Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ (Challenges in Contemporary Theology)
by William T. Cavanaugh
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Book Summary Information
Author: William T. CavanaughEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1998-12-14
ISBN: 0631211993
Number of pages: 304
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
Book Reviews of Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ (Challenges in Contemporary Theology)
Book Review: Perhaps the most important book on Ecclesiology in recent times.
Summary: 5 Stars
This remarkable book has forever changed the way I view the Church, the State, the Eucharist, Torture, and how they all relate.
William Cavanaugh's dissertation takes the form of a historical case study of the Roman Catholic Church in Chile during the Pinochet regime. He begins by dicussing how torture and disappearance[1] are ecclesiological problems. What he means is that torture and disappearance are not merely horrible abominations enacted upon individuals, but are violence enacted upon social bodies. Who are the victims of torture and disappearance? In once sense, it is those who have been tortured and disappeared, but in another it is all of those who dwell in the society in which this is taking place. This is because torture and disappearance are actions that can happen to anyone at anytime, so all people are kept in fear and an anxiety.
The idea of torture is perhaps the most effective generator of fear, since torture reaches to the very limits of horror, turning the body against the person to such an extent that death become desirable. Fear of torture, fear of death, were concrete fears that only began to articulate the hidden anxieties which lurked beneath the surface of Chilean society. (p. 47, emphasis added)
In this way, torture is liturgical:
Torture may be considered a kind of perverse liturgy, for in torture the body of the victim is the ritual site where the state's power is manifested in its most awesome form. Torture is liturgy...because it involves bodies and bodily movements in an enacted drama which both makes real the power of the state and constitutes an act of worship to that mysterious power. (p. 30, emphasis original)
So Cavanaugh argues that in Chile, torture was an act of violence upon the imaginations of the society. The society as a whole was made to take on the imagination of the state and forget all other narratives.
How Did the Church in Chile respond to these attacks?
Cavanaugh says that the Church in Chile had a deficient understanding of ecclesiology, which led to it being totally unprepared to deal with the violence of the regime. He argues that the Church had allowed itself to be relegated to a private "spiritual" sphere. They viewed the human being as being under two divinely sanctioned authorities, the Church (in regard to spiritual matters) and the State (in regard to social matters). When the state launched attacks upon the imaginations of the people of Chile in the form of torture and disappearance the Church was forced to respond to a state that was refusing to live by the bifurcation that their ecclesiology demanded. "Chapter 2 describes how ill-prepared the official church was to meet this strategy, since its own ecclesiology had already, in effect, disappeared the church as a social body." (p. 120)
So the church's response was to try and recapture its political and social aspects. The church learned how to be oppressed and give voices of dissent to the oppressors. The church began to tell a different story from that of the state, a story that gave the people a new imagination.
Cavanaugh offers several examples of how the church in Chile learned to do just this in the midst of their oppression. Specifically, he focus his study on the Eucharist as the church's response to torture.
"The Eucharist , as the gift which effects the visibility of the body of Christ, is therefore the church's counter-imagination to that of the state." (p. 251)
"The Eucharist is the promise and demand that the church enact the true body of Christ now, in time. Worldly kingdoms have declared the Kingdom of God indefinitely deferred, and the poor are told to suffer their lot quietly and invisibly. In the Eucharist the poor are invited now to come and feast in the Kingdom. The Eucharist must not be a scandal to the poor. It demands real reconciliation of oppressed and oppressor, tortured and torturer. Barring reconciliation, Eucharist demands judgement." (p. 263)
The church in Chile was unable to adequately respond to the abuses of the regime because of its faulty ecclesiology. But after a time the church found within its own structures and liturgy the tools necessary to respond to the actions of the state by proclaiming a parallel narrative. The church learned that it can not separate between the spiritual and the social, between the ecclesial and the political.
May the church in America learn this truth as well.
[1] Disappearance, as Cavanaugh defines it, is the apprehension of individuals by the regime without the officers of arrest identifying themselves or giving the specifics of the charges. The individual is then held in custody for an extended length of time without trial or knowledge of when his imprisonment and torture will end.
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