The Anthropology of St John Paul II and Authentic Communal Participation in the Sacrament of Penance

Introduction

In recent years a not insignificant number of liturgical theologians have questioned the Magisterium’s suppression of communal absolution. In support of their argument they cite the Second Vatican Council’s statement that the communal celebration of the liturgy is to be preferred to a celebration that is individual and quasi-private.¹

This paper will discuss the origins of the recovery of the communal celebration of the liturgy in the writings of the Liturgical Movement. In the second part it will address the revision of the Rite of Penance and the subsequent application of the recovery of the communal nature of the liturgy to the question of general absolution. In particular, this section will consider whether the Council actually advocates an antithetical relationship between the individual and communal participation in the liturgy. Finally, it will propose the filial-nuptial anthropology of St. John Paul II as a hermeneutical lens to transcend the apparent dualism in certain post-conciliar theories of liturgical participation.

I. The Liturgical Movement and the Communal Nature of Worship

From the beginning of the twentieth century and leading up to the period of the Second Vatican Council, efforts were made to recover an understanding of the communal nature of the liturgy. Such efforts were driven by a concern that individualism had begun to impact upon Catholic worship.² The notion of the communal, or corporate, nature of worship rested upon two interrelated theological principles.

In the first place stood the corporate nature of the Church from which flows her communal worship. Lambert Beauduin (1873–1960), one of the pioneers of the Liturgical Movement, wrote in 1914: “The Christian does not walk alone on the path of his pilgrimage… [By definition] the Catholic is…a member of a visible organism.”³ In his highly influential Spirit of the Liturgy, Romano Guardini (1885–1968) stated just a few years later:

The liturgy is not celebrated by the individual, but by the body of the faithful… The entity which performs the liturgical actions is not merely the sum total of all individual Catholics. It does consist of all these united in one body, but only in so far as this unity is of itself something… And that something is the Church.⁴

Thus the corporate-liturgical actions of the Church originate in the being of the Church and further act as a sacramentalization of this being.

The second principle from which the Liturgical Movement drew its understanding of the communal nature of worship is the Christo-Pneumatological foundations of the liturgy. The corporate nature of the Church finds its origin in a prior in-corporation in Christ through the grace of the Holy Spirit. For the Liturgical Movement the image of the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ becomes central to their efforts to recover the notion. As the Mystical Body, united to her Head, the Church is drawn into the worship of the Son in the communion of the Holy Spirit. The liturgy becomes the action of the totus Christus, Christ the Head together with the members of his Body, who share in the Son’s filiation through the gift of divine adoption. Guardini expressed it thus:

The faithful are actively united by a vital and fundamental principle common to them all. That principle is Christ Himself; His life is ours; we are incorporated in Him; we are His Body… Every individual Catholic is a cell of this living organism or a member of this Body.⁵

However, it is important to note that for the Liturgical Movement, as members of this Body the individual Christian does not become lost in the corporate we.⁶

A third essential point for the Liturgical Movement is the caveat that, when speaking of the Church as a community, this must not be misunderstood as a reduction of the Church to a localised congregation. The community assembled to do the work of the liturgy is never merely the visible community assembled here and now. The local community represents...