Project Canterbury
Reservation in Elizabethan Days
by Walter Howard Frere, CR
(Truro Diocesan Gazette, April 1927)
IN view of the discussion that is going on everywhere with regard to the practice of reserving the Holy Sacrament for the Communion of the Sick, it may be well to recall an episode in the Reformation history which has hardly been recognized as fully as it deserves. It is well known that the First Prayer Book, of 1549, sanctioned a plan of reserving for the Communion of the Sick, on the day of any Celebration, so that the Sacrament should be taken more or less directly from the church to the sick person. This plan was not much liked by anybody. Nor was the alternative plan of celebrating in the sick man’s room. It seemed too little a provision to make for sickness in the opinion of those who had been accustomed to Reservation as previously used. To the opposite party the former plan seemed undesirable, not because it involved Reservation, but because even ministration to a sick person (apart from a Celebration) in his private house seemed like ‘Private Mass’; and the extreme Reformers very much more objected to a 'Private Mass' than they did to the primitive idea of reserving the Sacrament for the absent sick.
When the new Prayer Book of 1552 came in, the two methods prescribed in the previous Book underwent alteration. With regard to the Ministration of the Sacrament reserved from the service of the same day, there was a complete elimination of that method. With regard to the second method, that of celebrating in a sick man’s house, that also was modified in this respect. The priest was directed, by a new rubrick, not to 'celebrate' but to ‘minister’ the Holy Communion. The change of term is remarkable and evidently intentional. But it is difficult to know what the result of the rubrick of 1552 really was. It seems to have been designed to be ambiguous. Strictly speaking, the word did not mean 'celebrate'; but it was coming more and more in practice to be confused and made equivalent to 'celebrate'. Therefore, the word as it stood, in 1552, might be taken to mean either.
This part of the Prayer Book was unaltered in the Elizabethan Book of 1558, so far as the English form of it was concerned. In the Latin form of the Elizabethan Prayer Book recourse was had to the precedent of the book of 1549; and the rubricks therein, allowing an immediate administration of the Reserved Sacrament, are treated as if they were still in force. There is a good deal of other evidence that in theory, at least, in the early days of the Elizabethan period it was held lawful to administer the Reserved Sacrament according to the plan of 1549, that is to say, to take it immediately from a Celebration to a sick man. The Reformers did not attack this method. When Calvin was appealed to, his reply, in a famous letter, shows that he did not condemn the practice, while he laid down conditions by which he sought to regulate the carrying of the Sacrament and the administration of it.
So far as practice is concerned, no instance of such a Sick Communion can be cited. Communicants at any time were accustomed to receive so rarely, that there was no great demand for the viaticum. Besides, Celebrations were so rare, being sadly soon confined practically to three or four times in the year, that the method would have been of no particular value to the sick in any case. Their need was much more easily met, in such circumstances as these, by the alternative of celebrating in the sick room. From the middle of Elizabeth’s reign onward it is probably the fact that this was generally regarded as being the whole of what had been intended by the Prayer Book. The term ‘minister’ was taken as the equivalent of ‘celebrate’; and in practice the Sick Celebration was always held and was kept designedly, in any case when a sick man needed to communicate. But the other view went on as well, as one might suppose, considering the trouble that had been taken to keep that door open in 1558. For Parker, in revising the Reformatio Legum in 1561 had accepted the view, just as the Latin Prayer Book had accepted and disseminated it under learned and royal authority in 1560.
It is curious that Calvin’s letter of 1561 made something of a tradition also; for the restrictions that he suggested seem to have become part of the outlook of Anglicans; they reappear, in the first part of the seventeenth century, side by side with the view which still maintained the tradition that the restricted form of Reservation was available and lawful. This tradition also, is maintained in the famous Commentary of Bishop Sparrow, on the Prayer Book, called his Rationale, first published in 1655 or 1657. In this he treated the custom of communicating the sick from the Sacrament reserved from the morning as still being authorized.
Then at the revision of 1661 the chance came; the word 'celebrate' was restored and submitted for the word 'minister'. The ambiguity which had probably been designedly introduced in 1552 was now designedly taken out, so far as that part of the rubrick was concerned.
There is a real significance in this piece of history, and it is a significance that is worth recalling. The Reformers evidently did not object to Reservation in itself; that the Sacrament should be reserved and administered to the sick subsequently to the Celebration was admitted by them. They could hardly have done otherwise in view of the history of the custom in the Christian Church. What they objected to, therefore, and abolished so far as they could, was the misuse of the Reserved Sacrament; and they were anxious in getting rid of abuses so to restrict reservation as to be sure that they should never return. In other words, their objection was a practical one, rather than a theological one. The doctrine involved they accepted, but the current practice they revised and curtailed. Further, the action taken in 1661, so far as it can safely be interpreted, was of a purely practical and not a doctrinal kind. It had been found that the Communion of the Sick was in practice, and most frequently, probably universally in fact, carried out by a Celebration in the sick room. The revisers therefore ordered this method explicitly, and solely.
The present proposal, therefore, to re-establish the Reservation of the Sacrament for the Sick does not ‘go behind the Reformation’, as it is sometimes said. It keeps the old doctrine. It recognizes, however, in practice, the different state of things prevailing at the present time—that whereas there was no demand in the seventeenth century for the Reserved Sacrament, now the very opposite is the case. There is also now the same desire as there was in the minds of the Reformers to take away the abuses while retaining the custom and privilege itself. The real point at issue, therefore, is not any central one, but only the subordinate one regarding the nature of the abuses that are liable to ensue, and the methods that are best to be devised for excluding them.