Some considerations

The question of how Holy Communion is distributed is not exactly a hot topic among my friends and acquaintances, and most are puzzled when I tell them that Fr Andrew and I have started a petition to ask the Holy Father to rescind the permission to receive Holy Communion in the hand.

However, and obviously, it is for me a crucial issue of the contemporary Church and my disquiet about giving Communion in the hand is entirely borne out of my daily experience. All too often I find myself saying: This is wrong – this is too open to abuse – there must be a better way.

Of course, the better way was discarded some decades ago and the history of the process by which Communion in the hand crept onto the scene is not altogether edifying. But let's not go there.

But let me first state categorically that I adhere totally to the present discipline of the Church which offers communicants a choice to receive either on the hand or on the tongue. I never refuse either, not even those who wish to receive kneeling. In fact, on the question of adherence to the norms of the Church I find myself aghast at stories from laity who have been denied, sometimes with extreme rudeness and offensiveness, their right to receive on the tongue, or their right to receive whilst kneeling.

There are a number of objections I have to Communion in the hand and but let me begin with just three:-

• It does not adequately protect the Sacred Host.

With Communion on the hand the reverent can be reverent, the indifferent can be indifferent, the careless can be careless, and the abusive can be abusive.

One would not place a priceless artwork into the hands of an individual and just assume that all due care would be taken. No! Serious safeguards would be implemented.

• The very action of placing the Sacred Host on the hands of a communicant invites routine.

There are any number of bodily actions we perform so often every day without thinking that they wear a kind of 'neuron track' into our brains: waving goodbye, shaking hands, pointing a finger, and receiving and placing something into another's hand.

It is very difficult to ask someone to use an habitual action in a sacred way.

Standing, or preferably kneeling, before a priest and extending our tongue is hardly a routine action. It is something we do only in church and it causes the communicant immediately to enter into a consciousness of the sacred. Communion on the tongue is itself a little catechesis.

A parishioner said to me once that So-and-so gives out Communion like he is handing out lollies. Even priests (and extraordinary ministers) can succumb to the routine.

• Communion on the hand is strangely catechesis resistant.

After all the years of this practice there is still a disturbing number of people who have no idea how to receive reverently; all has become routine in the worst sense of the word and the variety of idiosyncratic ways of receiving is endless.

Then, of course, there are those many who turn away from the priest and wander off to their seats to (hopefully) consume somewhere along the way.