Pope Benedict made some headlines a few years ago when, in his public Masses, he began only to distribute Holy Communion to communicants who were kneeling and receiving on the tongue. The Holy Father’s action has prompted a renewed discussion of how Holy Communion should be distributed, and a renewed, critical examination of the currently accepted practices of receiving Communion standing and in the hand.
Reception of Communion kneeling and on the tongue was the universal practice within the Roman Catholic Church for centuries leading up to the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), but it fell out of favor with many bishops and liturgists after the council. Some dioceses in the ‘60’s began to issue their own rules for receiving Holy Communion in disobedience to the universal law of the Church, encouraging the reception of Communion standing and in the hand.
The Holy See responded to these abuses in 1969 with the document Memoriale Domini, an Instruction from the Congregation for Divine Worship. This document insisted that Communion on the tongue be retained thanks to its centuries of usage, because of the practice’s profound expression of respect for the Eucharist, and for the insurance that the Eucharist would be distributed respectfully and with decorum.
However, the Holy See allowed national conferences of bishops to permit the practice of Communion in the hand in areas where the practice had begun to prevail, under various conditions, and as an exception to the Church’s universal law. Using this begrudging permission of the Holy See, most conferences of bishops wound up permitting Communion in the hand throughout their countries, so much so that in many countries (ours included) it seems like Communion in the hand is actually the norm.
So why is Benedict beginning a trend in the opposite direction? Distributing Communion on the tongue and while kneeling has a profound symbolism, and physically expresses the orthodox Christian teaching on the life of grace in the soul of the Christian. The reception of Holy Communion is the communication of grace par excellence. Whenever God gives grace, He (the active agent) gives a sharing in His own life (grace) to the soul of the Christian (the passive recipient) through the mediation of His Mystical Body, the Church.
The Sacraments are the ordinary means of man’s salvation, the standard and most powerful fountains from which Catholics imbibe the waters of grace. The Eucharist is the greatest of all the Sacraments since it provides the very source of grace, God made man in Jesus Christ. We receive the Eucharist from Christ, through His Church.
The Church attempted to express these realities of the communication of grace through her liturgical rites, and through the traditional manner of distributing Holy Communion on the tongue to kneeling communicants. God comes to us at the Mass in the words of consecration; the priest then turns to the people, showing them the Host while the people strike their breasts and declare their joint unworthiness and hope in God’s mercy.
At the actual distribution of the Host, in traditional practice the communicant kneels—a traditional, Western sign of humility before a superior, a sign of passive receptivity to the gifts of a kindly lord. Opening their mouths, the communicants receive Our Lord from the hands of the Church’s representative, the priest. We depend upon the Church, our mother, for our spiritual strength just as a chick depends upon his mother for physical strength, opening his mouth wide to the nourishing sustenance only a mother can provide.
It was for these reasons that auto-communication, the act of somebody other than the priest-celebrant taking the Eucharist and feeding it to himself, is and has always been a grave liturgical abuse. Aside from extraordinary circumstances (“The Huns are coming over the hill to destroy the church! We need to consume the Eucharist ASAP!”), the Eucharist must always be received from a minister of Holy Communion. We receive the life of grace through Christ’s bride, the Church. We do not take God’s grace on our own, and we cannot provide ourselves with the strength to become holy. Our action is not active, but passive; the Church earnestly desired to reinforce that truth by insisting that people receive Communion from a minister, rather than grabbing the Host out of a bowl on one’s own.
With this reasoning in mind, the ban on auto-communication, while allowing Communion standing and in the hand, seems incongruous. As far as our human psyche goes, there is not much difference between picking up a Host from the bowl of Hosts and eating it; or having a minister of Communion first put the Host in our hand, and then picking it up and eating it.
Both of them put the communicant in an active role (grabbing the host, putting it in your mouth, and eating it), yet the former is considered a grave abuse while the latter is licit. It seems like we give this grace to ourselves; our own action communicates Our Lord to ourselves. This mindset, present in both situations, is totally wrong and totally opposed to traditional Christian teaching.
In this light, the arguments of many of those in favor of the practice seem somewhat ridiculous. Many of the postconciliar innovators who introduced the practice discussed how standing was a sign of “greater Christian maturity,” that it was unfitting for the laity to have a posture of complete reliance on the clergy, that Communion on the tongue was an exaggerated, pietistic way to receive the Eucharist. Some went even further and began to lessen almost all the traditional forms of devotion to the Eucharist, instead emphasizing Christ’s presence in the community and in individual Christians as being of nearly equal value to the Eucharistic presence of Christ. It is interesting to note that Communion standing and in the hand was introduced by 16th and 17th Century Protestant reformers in order to destroy belief in the Real Presence.
It is clear that our Holy Father doesn’t hold with the ideas of the aging 1970’s liturgists, and it seems that a new, rising generation of priests and bishops is going back to more traditional practices along with the Holy Father. New, more traditional religious orders are springing up that are devoted to more traditional liturgical ideals, including a number of orders dedicated to the Traditional Latin Mass, and many of these orders are insisting on Communion kneeling and on the tongue. Many bishops and several of the cardinals-elect whom Benedict will appoint on November 20 are acknowledging the value of the traditional forms of Holy Communion.
In this action, it seems that the pope is teaching all Catholics a lesson in terms of the reverence with which we should approach the Eucharist. The pope began changing his method of distributing Communion after reading the book Dominus Est by the Kazakhstani Bishop Athanasius Schneider; the pope even ordered Vatican’s official publishing house to publish it. Clearly, he earnestly desired people to read the wisdom of Bishop Schneider’s arguments and put them into practice.
Thus, for us individual lay Catholics, it may be laudable to follow the pope’s lead, and to re-evaluate on a personal level the manner in which we currently receive Communion. The more traditional practices held sway for powerful and significant reasons, and they may merit a reevaluation of our personal fashion of receiving Communion. Such a reevaluation could well prove beneficial for Catholics desiring to deepen their devotion to our Eucharistic Lord.
John Gerardi is a first year law student who uses the Rover as his personal soapbox. He can be reached at jgerardi-at-nd.edu.
