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Social Significance of a Religious Rite

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Marie Delcourt
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Extract

The ceremony of gathering twelve-year old children together in each parish for the first sacrament of the Eucharist is not an old custom. The primitive Church took Christ's word literally: “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you.” (John, VI, 53), from which it was generally thought that children who died before having received communion were as damned as if they had not been baptised. The initiation of neophytes required successively both sacraments and confirmation. When the custom was established of baptising the new born (2nd and 3rd centuries) they received communion at the same time. As they were incapable of eating the host, the blood of Christ was conferred upon them in the guise of wine.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 9 , Issue 36 , December 1961 , pp. 76 - 86
Copyright
Copyright © 1961 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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References

1 Alfred Poncelet, Histoire de la Compagnie de Jésus dans les anciennes Pays-Bas, 1926, vol. II, p. 316; E. de Moreau, L'Eglise en Belgique des origines au début du XXe siècle, 1944, p. 185; Histoire de l'Eglise en Belgique, vol. V, 1952, p. 342.

2 In the region around Liège, faire ses pâques is used for communion, or for Easter communion. Traditionally, a first communicant is called a pâquet.

3 See note 2.

4 In 1728, at the catechumen refuge in Turin, Rousseau still saw a more or less converted Moor "baptised with great ceremony and dressed in white from head to foot" (Confessions, II).

5 Costly and uncomfortable regional costumes also date from this time. As far as I know, the appearance of these has never been psychologically explained.

6 See the lucid and courageous book by Gaucheron, L'Eglise de France et la communion des enfants, Paris, Ed. du Cerf, 1952.

7 Der Spiegel, May 3, 1961, p. 46.