CHILDREN AND LITURGY - #4

There is a lot of exchange and swapping of ideas about baptism, confirmation, and communion going on among liturgical scholars in the Roman Catholic, Episcopal/Anglican,Lutheran, Methodist, and Presbyterian Churches. Pastoral agents and ministers of religious education also contribute to the conversation because they prepare adults and children for the water bath, the sealing in the Spirit, and the welcoming table of the Lord.

Theological literature and pastoral discussion poses this question. When should the Churches give communion to children?

We Roman Catholics are familiar with the following answer. The church should offer the bread and the cup to children when two criteria are met. First, children receive at the age of reason when they can understand. Second, children receive after they have received ample religious education about the Eucharist. They know what the Eucharist is all about when they come to the table.

This thinking is based on two assumptions. First, we assume that children, once baptized, are regularly brought to the liturgy by their parents. In this way, first communion is not their only or last communion.

Second, we assume that human beings only profit from an action when they fully understand what they are doing and when they personally choose to perform the action.

Some scholars, pastors, and religious educators in the Christian churches are considering another answer. It goes like this.

When children are baptized, they put on Christ. Baptism ritually spells out the reality that God invites and calls children into the household of the church. When God chooses and graces children in the baptismal bath, they become members of the church. They become part of the ecclesial body of Christ. It is right and fitting that parents bring them regularly to the Sunday assembly. From their earliest days children have a place at the Lord's table.

Furthermore, children have a right to Christian nurture and the Church has a responsibility to feed them spiritually. Just as families give their infants nourishing food and drink, so too the Church should feed them with the bread of life and nourish them with the cup of salvation.

This idea has a simple consequence. All the baptized have a right to communion. This right is not based on rationality, cognition, education, or knowledge.It is baptismal right. Infants live and thrive when they receive nourishing food and drink.

Then as children start to learn and understand, they are taught the meaning of communion, table fellowship, and the Eucharist. Children's experience at Sunday liturgy becomes the basis for recognition. Children bring a ritual appreciation to their religious education and instruction. Formation and information are partners because children, from infancy onward, are cherished communicants in the Sunday assembly.

Roman Catholic thinking and polity is rooted in the first answer above. So, you may ask, why do I alert you to the second line of thinking? The answer is simple. First, I want to dissuade the line of thinking that denies children their rightful and regular place at the liturgy or that cordons them off into segregated space. Second, I want to encourage thinking that fosters mutuality, hospitality, and partnership among infants and parents, children and adults, young and old. Like the morning sun, the hopes of young and old rise together.