"Become What You Receive." A Transformative, Eucharistic Vision of the Family, Engaging the History and Theology of U.S. Catholicism in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries

Abstract

This dissertation contributes to discussions of theological method by creating a dialogue between social ethics, familial vocation, and liturgical theology. Informing the entirety of the project, historical analysis provides a framework for exploring an important normative claim: The Eucharist serves, and has always served, to unite families as communities of social transformation. In a Church where the family faces challenging questions of lay identity, gender, globalization, and multicultural awareness, this work aims to be both timely and efficacious. After introducing the shape of the field on social-scientific and theological issues of family and worship (Chapter 1), the project turns to an exploration of the history of the U.S. Catholic family and the Eucharist in the twentieth century prior to Vatican II (Chapters 2 and 3). In a century marked by great social change, documents from social history reveal Catholic programs attempting to resist popular agency, on the one hand, and encouraging the active participation and leadership of laypersons and families, on the other. An exploration of the history and theology of the period during and after Vatican II (Chapter 4) reveals that, confronting the mores of a changed world, the Church chose to align its official pedagogy, Eucharistic and social, with those theologies that supported lay and family agency. This societal and ecclesial trajectory is confirmed and expounded upon through an exploration of the work of John Paul II (Chapter 5) and through an anthropological and theological exploration of Pauline churches (Chapter 6). As the conclusion (Chapter 7) discusses, each of the above chapters seeks to unite historically-grounded concepts of the family, Eucharistic community, and social transformation. The family is to be the Body of Christ, for the sake of its members and for the sake of the world at large.