On the Right

A few years after Vatican II had released its furies, and nuns were flocking to beauty salons and priests to the matrimonial side of the altar, I spoke with Bishop Fulton Sheen, the learned and eloquent Christian who for a while during the Fifties all but made theology a prime-time favorite (the Fulton Sheen hour competed against Milton Berle, who, suffering from diminished ratings, complained that his own scriptwriters weren’t the equal of Sheen’s— “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John”). I asked Bishop Sheen (on Firing Line) what offense was left, for Catholics, that merited instant excommunication. He snapped back: “Desecration of the Blessed Sacrament.” He had trouble thinking of a second offense that would earn so heavy a penalty.

The word “desecration” was actually used by one of the dissenters in the Supreme Court’s flag decision. It was Justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote that if the ideas of liberty and equality are “worth fighting for . . . it cannot be true that the flag that uniquely symbolizes their power is not itself worthy of protection from unnecessary desecration.” One doesn’t quite know what the word “unnecessary” is doing in that sentence, which opens up interesting philosophical questions, namely: Is it possible to desecrate that which you do not believe to be sacred? When the Stars and Stripes were shot down in the War of 1812, the British were engaged in an act of war, not in an act of desecration. Catholics believe that the Blessed Sacrament isn’t a wafer, symbolizing God. They believe that it is God Himself. Is a non-believer engaged in desecration if he mutilates the Blessed Sacrament? Protestants tend to believe that the wafer has been merely “consubstantiated” into Godness, and communicants understand themselves to be partaking of a symbolic, not an actual, feast.

About the Author

William F. Buckley Jr.

William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review magazine in 1955.

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A few years after Vatican II had released its furies, and nuns were flocking to beauty salons and priests to the matrimonial side of the altar, I spoke with Bishop Fulton Sheen, the learned and eloquent Christian who for a while during the Fifties all but made theology a prime-time favorite (the Fulton Sheen hour competed against Milton Berle, who, suffering from diminished ratings, complained that his own scriptwriters weren’t the equal of Sheen’s— “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John”). I asked Bishop Sheen (on Firing Line) what offense was left, for Catholics, that merited instant excommunication. He snapped back: “Desecration of the Blessed Sacrament.” He had trouble thinking of a second offense that would earn so heavy a penalty.

The word “desecration” was actually used by one of the dissenters in the Supreme Court’s flag decision. It was Justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote that if the ideas of liberty and equality are “worth fighting for . . . it cannot be true that the flag that uniquely symbolizes their power is not itself worthy of protection from unnecessary desecration.” One doesn’t quite know what the word “unnecessary” is doing in that sentence, which opens up interesting philosophical questions, namely: Is it possible to desecrate that which you do not believe to be sacred? When the Stars and Stripes were shot down in the War of 1812, the British were engaged in an act of war, not in an act of desecration. Catholics believe that the Blessed Sacrament isn’t a wafer, symbolizing God. They believe that it is God Himself. Is a non-believer engaged in desecration if he mutilates the Blessed Sacrament? Protestants tend to believe that the wafer has been merely “consubstantiated” into Godness, and communicants understand themselves to be partaking of a symbolic, not an actual, feast.