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F e a t u r e A r t i c l e
Of Closed Communion and Japanese Restaurants
By Mark P. Shea
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This Rock
Volume 13, Number 9
 November 2002 
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A while back when the Atlanta Braves were playing the New York Yankees in the World Series, somebody asked some Native Americans what they thought of the Atlanta team's tomahawk symbol. I was amused that, with one exception, none of the Native Americans interviewed cared a whit about the symbol or felt it to be insulting, humiliating, et cetera.
The one exception was an "outraged" "social activist." You know the type: a professional grievance mongerer whose life and livelihood depend on surveying the landscape for affronts to Native Americans in order to get TV face time. The activist's outrage was purely professional and wildly out of touch with the people he claimed to speak for.
This strange disconnect between the activists and the people they supposedly care about springs to mind when I contemplate the Catholic Church in this country. One of the concerns among hand-wringing "progressives" is the psychological trauma inflicted on well-meaning non-Catholic visitors to Mass when they are informed that they cannot receive Communion.
So great is that trauma, we are told, that the Church simply must change its cruel and nonsensical rule of closed Communion and welcome all to the altar. Otherwise we risk alienating a throng of sensitive souls whose tender sensibilities cannot bear, even for a moment, the thought of such exclusion.
Now the curious thing is that the people who say these sorts of things are usually earnest acolytes of all that is politically correct and multicultural.
Walk into a Japanese restaurant with one of these folks and boorishly refuse to take your shoes off in deference to custom? You will be regarded as a mouth-breathing Neanderthal.
Attend a Jewish friend's bris for his son at the local Orthodox synagogue and complain that they didn't serve ham sandwiches to accommodate your goyim tastebuds? They will wince—rightly—at your loutishness.
Traipse into a silent auction and start barking out bids at the volume Ted Turner tells Polish jokes? They will, with complete justice, write you off as a self-centered loser with no capacity for dealing with social situations that do not orbit around your immense ego.
But walk into Mass as a guest and say, "Hey! How come I can't have some of those crackers and wine? Real Presence? What's that? The body and blood of Christ? I don't believe in fairy tales, but I resent being excluded, and I demand my rights!"? They will applaud you as a pioneer in Catholic theological reform.
Now, it may have occurred to you that not many visitors at Mass are really resisting such boorish impulses. It has occurred to me as well. I have a brother, mother, neighbors, and many friends who are not Catholic. When they join us for Mass, we remind them, "You can't, of course, receive Communion. However, you are welcome to come up and receive a blessing from the priest by just crossing your arms across your breast."
And they do. No muss, no fuss. They're happy to honor our customs, happy to show respect for our faith in whatever way seems best to us-just as I would be happy and not feel put upon to don a yarmulke should I pay a visit to my friend's synagogue.
I've never known or heard of a living soul, visiting the Church, who has been "hurt" by closed Communion. Typically, such visitors are, as I once was, strangers in a strange land-a little awed, a little curious, a little amazed, a little amused by the gestures, rituals, statues, candles, holy water, genuflections, litanies, candles, standing, kneeling, sitting, signs of the cross, sprinklings, anointings, readings, and assorted sensory experiences being flung at them in the liturgy.
It can be a little baffling, but who says that's bad? Any contact with the divine worth its salt ought to have something about it that is mysterious. A religious rite that is mundane as water or the multiplication table is going to be as satisfying to the human soul as reading the phone book. There should be, for the newcomer, the sense that we are, as Thomas Howard put it, in the precincts of a great mystery, that we are in terra incognita and not in command of the situation.
Along with that sensation comes a certain humility that is at the far end of the spectrum from humiliation: the humility that makes us take off our shoes in Japanese restaurants, or respect the customs in a foreign country, or refrain from writing in magic marker on the Great Pyramid. This same sensation bids us to honor the local custom of the sanctuary and to observe the proprieties-not because we know what's going on, but because we don't.
I have never known a soul, privy to this common courtesy rule of thumb, who has felt humiliated, excluded, diminished, or otherwise harmed by it. On the contrary, it is an enormously enriching approach to life, since it makes us alive to the mysteries, twists, and turns that both human custom and sacred revelation may spring on us.
Indeed, the only people I am aware of who fret about it are dissenting leftist Catholics, for whom no "problem" with the Church's teaching and practice is so trivial that they cannot find some way to take offense on behalf of the phantom legions of the wounded. (Dissenting rightist Catholics can also fixate on trivial things. But they usually claim these objects of fixation are an offense against TRVTH, not against the tender sensitivities of buttercup twirlers.)
It is the custom of leftist dissenters to talk about "nonsensical rules" without inquiring as to their sense. But when real visitors visit, they find the Church's "nonsensical" rules to make a great deal of sense. I never get a quarrel when I explain, "Please don't take Communion, since by that gesture we are proclaiming, 'I believe all that the Catholic Church teaches and proclaims is revealed by God,' and you don't want to do that unless you mean it and have been received into full communion by the Church." I get cheerful nods, interest, and a friendly desire to honor the sanctuary.
That's because visitors, unlike the activists and advocates in the Church who claim to speak for them, are reasonable people with real lives to live and baseball teams to root for.
Mark P. Shea is a popular writer and lecturer on the Catholic faith. His most recent book, Making Senses of Scripture, is available from Catholic Answers (1-800-291-8000). He writes from the Great Northwest.
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