Reflecting on the “evolution” of Eucharistic reverence, Pope Benedict XVI noted,
Here again we know that until the ninth century Communion was received in the hand, standing. That does not of course mean that it should always be so. For what is fine, sublime, about the Church is that she is growing, maturing, understanding the mystery more profoundly. In that sense the new development that began after the ninth century is quite justified, as an expression of reverence, and is well-founded. But, on the other hand, we have to say that the Church could not possibly have been celebrating the Eucharist unworthily for nine hundred years. [1]This quotation condenses the fundamental theoretical issues surrounding the practice of Communion in the hand, the very problems this article addresses, among which the most vital question is: do we really know this for a fact? Was there truly no Communion on the tongue until the ninth century? Was its emergence merely the result of a new development, while the standard norm across the entire Church had been for lay faithful to receive the Blessed Sacrament in their hands?
I doubt that this was actually the case, for two primary reasons.
The first reason, the true argument, is one that proponents of Communion in the hand generally fail to grasp. Because they implicitly or explicitly assume that unfolding the essence of Church doctrine, and thus understanding the true nature of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, required time for a certain “development” to take place, during which entirely new elements emerged. In reality, they do not believe that the Church understood the meaning of the Eucharistic Sacrifice and the Blessed Sacrament from the very first moment, and approached it accordingly from the very beginning.
Yet, because the Apostles understood the Mass from day one, they understood it to mean exactly what the Church would later teach about it. They also understood the priesthood itself. Consequently, from the very dawn of the Church, a distinction existed between the ordained and the laity, not only in the administration of the sacraments in general, but also in matters concerning the Most Holy, namely, the handling of the Blessed Sacrament. Therefore, I doubt that the touching of the Blessed Sacrament by unordained faithful could ever have been the norm, rather than a deviation from it; in other words, that it was a legally permitted default practice.
According to current scholarly consensus, the section of the Liber Pontificalis that attributes the prohibition of laymen touching the sacred vessels to Pope Sixtus I is a sixth-century compilation (dating to around 530). Even if this is true, the fact that such a decree could be compiled around 530 from earlier texts – and, moreover, that it carried authority – inherently proves that a widespread and normative practice of Communion in the hand is an impossibility. A regulation that ran directly counter to theological and liturgical evidence and practice could never have emerged at the very heart of the Holy Mother Church.
Furthermore, if in the first half of the sixth century a pope, or a decree circulated under papal authority, forbade the laity from even touching the sacred vessels, how reasonable is it to assume that this same prohibition did not apply to the contents of those vessels? Why would anyone consider the vessels holier than what they contained? This is especially true given the beautifully resonant reasoning the author of the decree attached to it:
It has been decreed by us, the other bishops, and the rest of the Lord’s priests, that the sacred vessels are not to be touched by anyone other than men consecrated and dedicated to the Lord. For it is exceedingly unworthy that the Lord’s sacred vessels, whatever they may be, should serve human use and be handled by anyone other than men who serve the Lord and are consecrated to Him; lest the Lord, being offended by such audacities, strike His people with a plague. [2]And how far we still are at this point from the ninth century, when the “novelty” of Communion on the tongue supposedly appeared!
The second reason exposing the flaw in the narrative of a normative and universally permitted Communion in the hand is the surprising lack of sources supporting it. I call it surprising because, due to the sheer volume of repetitive arguments used by proponents of this narrative, the sheer number of their supposedly clear patristic references can seem convincing. However, this illusion lasts only until one takes the trouble to verify their citations. It then becomes clear that these quotations are not about what they claim, and fail to prove their vehement assertions. Despite the notion that has prevailed since the rise of Humanism and the Reformation, we have only a few sources, and those dubious in either authorship or meaning, which show that the Church permitted the taking of the Blessed Sacrament home exclusively in times of emergency. Yet, contrary to the presuppositions of the narrative, even these sources do not bear witness to the laity actually touching the Blessed Sacrament with their hands.
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| James Tissot’s envisioning of Communion being given at the first Mass to the kneeling apostles; note the suggestion of Peter and John serving as something like deacon and subdeacon. |
When examining the patristic quotations used to ground the Communion-in-the-hand narrative, we encounter several highly typical errors.
The first is that writings supporting this narrative all rely on quotations copied from one another. As a rule, these quotations lack broader context; it is only a shared preconception that links them together into a chain of argument.
