ASK FATHER: “While I don’t like seeing female Eucharistic ministers, from a spiritual perspective how can it be worse than lay men?”

WRONG!

From a reader…

QUAERITUR:

I understand that before Vatican 2, only the priests distributed Holy Communion.  There are conservative people who think that it is fine for lay men to be Eucharistic ministers if need be, but not women. While I don’t like seeing female Eucharistic ministers, from a spiritual perspective how can it be worse than lay men. They both are not priests, and it is the priests job. Would love to hear your opinion.

Your instinct is substantially correct. From the standpoint of the present law of the Church, if a lay person is legitimately deputed as an Extraordinary Minister of Holy Communion (EMHC – they are not Eucharistic Ministers!), there is for the Novus Ordo no juridical reason according to which a woman distributing Communion is intrinsically worse than a man doing so. Canon 910 §2 simply speaks of an acolyte or “another member of the Christian faithful.”

There is, however, an historical reason why some traditional Catholics perceive a difference. Service in the sanctuary, especially the ministry of acolyte, developed within the male clerical cursus and had a close relationship to preparation for Holy Orders. That explains the traditional preference for males in roles closely associated with the altar. In the traditional Roman liturgical discipline, neither male nor female laypeople functioned as routine distributors of Holy Communion. Introducing lay EMHCs, male or female, into the 1962 Rite is contrary to its liturgical discipline and ethos.

As far as a theological reason is concerned, a lay man and a lay woman are equally incapable of acting as Ordinary Ministers of Holy Communion. That office belongs properly to the ordained. Nevertheless, a lay man, as a male, possesses a closer symbolic congruity with the sacred ministry because the ministerial priesthood is reserved by divine constitution to men only. Hence, the objection to a female extraordinary minister is not that she is less holy, worthy, or capable of reverence. It concerns the sacramental symbolism of the sanctuary. The priest acts in persona Christi capitis, and the traditional arrangement of ministers around the altar reflects and extends that masculine sacramental sign. A male lay minister, though not ordained, preserves that sign more closely.  A female minister introduces a sign that cannot bear the same relation to the ordained priesthood.  Let’s leave aside what certain Jesuits introduce.

Signs are important.  Once we start chipping away as the signs, we erode our identity.   You can see what has been done to the very concept of a sanctuary in a church, for example, through the iconoclastic (i.e., identity) war carried on by bishop and priest fanatics against Communion rails and their unblinking mania for filling what once was a sanctuary with women and girls.   These are ultimately aimed at our Catholic identity.

Therefore, any lay person is a departure from the ideal, a problem exacerbated when lay distribution is unnecessary (most of the time). But the use of a woman entails an additional rupture in the traditional symbolic relationship between altar service and the male priesthood.

As averted just above, a serious problem is the routine use of any lay Extraordinary Minister when there is no genuine necessity. Redemptionis Sacramentum states (cf 154, 157-158) that bishops, priests and deacons are the ordinary ministers of Holy Communion and that extraordinary ministers are to be used only when sacred ministers are lacking, impeded, or the number of communicants would otherwise prolong Mass excessively. A merely brief prolongation is explicitly insufficient.