Viaticum

The first Council of Nicaea, meeting in 325, gave a ruling about the dying which is short and unusually firm. Anyone at the point of death, it says, is not to be deprived of the last and most necessary viaticum. The force of it lies in the context. The early church's penitential discipline could exclude a person from communion for years, and the canon says that the discipline stops at the deathbed: whatever a person is under, they receive. A system of exclusion is thereby made to answer to something it cannot override.

The name carries the same idea in a different image. Viaticum in ordinary Latin is what a traveller takes for a journey, the provision put up for the road, and its use for communion given to the dying is a plain metaphor that the tradition has never felt the need to elaborate. It is the same sacrament as any other communion, brought to a bedside rather than received in church, and the rite around it is short: a greeting, a reading, the creed if the person can say it, the Lord's Prayer, and the giving of communion with words that name the journey.

Reservation of the sacrament outside the liturgy grew up largely to make this possible. Bread cannot be consecrated at a moment's notice at three in the morning, so churches kept some. The Byzantine practice of preparing a Lamb on Holy Thursday, drying it and keeping it through the year for the sick and the dying is the eastern form of the same provision, and it is the reason the reserved sacrament exists in that tradition at all.

In current Catholic practice the rites for a dying person run in an order that was deliberately restored in the twentieth century: penance, then the anointing of the sick, then viaticum. Communion comes last, and the Church describes it as the last sacrament of the Christian life. That ordering had slipped in the medieval West, where the last rites were popularly understood to culminate in extreme unction, the anointing which by then had become almost exclusively a sacrament of the dying rather than of the sick. Putting communion back at the end changes what the sequence says: the final act is not a preparation applied to a person but a meal shared with them.

Who may bring it follows from the same emphasis. A priest is the ordinary minister, but a deacon or another authorised minister of communion may carry the sacrament to a dying person where no priest can come, so the availability of viaticum does not depend on the availability of a priest in the way that anointing does.

Other traditions do the substance without the vocabulary. Orthodox parishes commune the dying from the sacrament reserved for the purpose. Anglican and Lutheran churches bring communion to the sick and dying as a normal pastoral office, and Anglican usage does sometimes keep the word. In the Reformed and free churches, where nothing is reserved and the elements are ordinary bread and wine again after the service, a minister and one or two members of the congregation bring the whole action to the bedside, which is understood as the congregation's table extended to a member who cannot come to it rather than as a distinct rite.