Pentecost: Let them eat cake

 It is often said that Pentecost is the Church's birthday. Many times, birthday cake will be served at coffee hour on Pentecost Sunday. If you enjoy that yummy tradition, the following discussion from Crisis Magazine by Monsignor Richard Antall might leave a bad taste in your mouth.

The traditional view of the birth of the Church is found expressed in Mystici Corporis Christi, the encyclical of Pius XII issued on the feast of Saints Peter and Paul in 1943. Recalling the teaching of Pope Leo XIII, the encyclical says:

As We set out briefly to expound in what sense Christ founded His social Body, the following thought of Our predecessor of happy memory, Leo XIII, occurs to Us at once: “The Church which, already conceived, came forth from the side of the second Adam in His sleep on the Cross, first showed Herself before the eyes of men on the great day of Pentecost.”[23] For the Divine Redeemer began the building of the mystical temple of the Church when by His preaching He made known His Precepts; He completed it when he hung glorified on the Cross; and He manifested and proclaimed it when He sent the Holy Ghost as Paraclete in visible form on His disciples. (26)

According to Mystici Corporis Christi, Pentecost was then the great day when the Church “first showed Herself before the eyes of men.” That manifestation was not the birthday. The theologian Louis Bouyer said Pentecost marked the inauguration of the “missionary expansion” of the Church.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, gave a conference at the Pastoral Congress of the Diocese of Aversa, Italy, on September 15, 2001. His topic was the ecclesiology of the Second Vatican Council. In that conference, he talked about when the Church was “founded.”

I will attempt to answer this question with a brief mention of some fundamental points. The first point is that Jesus’ Last Supper could be defined as the event that founded the Church. Jesus gave His followers this Liturgy of Death and Resurrection and at the same time He gave them the Feast of Life. In the Last Supper, He repeats the covenant of Sinai—or rather what at Sinai was a simple sign or prototype—that becomes now a complete reality: the communion in blood and life between God and man. Clearly the Last Supper anticipates the Cross and Resurrection and presupposes them, otherwise it would be an empty gesture. This is why the Fathers of the Church could use a beautiful image and say that the Church was born from the pierced side of the Lord, from which flowed blood and water. When I state that the Last Supper is the beginning of the Church, I am actually saying the same thing, from another point of view.”

In 1921, the Protestant theologian Ferdinand Kattenbusch tried to show that Jesus’ words of institution at the Last Supper constituted the act of founding the Church. With these words, he argued, Jesus gave His disciples something new that bound them together and made them into a community. Kattenbusch was right: with the Eucharist, the Church herself was established. Through Christ’s body, the Church became one, she became herself, and at the same time, through His death, she was opened up to the breadth of the world and its history.” (Jesus of Nazareth, Part Two)

I say, "Let them eat cake. I'll have the body and blood."