The second error is also due to a lack of context, but represents a very specific case: patristic quotations are brought forward to justify Communion in the hand without considering whether the text in question refers to an ordained priest, a bishop, or perhaps a layman. Since this fundamental distinction is never explicitly addressed in their works, I am inclined to view it not as mere accidental oversight, but rather as deliberate distortion. It is through such distortion that writers like St Augustine (Contra litteras Petiliani), Peter Chrysologus (Sermo XXXIII), or various Ordines Romani are cited either as authors or as examples proving Communion in the hand. These distortions become even more glaring when the context is deliberately erased, as seen when Dom Ambroise Verheul used ellipses to excise references to the priesthood in his article “La communion dans la main,” quoting a work by Tertullian to create the false impression that the passage applied to the lay faithful (in Les Questions Liturgiques et Paroissiales 2: 115-22).
The overwhelming volume of repetitive, cluttered arguments is a problem in itself. Guided by a preference for quantity over relevance, the text piles up mismatched and miscontextualized quotations. Proponents view – and try to make others view – every single quotation containing the words hands, communion, or receiving (accipere, ὑποδέχομαι) through the lens of their preconceived notions of Communion in the hand. One reason for this is an ignorance of the ancient rite of communion; the other is a misunderstanding of the true meaning of these terms.
Ignorance regarding the role of the hands is a particularly characteristic error. One never finds an explanation in these works as to why the hands could be called “worshippers” in antiquity, how one can worship with the hands, simply because the authors themselves do not understand the true symbolism of extended hands.
This lack of familiarity with symbolic meaning is also evident in their interpretation of various patristic sermons. They bring forward quotations from the Church Fathers as proof of Communion in the hand that only demonstrate the quotation-gatherers’ inability – or unwillingness – to understand tropological scriptural exegesis. Captives of their own ideology, they interpret sermons strictly in a sensus litteralis. A highly typical, recurring example of this is the parallel drawn in sermons between the touching of Christ by the woman with the hemorrhage and the “touching” that takes place in Holy Communion. They are always eager to discard the spiritual dimension of the sensus moralis, failing to grasp the true meaning conveyed through the use of contrast.
Yet, this exploration of the narrative would not be complete without answering the question: how did the claim of its ancient normativity ever develop in the first place?
It is crucial to recognize to what extent the Protestant rebellion played a prominent role in this. Although Humanism intensified the desire to examine ancient sources, during the rebellion, sharp, ideologically driven assertions were formulated long before the quotations to back them up were actually gathered. Thus, the opening – and sharpest – assertion lacked any patristic citation whatsoever; it rested solely on the claim of a patristic consensus referred to as “veterum monumenta”, which supposedly proved ancient Communion in the hand beyond doubt.
It was precisely this claim that one of the first ideologues of Communion in the hand, the Calvinist reformer Martin Bucer, used to support his position. In his Censura super libro sacrorum (1551), written as a critique of Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer, Bucer argued vehemently in favor of receiving Communion in the hand while denouncing Communion on the tongue as a practice belonging to the Antichrist. He considered a fierce assertion sufficient, which explains why his work lacks a supporting collection of citations. Nevertheless, his role in the formation of this narrative remains inescapable: he was the first to attach a lasting connotation to unspecified patristic quotations. He successfully crafted and placed the spectacles of the ancient Communion-in-the-hand narrative upon everyone’s eyes.
In doing so, Bucer was driven by a clear intent to eradicate the very foundations that had previously made lay Communion in the hand unthinkable for the Church as a norm: the priesthood and faith in the Real Presence. As he wrote:
In fact, I have no doubt that this usage of not putting these sacraments in the hands of the faithful has been introduced out of a double superstition; firstly, the false honour they wished to show to this sacrament, and secondly the wicked arrogance of priests claiming greater holiness than that of the people of Christ, by virtue of the oil of consecration. [3]Bucer’s spectacles became inescapable even among Catholics. Although the ancient texts had been known to churchmen ever since their composition – having been copied by monks, read, studied, and utilized by clerics throughout history – it was Bucer’s assertion that organized them into an interpretive framework. To be sure, among Catholics, this did not entail a desire to alter church practice until the twentieth century, yet they could not break free from this interpretation. It is due to this that Bucer’s contemporaries among the Catholics themselves, and not the Protestants, ultimately fashioned the modern historical arsenal for Communion in the hand: a corpus of citations designed to prove the practice's antiquity and normativity.
