Customer Reviews

Sacrifice Unveiled: The True Meaning of Christian Sacrifice

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This book has some valuable insights into sacrifice. However, Catholics who wish to continue thinking with the mind of the Church should note that the tone and some of Daly's arguments are not in harmony with the teaching of the Catholic Church.

Daly's book on sacrifice is the fruit of a lifetime's thinking on the issue of what precisely is the function of sacrifice in Christianity. The first point to note is that Daly subscribes to Rene Girard's anthropology. Girard's theory is that the sacrifice of the Cross unmasks what has been going on since the foundation of the world, namely that the cornerstone of all cultures rests on the blood of a scapegoat who has been ritually murdered to bring about peace within the community. Far from being an atoning sacrifice, Christ's death reveals this mechanism and neutralizes it. Girard's theory is decidedly unsympathetic to Anselm's theory of atonement. Nonetheless, its an interesting theory and Daly has assimilated it.

Daly is right in detecting that in Judaism, there is a spiritualizing process when it comes to cultic sacrifices. For Daly, Christianity brings cultic sacrifices to an end. Building on the work of Kilmartin, Daly shows that true sacrifice for Christians takes on the dynamic life of the Trinity, a self-offering with Jesus in the Spirit to the Father in a life of service to others. This is all well and good and Daly's analysis is commendable.

There are however some serious problems with the work. For a Catholic priest, Daly is decidedly low Church to use Anglican terminology. For example, his theology of the Eucharist (page 2 and 182) is not only not Catholic, it does not stack up philosophically. For Daly, there is no Eucharist if there is no concomitant transformation of the assembly. That sounds like a marvelous insight - one can see a bunch of people at one of Daly's talks nodding enthusiastically. But, how does this work in practice. An average assembly at Mass will be made up of people of varying degrees of commitment. Some will be there simply because they want their children to be taught at the local Catholic School, whose results, let us says, are top notch. Some will be there because they like the sense of community. Husbands may be there because of the nagging of the wives. And, some may be there because their hearts are on fire for the love of Christ and want to be there at the sacramental representation of His giving Himself for the life of the World.

So, how do we apply Daly's theory to this assembly? Do we have a partial Eucharist or a Eucharist for some and not for others? And, what about the sick old lady who has not been present at the Mass but is brought communion by a lay minister of Holy Communion? Does she have to ask: "my dear, can you tell me before I bow down my head before the Divine Master hidden under the Eucharistic species whether the assembly was transformed"? This is not even Lutheranism. For Luther, as I understand it, the Eucharist is present for me if I believe in Christ's presence in the bread and wine - a kind of cartesian subjectivism. For the Catholic Church, the issue is whether the person consecrating the elements has been ordained and whether he intends to offer the Mass. If so, Christ is present regardless of the effect on the assembly. Both Lutheranism and Catholicism have an intrinsic logic but Daly's theory is simply unworkable - its really the beginning of a journey where no Real presence is recognized at all.

Another problem with Daly's work is that he has a real problem with what he sees as the institutionalization trend in the Church. So much so, that he dectect a deformation beginning in the New Testament. On page 101, he quotes Finlan (presumably approvingly): "One can see this deformation already beginning to take place as early as the pastoral Epistles and Duetero-Pauline letters where fidelity to right doctrine was increasingly seen as the sign of a true Christian". I am no fundamentalist - I can see that the hand of Man as well as the hand of God is present in the Scriptures. Otherwise, how can we possibly make sense of all the violence attributed to God, when the Christian message in Jesus is clearly about mercy and forgiveness? But, Daly seems to be saying that the hand of Man intrudes even into the New Testament. Is he suggesting a kind of Canon within a Canon? Should we then cleanse the text of Man's input to arrive at the True Canon. This seems quite dangerous.

This leads on, as far as I can tell, to a kind of suspicion of Holy Orders. One begins to wonder after a while: why is Daly a Catholic, leaving aside the bigger question: why is he a Catholic Priest? His analysis of Eucharistic prayers is valuable but I detect a suspicion of the Roman Canon (as properly translated) particularly when augmented by the Tridentine rubrics. His dislike of the sacrificial element is palatable. But, there seems to be a bigger issue lurking under all of this. What is Daly's sacramental theology particularly vis a vis the Eucharist? If the Eucharist is all about transformation of us, where does sacramental representation come in as a preliminary step to transforming us? Daly is right, of course, that the sacraments are for us - they don't exist for their own sake. They will come to an end when all things are gathered unto the Lord at the end of time. But, I can't help feeling that sacramental representation is lost in Daly's theology. I think it is a question of philosophy more than theology (JP II's Ratio et Fides encyclical refers) - we cant' do theology without proper philosophical foundations.

Daly ends his book quite beautifully and humbly and even though I took issue with a number of points in his book, I felt my heart warming to him. Daly's excitement and commitment to his topic is palpable.