Why We Should Retain or Reintroduce the Communion Plate (“Chin Paten”)

At a time in my life when I was still attending daily Novus Ordo Masses, there was a particular year in which, due to what strange epidemic of butterfingers I could not say, I witnessed hosts falling to the ground several times. It happened with three different priests. Apart from further cementing my conviction that nothing dumber could ever have been imagined than switching from the safe, efficient, and reverent method of communicating the faithful on the tongue as they kneel along the altar rail to the unsteady, convoluted, and casual method of queuing up and sticking out hands or tongue at varied heights in relation to the distributor, these episodes prompted me to do a bit of research about what ever happened to the paten or “communion plate” held by an altar server in order to catch hosts or fragments.

The full story of “chin patens” or communion plates turned out to be considerably more interesting than I had realized: Monsignor Charles Pope relates it here. Although a recent (19th-century) development, they make a great deal of sense. After all, even if the “houseling cloth” was the traditional method and still possesses an aesthetic and devotional appeal of its own, it wouldn’t really work very well at catching anything unless it were suspended carefully under each communicant — as one sees in Byzantine practice, or in some First Communion services in the Roman rite (see photograph below). So the invention of the “chin paten” was a brilliant idea and deserved its universal acceptance around the Catholic world. We could consider it a classic example of organic development: a real need is met by an appropriate solution that harmoniously slides into what is already there.

We can all guess what happened to them in the 1960s: in the rush to modernize, the chin paten, together with maniples, birettas, amices, houseling cloths, altar rails, and a hundred other standard-issue features of a Catholic church, would have seemed fussy extras, sacristy clutter, scrupulous remnants interfering with the businesslike transaction and the clean lines of the new aesthetic, where less was thought to be more — more “authentic” and more “spiritual.”

Nevertheless, it does not take long experience to see that when a chin paten is used, fragments of the host do fall on its surface sometimes, and that it does catch falling hosts. [1] That, in and of itself, should be more than enough to force an earnest reconsideration of the importance of retaining or reintroducing chin patens during communion time.

What surprised me is that this is also the mens ecclesiae, as expressed most recently in 2004, in the Instruction Redemptionis Sacramentum of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, which states:

The Communion-plate for the Communion of the faithful ought to be retained, so as to avoid the danger of the sacred host or some fragment of it falling. (Patina pro Communione fidelium oportet retineatur, ad vitandum periculum ut hostia sacra vel quoddam eius fragmentum cadat.)

The Instruction at this point cites n. 118 of the General Instruction, which lists all the things that should be provided on the credence table, including: “the Communion-plate [patina] for the Communion of the faithful.” It is true that a close reading of the GIRM would suggest that this paten is mandatory only when intinction is utilized (see n. 287), but nevertheless it is a common sense practice allowed for by the GIRM and certainly commendable for all sorts of reasons.

Houseling cloth and paten in use (a first communion in Germany) 

One reason has not yet been mentioned: quite apart from its utility, the chin paten reminds the faithful of the mystery of the One who is present to us under the sacramental species of bread. He is the Lord of glory, hidden under the humble veil of food, and we must approach It and handle It with utmost reverence. The paten is a simple and subtle way of underlining that communion is no mere symbolic token of communal belonging but a genuine participation in the Redeemer’s divine flesh. When we recover little signs like this — and in ideal circumstances, we would be restoring the altar rail, too, and the houseling cloth — we do our part in reversing the outrageously bad statistics about the ignorance of and lack of faith in transubstantiation that characterizes American Catholics and probably Catholics in many other parts of the world as well.

Another reason to use the chin paten is that it subtly encourages the faithful to receive on the tongue, since the paten seems to have its use most properly in that configuration. The signal is transmitted that something special is occurring in reception on the tongue that reception on the hand rules out. Psychologically, this could come across as: “The person in line ahead of me is treated more specially because the priest and the server cooperate when giving him communion. Maybe I should do that, too. It seems more appropriate somehow.” I grant that Boomers are not likely to reason this way, but others with less baggage might.

Although communion plates with no handle are sometimes used, plates with long handles tend to be much more convenient for altar servers. If a particular place is following the common though inefficient and impersonal “queuing up” model, the server should stand to one side of the priest and hold the paten under the chin of any communicant who receives on the tongue. It is harder to say what should be done with those who receive in the hands, apart from saying that they just shouldn’t, period. But that topic has been taken up in many other NLM articles, and is not the main point here.

For those who take the motto of “brick by brick” seriously, reintroducing the communion plate would be a simple and affordable brick that could be set into its place readily enough.


NOTE
[1] No method is perfect, since a host hard enough can bounce off of a paten, as I saw happen with the first generation low-gluten hosts, which tended to be hard rather than soft. Such mishaps can, in any case, be avoided as long as the paten remains close to the communicant's chin, so that there is not a long distance through which a host can fall.

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Tradition is for the Young (Part 13) - Archbishop Sample’s Sermon in DC

This past Saturday, His Excellency Alexander Sample, Archbishop of Portland, Oregon, celebrated a Pontifical Mass in the Extraordinary Form at the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. Several people I know were present and have commented on how beautiful the ceremony was, with fine music and a well-executed ceremony. The church was, not at all surprisingly, quite full, and the members of the congregation were predominantly young. The Mass was broadcast live on EWTN, and can now be viewed on the Youtube channel of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception (embedded below). It is accompanied by a commentary by Monsignor Charles Pope, who describes it at the very beginning as “one of the most beautiful liturgies you will ever see”, and Mons. Andrew Wadsworth of the Washington DC Oratory. This commentary will certainly be useful to those who are not familiar with the traditional Mass, and especially the Pontifical Mass.