The collection of patristic citations was established by Iacobus Pamelius’s two-volume work entitled Liturgica latinorum (1571), which was significant not primarily in terms of the quantity of the citations, but rather in their contextualization. In this work, the titles of individual sections served as summaries of the content, formulated as definitive assertions. These pithy summaries conveyed a message that remains deeply influential to this day, shaping the discourse through seemingly unassailable topoi: “The Body of the Lord was given into the hand”; “They were also permitted to take the Eucharist to their homes”; “To men, the Body of the Lord was given into their hands, and to women, in a clean linen cloth.”[4]
Pamelius had great merits in publishing the works of certain Church Fathers, including those of Cyprian, from whom most of the quotations forming the basis of Pamelius’ observations on our topic originate. In one of his commentaries on Cyprian, specifically regarding the gestari-gustari problem, Pamelius also played a role in the formation of a specific quotation-related trope. This was, of course, not because he was a determined innovator, but because he was unfamiliar with the actual ancient practice of administering Communion.
The lineage continued with Caesar Baronius, who, in his footnote (c) written for August 15 in the Martyrologium Romanum (1586), already listed several quotations from various ancient authors. According to him, these indicated that it was once permissible for the faithful to take the Eucharist home. However, even though he knew the Greek sources only through translation, as a perceptive historian he assumed a process that could be deduced from the letter written to the patrician Caesaria (attributed to Saint Basil the Great), and provided an interpretation of the phenomenon based on this. He summarized the process by stating that after the persecutions, the Church abolished the possibility of taking the Eucharist home, and he expressed astonishment that this practice could nevertheless have persisted for some time afterward: “What is even more surprising, however, is that after the peace of the Church was established under the Christian and orthodox emperors, this same custom remained in place for some time.” [5]
Ioannes Stephanus Durantus (Jean-Étienne Durant, 1534-89), in his work De ritibus Ecclesiae Catholicae (1592), incorporated not only Pamelius’ quotations but also Baronius’ contextualizing observation:
Once, during times of threatened persecution, when the faithful Christians were not permitted to assemble freely and anywhere for the breaking of bread and holy communion, they received the consecrated Eucharist into their hands from the leaders of the churches, wrapped it in clean linen, carried it home, and preserved it so that they might receive it when necessity arose. [6]Yet, Durantus also significantly expanded the array of references provided by Pamelius and Baronius, so that in his work there already appear many of the ancient quotations cited nowadays as proof of Communion in the hand.
This series was later supplemented with a few newer ones in a work published in 1659 by Henricus Valesius (Henri de Valois, 1603-76), in which he presented Eusebius’ ecclesiastical history in Greek alongside a new Latin translation. His annotations became the permanent commentary on Eusebius, and consequently, on the presumed quotations regarding Communion in the hand. Volume 20 of the Patrologia Graeca adopts these very notes in its footnotes. [7]
The Communion-in-the-hand corpus, which had essentially matured prior to the twentieth century, came together with Chapter 17 of Book II of Cardinal Bona’s (Giovanni Bona, 1609-74) work Rerum liturgicarum (1671). Stripped of Baronius’ contextualizing remark, this work presents the array of classic quotations that seemingly prove the widespread prevalence and normativity of Communion in the hand, opening with this flourish:
For Holy Communion, according to ancient custom, was not received by mouth, as is done today, but by hand; and whoever received it, raised it with reverence to his mouth. On this matter, countless testimonies from the Greek and Latin Holy Fathers are available; but lest I be too tedious, I shall exercise moderation in listing them. [8]Despite Cardinal Bona’s “moderation,” his work crowned the process by which, by the nineteenth century, the notion regarding the ancient and early medieval manner of communion and its normativity had become self-evident “knowledge.”
This work and the quotations compiled within it then became the primary sources for twentieth-century liturgists. Although several researchers did indeed deal with individual quotations, and major works on liturgical history were produced, the studies parading this list of citations in the 1960s and 1970s were all tied to the unholy battle aimed at permitting Communion in the hand. Such were the study by Dom Ambroise Verheul OSB and the newspaper articles by Bugnini, in which he largely draws from Verheul, with a few additions taken from elsewhere.
Moreover, although they received these loci ready-made – Verheul, for example, likely adopted the vast majority of his quotations from Cardinal Bona’s work – his article, despite posing as a true scholarly opus, contained not even a mention or a reference to Cardinal Bona or his work. Of course, the scientific value of the innovators’ works does not converge to zero primarily because of this, but because they were first and foremost ideological warriors who dressed their desire for “profane innovations” in scientific garb (“always rejoice in profane innovations, disdain the decrees of antiquity, and through the oppositions of knowledge falsely so called, make shipwreck concerning the faith”).[9] Their essential activity actually consisted of doing what no Catholic scholar, theologian, liturgist, or church historian had ever thought to do until the twentieth century: they demanded the introduction of Communion in the hand, as Dom Ambroise Verheul OSB did, or they presented its introduction as historically legitimate and justified as a continuation of ancient practice, as Bugnini did in his writings.
