God Be in My Hand — or on My Tongue?
SACRED SPECIES VS. CASUAL COMMUNION
Communion in the hand is almost everywhere the “done thing,” and it is possible that few Catholics are aware that they retain the option of receiving on the tongue.
Given that we do have two options, which is the better way of receiving Communion, and why? Or is the choice between them a matter of indifference? Let us review the arguments for putting Communion in the hand.
“Communion in the hand was done in the early Church.”
Perhaps it was. But in the early Church, women were veiled, segregated in church, and forbidden to speak there. In the early Church, penances for sin were public, lengthy, and severe. Shall we return to those usages? Unless proponents of “the primitive rite” are consistent in their support of a return to the practices of the early Church, this argument amounts to special pleading. “An argument is not like a cab,” as Schopenhauer memorably said. “You cannot pay it off when it has taken you as far as you wish to go.”
You May Also Enjoy
What measures should be taken to fast-forward the reform of the reform; to stop the nonsense and increase the sense of the sacred at Mass?
My wife and I visited a new parish. The “greeters” at the door might have been recruited from a squadron of grim reapers at the entrance to Hell in Dante’s Inferno.
Pope Gregory’s program was really quite simple: To return to the people of Rome a sense of sin and a sense of the sacred.