Opinion: The pope and Updike: Together again for the first time

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I was preparing to write about the pope’s un-excommunication of four traditionalist bishops -- including a Holocaust skeptic -- when I heard that John Updike had died. Immediately it occurred to me that there was a connection between the breakaway movement led by ‘rebel archbishop’ Marcel Lefebvre and ‘The Music School,’ one of my favorite Updike short stories. The Times’ Updike obit quoted this line from the last paragraph of that story: ‘The world is the host; it must be chewed.’ My first thought was of the story’s first paragrph, which introduces the metaphor of the Communion wafer.

The narrator writes: ‘Last night I heard a young priest tell of a change in the Church’s attutude toward the Eucharistic wafer. For generations nuns and priests but especially (the young man said) nuns, have taught Catholic children that the wafer must be held in the mouth and allowed to melt; that to touch it with the teeth would be (and this was never doctrine, but merely a nuance of instruction) in some manner blasphemous. Now, amid the flowering of fresh and bold ideas with which the Church, like a tundra thawing, responded to that unexpected sun the late Pope John, there has sprung up the thought that Christ did not say Take and melt this in your mouth but Take and eat. The word is eat, and to dissolve the world is to dilute the transubstantiated metaphor of physical nourishment. This demiquaver of theology crystallizes with a beautiful simplicity in the material world; the bakeries supplying the Mass have been instructed to unlearn the science of a dough translucent to the tongue and to prepare a thicker, tougher wafer -- a host, in fact, so substantial it must be chewed to be swallowed.’

Updike, an astute amateur theologian, knew whereof he spoke. I remember a nun who told us that some irreverent child had once chewed the host, only to find his mouth filled with (real, not sacramental) blood.

It’s a literal article of faith among the Lefebvrists that the post-Vatican II Church had demystified Catholicism, including the traditional view of the Eucharist as a sacrifice in which the consecrated bread offered to God is no ordinary bread -- and shouldn’t taste like it. In pre-Vatican II theology, the climax of the Mass wasn’t, as in Protestantism, the Communion (i.e., the eating) but the transformation of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. The culinary change Updike described probably would be anathema to Archbishop Lefebvre -- as may be to Pope Benedict and the ‘rad trads’ (radical traditionalists) who admire him for rehabilitating the Latin Mass.

There always has been a poignance about the schism of the ‘rebel archbishop’ and his followers. These were old-school Catholics nursed on the doctrine of papal supremacy who came to the traumatic conclusion that the pope was wrong. That the current pope is reaching out to them is something for liberal Catholics to chew on -- and they won’t like the taste.