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| An illustration from a 1914 breviary, showing imagined hand-communion of the early Christians |
And since I began with a quotation from Benedict XVI, I would conclude by citing the article by Verheul, which supports the grand assertions of Jungmann’s Missarum sollemnia – one of the sources of Benedict’s knowledge – with quotations; for it is this very article, with its collection of citations, that became the foundation for most modern scholarly or apologetic writings that support Communion in the hand and present it as historically normative, even if, being a difficult article to access, few are personally familiar with it. [10]
At the beginning of this, Verheul starts as follows:
The manner of receiving Communion by placing azyme (unleavened) bread on the tongue, which is traditional in the Western Church, is not as old as many would think; it was certainly not the ancient manner of receiving Communion, since it dates back only to the ninth century. In the first eight centuries, in both the East and the West, Communion was generally given into the hand. During this entire period, no one saw any irreverence in this. On the contrary, to our surprise, the testimonies we have collected show that this healthy and mature manner of receiving Communion went hand in hand with the respect due to the Lord present. Worship and fear of the sacred had not yet degenerated into anxiety and scrupulosity.Regarding his own writing, Verheul modestly indicated that it “renders our traditional manner of communion highly relative, against which criticisms are rightly mounting,” given that “compared to Communion in the hand, it seems somewhat childish and passive.” And to substantiate my aforementioned summary regarding the core added value of twentieth-century liturgists, he presented the rebellion against the rules prescribing the traditional manner of receiving Communion as the work of the Holy Spirit:
Here we are dealing with a current that can no longer be stopped. To oppose a current that is good in itself, and which, with a little common sense, can be foreseen to become universal and legally recognized shortly, would cause unnecessary unrest; it would be a tilting at windmills. Alongside obedience to the law, there is also that which is prompted in God’s Church by the Spirit of the living God. What we call obedience to the law can sometimes become disobedience to the Spirit of God.These are grave assertions; therefore, it is worthwhile to examine the quotations that prompted him to make them. Due to space constraints, this is not possible here; therefore, those interested can read the quotations of the corpus and their commentary in detail in an online collection that I have prepared. For the sake of a gentle jibe, this collection of quotations on Communion in the hand was given the name Corpus Bugninianum.
In compiling it, I followed the method that I was able to learn from Matías Augé, a professor at the Anselmianum. In his critique of Enrico Zoffoli’s work Comunione sulla mano? Il vero pensiero della chiesa secondo la vera storia del nuovo rito, Augé attempted to refute Zoffoli’s lines – which argued in favor of Communion on the tongue – slowly and articulately, using a mockery disguised as jovial kindness fit for the simple-minded. His essential endeavor during this was to demonstrate that Zoffoli’s quotations are insufficient proof of his assertions:
Our conclusion, therefore, sounds quite different: based on the texts used by Zoffoli, it cannot be proven that the administration of Holy Communion in 5th-to-6th-century Rome was done on the tongue, nor that this practice transferred to the regions of Gaul in the 7th century. What is most striking about this “true history” is the omission of highly explicit testimonies from ancient tradition that speak of Communion in the hand beyond all doubt.[11]Augé’s method serves as a vital blueprint for anyone wishing to scrutinize the citations advanced by the proponents of Communion in the hand. Adopting this approach is highly rewarding, as it demonstrates that the citations within the “Corpus Bugninianum”, whether viewed individually or collectively, fail to substantiate what Augé labels as “highly unambiguous testimonies” for the practice.
Indeed, it would be highly desirable for researchers to scrutinize the citations of the “Corpus Bugninianum”, whether by applying Augé’s method or developing others, and to expand and refine these commentaries. It is high time we move past an era where misunderstood or intentionally misinterpreted patristic quotations are used to present a practice contrary to the norm as the norm itself.
NOTES
[1] God Is Near Us: The Eucharist, the Heart of Life. Ignatius Press 2003, p. 70
[2] cf. Decretum 70, pdf p. 52.
[3] Martini Buceri scripta Anglicana, p.462, pdf p. 460.
[4] Tomus I. pp. 201-202, pdf.
[5] p. 366; pdf p. 366.
[6] Book I, Chapter 16, 11, pdf.
[7] Annotationes in Librum VII, p.145, pdf p. 889.
[8] pdf.
[9] Vincent of Lerins; pdf.
[10] pdf.
[11] link.
