Date of Award
4-2020
Document Type
Thesis
Publisher
Santa Clara : Santa Clara University, 2020.
Degree Name
Licentiate in Sacred Theology (STL)
Director
Paul Janowiak, S.J.
Abstract
This thesis addresses the divide that is ever-present in the modern Catholic Church, and the distance between so-called ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’ Catholics, who, with increasing regularity, prefer not to worship together, rather retreating to their own partisan camps. In this thesis, questions about personal and ecclesial identity are raised and the “foundational theology of sacramentality” of the renowned twentieth-century theologian Louis-Marie Chauvet is brought into dialogue with the present situation. Chauvet’s fundamental understanding of the sacraments as something we do as corporeal individuals gathered as the corporate Body of Christ (and not simply as some ‘things’ we get) has great implications for inculcating and instituting a common identity among the worshipping community, an identity that can be forged through the development of a common ‘language,’ which can take on many corporeal forms.
This thesis picks up Chauvet’s line of thought and suggests that liturgical memory - anamnesis - is itself a corporeal language that can be spoken by the gathered assembly, thus working to build up a common identity. A further argument is made that the way in which the Body of Christ learns to speak this language, together, can best be seen in the celebration of the Easter Vigil of the Roman Rite - the liturgy par excellence - where Head and Members gather to ‘hold’ memory, ‘share’ memory, and ‘future’ their memories.
Recommended Citation
Maczkiewicz, Keith A., "Remembering Who We Are: Liturgical Memory in the Symbolic Language of Louis-Marie Chauvet to Combat the Bifurcation of the Body of Christ" (2020). Jesuit School of Theology Dissertations. 56.
https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/jst_dissertations/56