The Ramey Affair in the Diocese of Virginia has been reported on widely, from The Living Church and Episcopal News Service to The Washington Post. Not only is the case unusual because, as Lauren Anderson-Cripps reported in TLC, “[t]his is a rare instance of an appeal making its way to the Court of Review. Since 2018, the court has considered just two cases, both of which were Title III cases related to the election of the Rev. Charlie Holt to the episcopate in the Diocese of Florida” (all quotations about the details of the case come from this news story unless otherwise noted). It is also unusual because it is a Title IV case that directly concerns theology—specifically, the theology of the priesthood.
Here are the details:
The Rev. Cayce Ramey, who served as rector of All Saints’ Episcopal Church Sharon Chapel in Alexandria, Virginia, from 2014 to 2022, has abstained from celebrating, administering, and receiving Holy Eucharist for the past three years. Ramey has said he will not resume the practice until there is proof of repentance and amendment of life in the Episcopal Church regarding white supremacy and racial injustice.
In response, a Hearing Panel in the Diocese of Virginia determined that Ramey committed several Offenses as outlined in Title IV, including but not limited to the following:
- Failing to “abide by the promises and vows made when ordained,” Canon IV.4.1(c);
- “[H]abitual neglect of public worship, and of the Holy Communion, according to the order and use of the Church,” Canon IV.4.1(h)(8);
- Failing “to conform to the Rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer,” Canon IV.4.1(b); and finally,
- Failing “to refrain from any Conduct Unbecoming a Member of the Clergy,” Canon IV.4.1(h)(9).
The Hearing Panel recommended that Ramey be deposed and “deprived of the right to exercise the gifts and spiritual authority of God’s word and sacraments conferred at ordinations to Priesthood and Diaconate.” He appealed the panel’s judgment, and the case made it to the Court of Review, the procedures of which are described in Canon IV.15, Of Review.
This case brings to light some serious deficiencies in how we understand the priesthood in this church, and forces a renewed consideration about fasting in general, the eucharistic fast, excommunication, and even the nature of sin.
The Problems with Ramey’s Claims
There are several fundamental problems with Ramey’s claim that a “eucharistic fast” is an appropriate response by a priest to systemic, structural sin.
Fasting?
The first problem is the misapplication of the term fast and its conflation with the term abstention.
Fasting as a Christian ascetical discipline is about as universal a practice as prayer. In the Christian tradition, a fast is always understood to be joined to prayer. For most of Christian history, fasting almost exclusively “meant entire abstention from food for the whole or part of the fast day and, in the latter case, a restricted diet” (Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 4th ed., “Fasts and fasting”). Reception of the Eucharist was never understood to be a breaking of the fast.
In fact, joining eucharistic reception to the fast was not seen as a contradiction but as a natural companion to the ascetical discipline. The ritual meal that cannot satiate is a sacramental and ascetical expression of one of the central scriptural underpinnings of a proper fast: we do not live by bread alone, but by every Word that proceeds out of the mouth of God (Matt. 4:4). To quote the Anglican ascetical writer Martin Thornton, “The whole purpose of mortification, fasting, almsgiving, and discipline, is to replace concupiscence by tranquillitas, to re-establish harmony with people, creation, and God” (English Spirituality, p. 116).
The Christian tradition also provides a quite different practice known as a Eucharistic fast, which Augustine took to be “of universal observance and dating back to apostolic times.” This practice is the “complete abstinence from food and drink for a period preceding the reception of holy communion.” This is a different kind of ascetical discipline because it was undertaken “to do honor to the eucharistic gifts” (Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 4th ed., “Eucharistic fast”). The notion of “fasting” from other things (specific foods, Netflix, gossip) is a quite late development, including the very idea of “choosing” a particular fast, and would likely be perplexing to our forebears.
What does this tell us? We can conclude at least this: A eucharistic fast that is recognizable to the Christian tradition is the exact opposite of the discipline that Ramey has undertaken. To call the reception of the food joined to an abstention from the Eucharist a “eucharistic fast” would not only be utterly confusing to the Christian tradition, but nonsensical. One “needs” the eucharist when engaging in an ascetical fast. The idea that one would not only engage in fasting without the Eucharist but would, in fact, fast from the Eucharist while not fasting from food and drink is an inversion of all traditional understanding of fasting.
This alone should give us pause.
Systemic and Structural Sin
Now we come to issues that are much more multifaceted. I need to state at the outset that the challenge I bring to Fr. Ramsey’s position in this section is not with his claim about the reality of systemic or structural sin. Furthermore, I acknowledge that what follows is a gross simplification for the sake of space. This is a very complex topic, and its contours are highly debated. Nonetheless, I think it is clear there is a widespread agreement, for example, that (a) practices such as chattel slavery were constitutive of the economics of the United States for part of its history and, (b) that this practice was both evil and morally reprehensible. I am taking this as a given. Furthermore, recognition of these facts enjoins some sort of action on the part of Christians. The nature of that response is not my topic here. The focus, rather, is a much narrower question: Is the response that Fr. Ramey took open to him as a Christian priest? That question will thread the balance of this essay.
One of the substantive challenges is when the word sin is applied to the reality of systemic or structural evil. The question is not whether individuals who ostensibly sold or purchased another sinned. They did. The question is whether one of the many ways of describing slavery as a system properly includes the term sin.
