Objection & response

What happens when there is no accessible priest?

Walling off can mean months or years without the Mysteries. Is that spiritual starvation, and is remaining without Communion automatically sinful?

The objection, at its strongest

In practice, ceasing commemoration may leave a believer with no parish and no Communion, possibly for years. To choose sacramental starvation cannot be God's will; therefore the wall must yield to the need for the Chalice.

Why it is raised

The Eucharist is the centre of Christian life; prolonged isolation carries real spiritual dangers of drift and delusion.

Evidence for the objection

The Church has never treated deliberate, avoidable abstinence from the Mysteries as healthy.
Isolation without guidance has historically bred the very delusions the canons fear.

Evidence against it

The Apostolic Constitutions legislate for exactly this case: if it is not possible to gather in church because of the impious, gather in a house; if not in a house, let each pray alone or two or three together, “for where two or three are gathered in my name…”.
St Paul's warning cuts the other way: communion unto judgment (1 Cor. 11:29) is a worse starvation than waiting; the tradition prefers the fast to the knowing defilement.
The precedents lived it: the faithful under Arian held sees, the desert under the usurper, the confessors in prison, years without the Mysteries, endured as confession, never reckoned as sin.

A limited conclusion

Strongly supported

Deprivation endured for the faith's sake is confession, not sin: the fathers provided the house gathering pattern and preferred waiting to knowing defilement. It remains a heavy cost, which is exactly why the certainty, counsel and narrow conditions of Lessons 3 and 11 must come before the wall, and why one seeks, where possible, a priest of unimpeachable confession rather than solitude.