Ex opere operato

For three decades, the center of my encounter with the Eucharist has been a Latin doctrine that I learned about not in school or at church but on assignment -- while reporting and writing a piece of long-form journalism.    

In the years after college (I graduated from Fordham in 1987) I began contributing pieces to Commonweal, and I wound up writing a long, agitated essay on young Catholics and "our" efforts to fit ourselves into a church defined by the collective memory of American Catholics whose religious lives had been shaped by a before-and-after experience of Vatican II.

Andrew Sullivan read the piece and wrote to me via Commonweal.  He had just been named the editor of The New Republic.  He was a young Catholic himself, and his pieces on Catholicism for the magazine set a matchless standard for reporting, analysis, and personal reflection.  He invited me to write about Catholicism for TNR.   The first assignment to write about Black Catholics: an approaching schism involving a breakaway church in Philadelphia -- the Imani Temple African-American Catholic Congregation -- had caught his eye.

I plunged in.  I didn't know much about the subject: I had grown up with suburban Catholicism and then Jesuit-campus Catholicism, and on Sundays I now parish-hopped among the churches of Manhattan.  But I was well positioned.   I had relatives in Philadelphia.  I lived just uptown from Columbia University, and there were several Catholic churches in Harlem, nearby: St. Joseph of the Holy Family, on 125th Street, St. Charles Borromeo on West 141st, and Resurrection on West 151st, whose pastors -- Black men -- became sources and figures in the article. 

 

I plunged in.  I didn't know much about the subject: I had grown up with suburban Catholicism and then Jesuit-campus Catholicism, and on Sundays I now parish-hopped among the churches of Manhattan.  

 

Through my work for Lingua Franca, the journal of academe, I knew that one good way to start reporting a story was by calling college professors -- experts who were seldom asked to explain their expertise to the outside world.   I spoke with Br. Cyprian Davis, a Benedictine historian at St. Meinrad's Archabbey in Indiana, who explained Black Catholics' ability to perdure in spite of racist structures by saying, simply, "Catholic people take time."   And I spoke with Albert Raboteau, an historian at Princeton, whose book Slave Religion: The "Invisible" Institution in the Antebellum South was a standard work.

It was from Prof. Raboteau, I think, that I learned about ex opere operato (“by the work worked”)– and about how this doctrine involving the Eucharist had become central and sustaining to Black Catholics over the centuries.

Ex opere operato, he explained, maintains that a sacrament is efficacious without regard to the moral disposition -- the virtue, or lack of virtue -- of the minister who is performing it. For Black Catholics, this doctrine at once distinguished Roman Catholicism from many forms of Protestant Christianity and enabled them to worship and belong in good conscience despite the racist structures of the Church.

These two themes emerged again in interviews with Br. Davis; Msgr. Wallace Harris, pastor of St. Charles Borromeo; and Rev. Lawrence Lucas, pastor of Resurrection (and author of Black Priest, White Church).

Ex opere operato, they told me, put the sacraments outside the structures of church and society.  Whereas Protestant churches often identified the charism of the church with a particular evangelist or preacher or with the believing community gathered together for worship, Roman Catholicism's sacramental system made the sacraments independent of any one cleric, and also independent of his character.  If the priest had been ordained via apostolic succession, when he administered the sacraments they were efficacious, full stop.  

In a similar way, ex opere operato, and the sacramental system surrounding it, served to offset the racism and bigotry of everyday Catholic life.   Many Catholic churches were segregated -- and not just in the South -- with Blacks forced to sit in the back or in the balcony or encouraged to worship at a Mass focused on Black Catholics.   And many white clerics treated Blacks as second-class citizens in their religious lives as in their everyday lives.  Ex opere operato meant that, all those things notwithstanding, when Black Catholics took the Eucharist they knew they were Catholics equal in the eyes of God, receiving the Real Presence of Christ -- an encounter that racism could not fully diminish.    

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Ex opere operato meant that, all those things notwithstanding, when Black Catholics took the Eucharist they knew they were Catholics equal in the eyes of God, receiving the Real Presence of Christ -- an encounter that racism could not fully diminish.

 

For me, those were striking insights into the history and experience of Black Catholics, which I was beginning to know better. And the interviews were as direct an encounter I'd had with eucharistic theology -- tutorials after the fact. They were an initiation into the mystery of the sacraments, which had been obscured by the personable, communal approach to liturgy taken in the parishes where I'd grown up, led by decent-seeming pastors who knew the members of our family by name.   

Here instead was a sense of God acting in the sacraments -- breaking through from outside or beyond history and making himself present in a world whose ways and means, though not insignificant, were of a different order than those of divinity.  Here was the Eucharist as an encounter with the supernatural.  

That sense of the Eucharist, renewed week after week over several decades, became a crucial aspect of my experience of Mass.  And it has figured into my apprehension of several phases of the Church's public dealings with the clerical sexual abuse. The reports that many hundreds of Catholic clerics had violated young people sexually came as a direct challenge to the conventional understanding of the priest as a figure whose authority is related to his virtue.  And examples of the sacraments administered by priests of dubious character were near at hand. The priest who witnessed the sacrament of marriage that joined my wife and myself was later accused of possessing child pornography, and wound up living at a halfway house for accused priests in the Bronx -- where I interviewed him one day -- before leaving the priesthood. Living in the same house, I found, was Msgr. Harris, who had been credibly accused of sexual abuse by three men who were high-school students of his at Cathedral Prep.  During the years when those two men were ordained priests of the Archdiocese of New York, Theodore McCarrick was a priest and then an auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese -- and was, credible accusers say, abusing boys and young men. (McCarrick has denied the allegations.) As auxiliary, McCarrick likely officiated at priestly ordinations.     

The logic of the sacramental system depends on the apostolic succession of the bishops.   So the wrong and in many instances criminal covering-up of priestly sexual abuse by bishops in recent decades were themselves a grave challenge to ex opere operato: after all, both the acts of abuse and the covering-up of them were justified by the same way of thinking that  informs ex opere operato -- a way of thinking that distinguishes a cleric's sacramental powers (and thus the bishops' need to protect the cleric) from his morality and conduct, or misconduct.    

Like so many American Catholics scarred by clerical sexual abuse, I take the sacraments less ardently than I used to, and for sound reasons.  And yet when I receive the Eucharist is it with ex opere operato in mind -- and the sacramental life of the Black Catholics whose past confidence in the doctrine is a basis for my confidence in it in the present.