One of the noteworthy elements in 20th-century Roman Catholic social teaching was the emergence of phrases like “unjust structures” and their synonyms, which then culminates in the phrase “social sin” used by Pope John Paul II in Ut unum sint (§34). This development introduced a tension that has yet to be resolved fully.
What Fr. Ramey describes in his response to the initial charges is a deeply felt response to his growing understanding of profound evil and injustice. I have no intention to minimize this in any way. However, the question remains: Is his response one of the options available to him as a Christian priest? “Is this the fast that I desire?”
I value truth, authenticity, honesty, duty, and responsibility. God has told us, the Episcopal Church, has called us to end the trauma and violence we are visiting upon our siblings, sisters, and brothers and ourselves. Jesus calls us, secure in His promise of resurrection, to be honest with ourselves about our sin, our broken relationship with God, and about our human theology, particularly about our sacraments. We cannot be still and silent in the face of white supremacy and be faithful children of God. And in the face of such overwhelming realities, Jesus gives us a way of love to repentance and restoration and new relationship that can save and transform us and our church.
So it is that in prayerful conversation with my spiritual director, professors, mentors, colleagues, vestry members, my bishop, DMin advisor, friends, and family I have felt called to a prophetic voluntary fast, refraining from celebrating or receiving Holy Eucharist, leaving our gifts at the altar so that we could first go and be reconciled.
There are several interconnected problems that I discern in Fr. Ramey’s response related to the category of sin.
First, Ramey has infused the language of “fasting” to the eucharistic discipline usually described as “excommunication,” a process described on page 409 of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. The instruction begins:
If the priest knows that a person who is living a notoriously evil life intends to come to Communion, the priest shall speak to that person privately, and tell him that he may not come to the Holy Table until he has given clear proof of repentance and amendment of life.
To be fair, Ramey later calls his action a “voluntary excommunication.” But to elide “voluntary excommunication” with fasting does no favors to his argument. For one thing, a person does not self-excommunicate; rather, excommunication is a discipline imposed by one with authority. If one is convicted that one should not receive Holy Communion, the response is not excommunication but confession and absolution. We can see immediately where the rubber meets the road when “sin” is applied to a system or a group. Ramey indicates that he can only give up this eucharistic exile (my phrase) when the Episcopal Church “has given clear proof of repentance and amendment of life.” But how can this be applied to an institution? Who determines that the proof is clear? What is “amendment of life” when applied to an ecclesial body?
A further issue surfaced in one of the questions during the Court of Review:
Bishop A. Robert Hirschfeld of New Hampshire raised a hypothetical to [J.B.] Burtch [Ramey’s attorney]: Would a priest be justified in engaging in a Eucharistic fast to protest other issues, such as the church’s use of fossil fuels or the acceptance of pledges from an individual whose income comes from manufacturing weapons?
“We’re not making that case,” Burtch said. “The case we’re making is the House of Bishops has spoken unequivocally about the sin of white supremacy in the Episcopal Church and that is specifically the grounds on which Fr. Ramey has instituted his Eucharistic fast. … It’s one very specific reason for a very specific purpose.”
The problem is that the way Ramey framed the issue means that one cannot separate various systemic issues from one another. Sin is sin is sin. If one is engaged in a notorious evil act that has become a manner of life, then one should not receive Communion until it has been properly addressed. One of the reasons for the provision for excommunication is given in the Exhortation to Holy Communion in the prayer book: “For, as the benefit is great, if with penitent hearts and living faith we receive the holy Sacrament, so is the danger great, if we receive it improperly” (p. 316).
It either is or it is not dangerous for a person to receive Communion. If Fr. Ramey should not receive the Sacrament because of a notorious evil of which he is complicit as an Episcopalian, why should any Episcopalian receive the Sacrament rightly? It is hard to see how it would be any less dangerous for me to receive than for him.
This is precisely where we can see that Ramey’s sacramental protest is categorically different from, say, an act of civil disobedience.
His protests aside, it is not possible to understand (a) how different notorious structural sins can be distinguished from systemic racism, and (b) why his rationale for his response does not apply to everyone who is part of the system or group in question (which is to say, all of us).
In summary, here are the issues as I see them with how Ramey has framed the issue:
- Fr Ramey has applied the practice of fasting to this situation in a way that is completely unrecognizable to the Christian tradition. This is more of an excommunication; but self-excommunication is also unrecognizable to the Christian tradition.
- Fr Ramey’s practice is an inversion of and a confusion about a eucharistic fast, which is abstaining from food before receiving the Sacrament.
- It is impossible to see how the application of the criteria of notorious sins that require “proof of repentance and amendment of life” do not apply to all Episcopalians (at a minimum) with all systemic and structural sins.
The second part of this essay, appearing tomorrow, will outline problems with the case against Fr. Ramey and, likewise, consider how the affair drives us to consider a coherent theology of the priesthood.
The Rev. Matthew S.C. Olver, Ph.D., is the Executive Director and Publisher of the Living Church Foundation, Senior Lecturer in Liturgics at Nashotah House Theological Seminary, and a scholar of early Christian liturgy.
