Prof. Hadley Arkes, Writing in The Catholic Thing on the occasion of Passover, reflects on the moral parallels between an ecclesiastical ritual and the "communion" of citizenship into which we have entered. Some excerpts: "Christian friends are often invited to a Passover seder, for indeed that was the setting for the Last Supper, but in these lax times, the hosts no longer enforce those old rules, or even make delicate inquiries. In our own time, the unleavened bread, the matzo, on the shelves in the supermarket marks the most noticeable sign that Passover is coming. It is taken a symbol or a reminder of the story: the deliverance of the Jewish people from bondage. But it’s curious that the other side of the story, with another moral dimension, seems to have faded from view." "People routinely go into voting booths in this country, marking preferences among candidates, but without much awareness that, in this small, prosaic act, they are entering a communion of sorts. Are they aware that, in voting, they are also affirming the rightness in principle of a regime of free elections? Are they aware, then, that they should foreclose to themselves the right to vote for a party – say, a Communist party or a Nazi party – that would deprive the people around them of that same right to vote, and even remove from them the protections of the law?" "Entering citizenship is entering a kind of communion, with moral requirements, raising anew the question about the kind of 'people' we wish to be. As St. Paul had it then, we celebrate the paschal lamb and the risen Christ 'not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.'" Read the whole piece here.