the communion part. But it’s also distinct from the socialism that would have us forget about the individual part. You see how Christianity is the only way to hold the two in their right relationship: God comes to the individual through his or her circumstances in order to draw that person into communion with Him and with the Church. After all, what is the Church but a communion of people who say to one another, “Isn’t it wonderful to be favored by Him!”
Pope Leo XIII, from whom our present Holy Father took his name, was the pope during the advent of the Industrial Revolution, which threatened to reduce the human person to an object to be manipulated. But he bravely upheld the dignity of the worker in those cold winds of industry (particularly child labor) by teaching the truth that the individual experience of the human person also reveals something about the nature of our common humanity, namely, that God has made us for Himself, and “our hearts are restless until they rest in [Him].”
That last line was, of course, a quote from Saint Augustine. He was teaching - and I suppose our new Pope Leo will be teaching this as well - that God comes to us through our “I” in order to bring us into His “we.” No wonder then, when Christ taught us to pray He said, “Say, Our Father.” You see that? “When you pray, say our.” This is the tension we live in. And this is what’s at stake in our modern times, even more now with the advent of Artificial Intelligence. The way of Christ is neither individualism nor socialism. It is Christianity: God comes to the world through an individual, Jesus of Nazareth, on whom His favor rests, who then brings you and me into that favor, as He did Saint Augustine, that in Him our hearts, too, might find rest. And so there truly are as many ways as there are people to receive this gift of Holy Communion. +