Catholics and Protestants see the Eucharist and the Bible differently

Gavin Ashenden• February 25, 2025

Last week an academic in America arranged for Bishop Robert Barron and myself to go on a blind date for coffee.

We were both told I think that we would enjoy each other’s company. I was delighted to meet him. Some 1.6 million followers on social media is a very impressive achievement and I greatly enjoyed discussing among other things how he had done it.

His organisation Word on Fire is an astonishing achievement. Confronting the Protestant myth that Catholics don’t read their Bibles, the organisation has achieved extraordinary things. And there is no doubt whatsoever that renewal of faith is closely linked to a willingness to read the text of the Bible.

As it happened, immediately after our coffee, the bishop was due to launch a new Word on Fire a conference in London at the Excel Centre.

The programme was impressive. Fr Matthew Jarvis has just written a moving and powerful appreciation in the Herald of the event, which was named Evangelisation and Culture Conference: The Bible.

As Fr Jarvis documented, this event followed a 2023 Wonder conference, where Bishop Barron invited people to participate more deeply in the experience of “Biblical renewal”. He described and enthused how the Bible is “a book of patterns by which we see the world”. Seeing biblically will ground a spiritual renewal.

Brenden Thompson, the director of Word on Fire UK and organiser of the conference, has also brought together non-Catholic contributors to make up an ecumenical panel on the grounds that “communion is intrinsic to mission”.

This proved to be something of a double-edged strategy. On the one hand Fr Jarvis and many others appreciated it greatly. On the other hand, it did not come price-free.

The problem is that evangelism and the ecumenism are nonetheless two separate areas of complexity and expertise. And they don’t automatically complement one another. Unwittingly, the conference demonstrated that the relationship between them was more complex that might at first be thought.

Fr Jarvis pointed us to some of the problems that were exposed, wondering “whether, despite convergences, a fundamental difference still exists between Catholic and Protestant use of the Bible”.

“Whereas Protestants typically read the Scriptures in order to find out what to believe, Catholics (according to Newman and his Anglican teachers) take the Faith as a given, of which they find the ‘proof’, or test, in the Scriptures,” he noted.

This opposing way of understanding not only biblical authority but also by implication the authority of the Church causes mutually opposed mind-sets that are not easy to overcome either at the most popular level or at the most professionally theologically informed,.

The place the Bible plays in faith is in fact seriously contested. Your average lay Protestant is always very irritated when they are told that the Catholic Church gave them the Bible.

They find it very hard to believe or accept, having seldom heard of the Council of Carthage and the formation of the New Testament, that the canon came via a council of the Church, and do everything they can to refute it. But since many, if not most, of them suffer from a form of historical Alzheimer’s that starts with the end of the Acts of the Apostles and is restored only in 1519, their understanding of how the Bible got to them is often very patchy.

One of the wonderful achievement  of Word on Fire lies in the production of copies of the  Bible that are physically and aesthetically beautiful , but they have also managed to add aspects of Catholic learning, commentary and beauty, making  them both informative as well as lovely. But no one has yet found any publishing mechanism to solve the difference in the way that a Protestant reads the Bible and arrives at conclusions that are diametrically opposed to the Catholic faith.

The problem is despite the aspiration of doing together, whatever we don’t have to do apart, the radical differences of understanding what makes up the Mass, or want to find in the Church, or even how we read the Bible, showed the difference between us was almost greater than what unites us.

On paper, the idea of having the Anglican biblical scholar NT Wright might look very attractive. But I was reminded of a remark made by a university Chaplain preparing for an ecumenical pilgrimage to Taize. The idea of ecumenical communities and conversations is often that people discover that they like and loved one another, and discover that they have a great deal in common But there’s always a danger of putting them in close proximity they discover the reasons to instinctively dislike and mistrust each other and how they are implacably opposed to each other’s views.

The conversation between NT Wright and Bishop Barron over the differences in understanding the Mass, and the barrier of inter-communion, exposed the terrible gap of mis or non-understanding.

Things became awkward when NT Wright made his business to explain how the teaching of the Catholic Church was badly mistaken over the Mass, and urged for an easy an inclusive inter-communion.

He chafed at the restrictions Rome had placed on Anglicans having access to Catholic sacraments.

Extrapolating from the first principle that St Paul was constantly writing about unity as his major preoccupation, he suggested that Ss Peter and Paul’s meeting in Antioch comprised essentially of the question, “What is there to stop us sitting down and eating with these people?”

His exegesis was that this ought to provide both the determining question and subsequent answer to the impasse of Eucharistic misunderstanding.

NT Wright went on to gently but firmly chide the Catholic Church for its mistake in treating the sharing of Holy Communion at Mass as if it constituted the goal of unity.

Instead he firmly believed it ought to be as the means of approaching it. If Catholics would only welcome Protestants to Mass, Church unity was much more likely to be achieved as a result.

But all of this was on the basis that for a Protestant, communion is essentially a meal of fellowship. It sees the common meal in Acts as the essential model and provides a functional meaning that is really all about eating together. The Protestant position is that the Catholic Church is terrible mistaken in its understanding that Jesus himself is offered as a sacrifice in the Mass and that the elements are miraculously changed.

Bishop Barron leaped to the rescue, trying to avoid the head on collision over the sacraments that NT Wright was inviting the conference to engage in. He rather skilfully reminded the audience that the late medieval period was a time of hyper-nominalism, and that perhaps tensions at the Reformation were unnecessarily exacerbated by the imbalances this brought,

Is communion intrinsic to mission? It may be that fraternal enthusiasm in evangelistic fervour is not quite enough to solve some of the inextricably ecumenical conflicts that have deep roots not only in the different ways of reading the Bibles but also in philosophies of mind and culture that don’t easily resolve themselves.

Mission and ecumenism are problematically and inextricably linked as the chicken and the egg. We know they go together, but it’s not obvious which one comes first.

(Photo by HENDRIK SCHMIDT/DPA/AFP via Getty Images)