The papal encyclical on the Eucharist is embarrassing. It's a bit like coming across a love letter and then realising that it's been written by your grandparents who should be past that kind of thing, writes Breda O'Brien.
Pope John Paul is nakedly, passionately in love, and he not only wants the whole world to know about it, but to fall in love as well. In an age when ironic, hip detachment is the new orthodoxy, such blazing commitment makes us squirm on behalf of the person who displays it.
"It is pleasant to spend time with him, to lie close to his breast like the Beloved Disciple and to feel the infinite love present in his heart. If in our time Christians must be distinguished above all by the 'art of prayer', how can we not feel a renewed need to spend time in spiritual converse, in silent adoration, in heartfelt love before Christ present in the Most Holy Sacrament? How often, dear brothers and sisters, have I experienced this, and drawn from it strength, consolation and support!"
As I said, it's embarrassing. And it gets worse. "In the humble signs of bread and wine, changed into his body and blood, Christ walks beside us as our strength and our food for the journey, and he enables us to become, for everyone, witnesses of hope. If, in the presence of this mystery, reason experiences its limits, the heart, enlightened by the grace of the Holy Spirit, clearly sees the response that is demanded, and bows low in adoration and unbounded love."
In a short encyclical, the word "love" occurs 24 times. That's excluding all the synonyms. The Pope pleads: "Allow me, dear brothers and sisters, to share with deep emotion, as a means of accompanying and strengthening your faith, my own testimony of faith in the Most Holy Eucharist."
Er, no, actually. We don't want you to share your deep emotion, your reminiscences about 56 years celebrating Mass in "chapels built along mountain paths, on lakeshores and sea coasts, on altars in stadiums and in city squares." And spare us, please, flights of fancy like this: "These varied scenarios of celebrations of the Eucharist have given me a powerful experience of its universal and, so to speak, cosmic character. Yes, cosmic!"
John Paul, you may wish to speak to us about love, about devotion. You may wish to tell us how the "enraptured gaze of Mary as she contemplated the face of the new-born Christ and cradled him in her arms" should be the "unparalleled model of love which should inspire us every time we receive Eucharistic communion". That's not exactly music to the ears of a generation who claim to have outgrown all that, we who have substituted the benign indifference of "whatever you're into" for the hard work of really understanding other people's beliefs.
On the other hand, those who work in the Irish media have another aim in mind. We will scan through the thing until we find what we were searching for. Yes, he said it again. Catholics should not receive communion in Protestant churches. Great, we can recycle all our well-used headlines about "Nails in ecumenical coffins" and "Reactionary Pope offends Protestants".
Forget the fact that this is an intensely personal, and in parts lyrical and poetic, contemplation of the central mystery which has sustained Catholicism for 20 centuries. Let's gleefully talk about the right-wing Pope, while ignoring this passage from the encyclical: "And what should we say of the thousand inconsistencies of a 'globalised' world where the weakest, the most powerless and the poorest appear to have so little hope!"
Well, we don't want you to say very much, actually, because it doesn't fit. Your pigeonhole is marked "right-wing" and we have no desire to change that.
It was a trifle upsetting that you insisted on working night and day to avert war in Iraq, but we coped with that by not reporting it very much, unlike most of the rest of the world's media. When you bucked the stereotype before and mobilised opinion to try and repeal the debt of developing countries, we reported it here as Bono recruiting you to the cause, not the other way round.
You might have instituted an unprecedented dialogue with Muslims, and prayed with Jews at the Wailing Wall. You might have been the first Pope to set foot in the Anglican Canterbury Cathedral, but we know that you are really a religious supremacist with no desire to reach out to other traditions or faiths.
Does the Pope have the right to be a Catholic? From the reaction to the encyclical, which I would wager most journalists have not read, the answer would seem to be "No". This denial of the right to be different is a travesty of pluralism. To be pluralist does not mean denying differences exist, or attempting to make everyone believe in a bland mush which offends no one.
We only have to look at Northern Ireland to know that divisions do not disappear because we wish them to do so.
It is sad, no, scandalous, that Christians are divided over communion, which Christ left to us as the great sign of unity. It is shameful that Protestant and Catholic cause each other pain. Yet we know that a marriage where someone buries deep-held convictions in order to make the marriage work has little chance of success.
That is true in ecumenism, too. Pope John Paul puts it like this: "The path towards full unity can only be undertaken in truth." The truth is that there are more than cosmetic differences between the churches on the question of communion, and for that matter between members of the same church.
This raises a further interesting question. We cannot blame media which thrive on controversy and conflict for ignoring the deeper meanings of an encyclical. But how many of us Catholics will hear preaching in our churches which will move us to the kind of devotion so nakedly displayed by the Pope?
How many Catholics, whether lay or clergy, really feel the kind of "amazement and gratitude" talked about in the encyclical? Judging by the deadness of the atmosphere in many of our churches, fewer than we might think. Or is that just too embarrassing to talk about, too?