Ronald Knox and the Eucharist

Readers of Mr Evelyn Waugh's Life of Ronald Knox will not be surprised to notice that the largest single section of this book is devoted to the Eucharist. This is not due merely to the accident that from 1926 he was asked every year to preach at Maiden Lane on the feast of Corpus Christi: rather he agreed to the repeated request because, for him, the Eucharist was the central, inexhaustible and unifying mystery of his priestly life. It will be recalled that as an Anglican the Eucharist was the inspiration of his ministry; and that only when he began to be tormented with doubts about the validity of his priesthood did he take the first painful step in the direction of Rome. "I never celebrate", he wrote at this time, "without wondering whether anything's happening"; and again, "I have to set my teeth to consecrate, and make my thanksgiving after communion or confession with a mental reservation." The Catholic priesthood gave him the assurance that he was indeed offering the sacrifice of the New Testament; and the Mass became not merely the central act of his own life, but the unifying mystery of the people of God. It is striking how the social aspect of the Eucharist, a theme seldom developed by modern writers, recurs in many of these sermons, and each time in a different context. The same food, handed round like the bread in the miracle of the barley loaves, draws each man to his neighbour, and make each feel his human interdependence. Here, and in innumerable places, Mgr Knox calls attention to precisely those things that Catholics forget, insisting always that the Eucharist is instituted as much for a social as for an individual purpose. If others receive Holy Communion at the same time as we do, it is not to save the priest trouble: it is a sacramental assertion of the bond of fellowship that unites the faithful to Christ, and through him to one another.

The habit of thought on the Eucharist makes Mgr Knox quick to notice all the hints of the mysterious union of Christians in the Gospel narratives and parables. The wedding feast of Cana, for instance, has its lesson of union for the communicant as much as the feeding of the five thousand, and both, moreover, illustrate the need of our co-operation with God's grace. In both miracles our Lord leaves something to be done to the human assistants. "Give them to eat", he orders them n the one case; "Fill the water pots", on the other occasion, Mgr Knox concludes, "he does ask for co-operation; he does invite us to correspond by our own devotion with the grace we receive.

In this group of sermons there are many examples of the manner in which meditation on the Eucharist directed his reflections on certain theological or spiritual problems which are commonly considered in isolation from it. A striking example is the passage in the sermon entitle Prope est Verbum. Here Mgr Knox faces the problem that intermittently teases the Christian mind - how God can care individually for the souls he has made, for the thousands of our fellow human beings whom we see passing in crowds downs the streets to their daily work with "faces hardened by money-getting, faces impudent with the affectation of vice, faces vacant with frivolity, faces lined with despair". It seems impossible that each of these faces can represent a human being for whom God cares as he cared for Zaccheus or Mary Magdalen. But it is the mystery of the Eucharist that allays the scruple, for the universality of its application makes it possible for us to imagine the universality of the divine love.

With much profit to himself the reader of these sermons can study the central place occupied by the Eucharist in Mgr Knox's spiritual life. The subject and its implications in our daily work is so well developed that the central portion of the books forms a most valuable and modern treatise on the Blessed Sacrament.

From the Introduction to the Pastoral Sermons of Ronald A. Knox edited by Fr. Philip Caraman.

NB In the final paragraph Fr. Caraman refers to sermons previously published in a separate work entitled The Window in the Wall and Other Sermons on the Eucharist.