The Eucharist, Excess, and the Politics of the Postconciliar Mass

“A paschal banquet in which Christ is consumed.” This description of the Mass, drawn from the Vatican II constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium, holds in tension the ideas of feast and sacrifice that are central to Catholic Eucharistic theology. In the postconciliar Church, particularly in elite Catholic culture, this tension has fissured into competing “horizontal” and “vertical" theological perspectives, each carrying divergent ecclesiological and political commitments. Drawing on the work of Georges Bataille, this paper examines how the routine celebration of the Eucharist in the contemporary United States generates an excess that overflows, but also reinforces, the restricted economies through which it is interpreted. Bataille’s framework of general economy, I argue, illuminates what theological discourse struggles to name: that both camps draw on the same sovereign expenditure, and that their conflict depends on that shared foundation remaining unacknowledged.