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LOVE AND REVERENCE DUE TO OUR LORD How should we receive Holy Communion?
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PHOTO CREDIT: DON ELVIR TABAKOVIĆ, CAN. REG.
oice of the Family in union with the prolife movement worldwide advocates for the inviolability and value of human life and proudly so. Indeed, we consider it a privilege and honour to defend the most vulnerable human lives. Many in the pro-life movement are prepared to lay down their own lives for the lives of those they seek to protect. This is the strength of our commitment. And yet there is something even more precious than the sanctity of human life, and this is the divine life truly present in the Holy Eucharist, in His Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity. Our greatest treasure on earth is the Blessed Sacrament. There is no other nation so great, the Divine Office of Corpus Christi sings, “as to have its gods so near as our God is present to us”. The Eucharist is our dearest treasure and the thought of having it so near to us in our Catholic churches fills us with gratitude and awe. We rejoiced as churches around the world re-opened: Our Lord in the Holy Eucharist can be received again! But whilst the life of a Catholic might be characterised as discerning how we can best offer the love and reverence due to Our Lord, Catholics in many places in the world are now faced with a new and terrible challenge of how are we allowed to worship Our Lord. Regulations, issued by some of the world’s bishops, recommend that the faithful receive Holy Communion in the hand and, in the most radical cases, bishops have attempted to ban Holy Communion on the tongue. These recommendations contradict Church law, they obscure the reality of the Real Presence, and they lead the faithful, albeit, please God, in
most cases unintentionally, to engage in practices lacking in reverence towards the divine life. What are we, the laity, to do in such a situation? How can we defend the Eucharist and offer Our Lord the love and reverence due to Him? First, we must know that by insisting on receiving Holy Communion on the tongue, we are standing on solid ground, prepared by the Tradition of the Church and made fertile with the blood of her martyrs. Tradition demands the greatest possible reverence towards the Holy Eucharist. In fact, serious punishments used to be reserved for practices which are being recommended by some bishops today. The faithful are being misled into believing that the responsible option is to receive Our Lord in the hand despite the very real danger of losing and desecrating fragments of our Eucharistic Lord. And following the instructions issued in the current crisis, Catholics are being schooled to remember in future that this is the “safer option” when similar problems arrive. But generations of Catholics before us have kept their devotion to our Eucharistic Lord unchanged throughout wars, epidemics, and other disasters that have struck the world – not because they did not know the danger they were in, but because they knew Who is in the Eucharist they approached. St. Thomas taught: “Out of reverence towards this Sacrament, nothing touches it, but what is consecrated; hence the corporal and the chalice are consecrated, and likewise the priest’s hands, for touching this Sacrament. Hence, it is not lawful for anyone else to touch it except from necessity, for instance, if it were
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