A Pauline hermeneutic of eucharistic unworthiness in 1 Corinthians 11:27 and its pastoral significance to remarried divorced Catholics

Abstract

Church teaching has often invoked 1 Corinthians 11:27 to justify the barring of dissidents from the sacrament of the Eucharist on the grounds of unworthiness. It has been particularly invoked to bar those in a state of sin without prior penance and those in a state of manifest grave sin with obstinacy. Both solutions emphasise the personal internal problems of the individual’s conscience rather than the social dimension of communion – a reality inconceivable to Pauline theology. Both solutions can only be justified if personal sin ostracises the individual from the Church since ‘being Church/ecclesial communion’ is a prerequisite to Eucharistic communion. Sadly, Church history has often prioritised Eucharistic communion over ecclesial communion, and, at times, alienated it completely from it. The Eucharist is to be understood in terms of ecclesial communion and not in terms of the nature of the Eucharist as such. Thus, the admission to the sacrament is a question of ecclesiology not Eucharistic theology. Pope Francis (without denying the stance of his predecessors) retrieves this social dimension of the text (Amoris Laetitia, n. 185-186). Through an in-depth exegesis of 1 Corinthians from the point-of-view of Scripture and Tradition, the study aims to address the issues raised by the biblical passage and to provide a pastoral contribution to the discussion regarding the divorced and remarried.