For our reader’s convenience, here is a video with just the sermon. I strongly encourage you to listen to the whole of it, but would like to highlight a particularly wise thing which His Excellency says, starting at 5:18.

“Over the years, since the release of Summorum Pontificum, I have heard many in the Church ... express puzzlement, and dismay, over why so many young people are attracted to this venerable form of the Roman Rite. They say things like, ‘I just don’t understand it. How could they be so attracted to a form of the liturgy that they did not grow up with, or ever experience before?’ If the comment has been directed to me, I have often responded ‘That is exactly the question you should be asking. Why are they attracted to this liturgy?’ Or perhaps more pointedly: ‘What is it that this form of the Roman Rite provides for them that their own experience growing up with the Ordinary Form did not provide?’ For this will give us an insight into what future liturgical development might look like. ”

Our sincerest thanks to Archbishop Sample for all that he has done, and continues to do, to encourage reverent celebration of the liturgy in both Forms, and his pastoral generosity in helping all Catholics, but especially the young, to live and love their rightful liturgical inheritance.

Here is the video of the complete ceremony, with commentary. (There is about 4:35 of dead air at the beginning, and, weirdly, a cough can be heard at 2:35.)

Un-censoring the Psalms? Mons. Charles Pope Weighs In

Mons. Charles Pope, the principal writer of the blog “Community in Mission,” published an interesting article two days ago entitled “Is It Time to Restore the Full Psalter to the Liturgy of the Hours?” In it, he addresses something which has long been regarded by many as one of the most serious defects of the post-Conciliar Liturgy of the Hours, the censorship of the Psalter by the removal of the three so-called imprecatory psalms, and of specific verses from several other psalms, a total of about 120. (To this one might add the little-noted fact that three of the long psalms which one might call “history psalms”, 77, 104 and 105, are said only in Advent, Lent, and Eastertide, an entirely inexplicable feature.)

There are several grounds which render this censorship deeply problematic, first and foremost the almost unavoidable implications for the doctrine of the inspiration of Holy Scripture. (Indeed, proposals for censoring not just the Psalms, but a great many other parts of the Bible, were floated in some liberal Protestant churches long before the Catholic liturgical reform, as Scriptural inerrancy and inspiration began to fall under the Biblical critics’ axes.) Monsignor notes that the principal justification for this censorship given by the prenotanda of the Liturgy of the Hours is the “psychological difficulty” which they purportedly create, to which he answers (rightly in my estimation) “(w)hatever ‘psychological difficulty’ or spiritual unease these texts cause, all the more reason that we should wonder as to the purpose of such verses.”

He then notes that St Thomas Aquinas gives three way to understand these imprecations: 1. as a prediction of God’s punishment, not a wish that it be fulfilled; 2. as a declaration of the justice of God’s punishment; and 3. as “an allegory of the removal of sin and the destruction of its power.” A very ancient example of the latter is the allegorical interpretation of the words of Psalm 136, in which the psalmist says to Babylon “Blessed be he that shall take and dash thy little ones against the rock.” The explanation that the “little ones” here are nascent temptations, which are destroyed before they can grow into sin, was first given by Origen in the 3rd century, and continuously accepted by the Church Fathers after him.

To this. Mons. Pope he adds his own explanation, which I think very worthy and very much worth our consideration. “I think it is good to recall that the overall context of prayer modeled in the Scriptures is one of frank disclosure to God of all of our emotions and thoughts, even the darkest ones. ... anger, vengeance, despair, doubt, and indignation are all taken up in the language of prayer in the Scripture. ... It is not obvious to me that speaking of these all-too-common feelings is a cause of psychological distress. Rather, it is the concealing and suppressing of such things that causes psychological distress. As a priest, I encounter too many people who think that they cannot bring their dark and negative emotions to God. This is not healthy. It leads to simmering anger and increasing depression. Facing our negative emotions—neither demonizing them nor sanctifying them—and bringing them to God as Scripture models is the surer way to avoid ‘psychological distress.’ God is our healer, and just as we must learn to speak honestly to a doctor, even more so to the Lord. Properly understood (viz. St. Thomas), the imprecatory verses and other Scriptures model a way to pray in this manner.”

Of course, there is still the practical consideration that if the Holy See were to decree the restoration of the full texts of the Book of Psalms (which clearly isn’t likely any time in the near future), it would necessitate yet another re-ordering of the liturgical Psalter, the third in just over a century, and the printing of a yet another completely new breviary, for the fourth time in just over a century.

Two other points in this regard which Mons. Pope does not mention. One is that the censorship of the Psalter is yet another example of the liturgical reformers going far beyond the mandate of Sacrosanctum Consilium, which spoke only of distributing the Psalms over a period longer than a week. The other is that our separated brethren of the various Orthodox churches continue to use the full text f the Psalter in their Offices, and it is difficult to imagine that they think much of the current Catholic practice in this regard.

How is Your TLM Doing?

Over at the National Catholic Register, Msgr Charles Pope published an article yesterday called “An Urgent Warning About the Future of the Traditional Latin Mass.” The warning is that in many places, the congregations attending the EF Mass are not growing, and may well be in danger of declining in the future, perhaps the fairly near future. Msgr himself admits that his “sense that the Traditional Latin Mass has reached its peak in terms of numbers attending” is based on “only anecdotal evidence.” But for example, “In my own archdiocese, although we offer the Traditional Latin Mass in five different locations, we’ve never been able to attract more than a total of about a thousand people. That’s only one-half of one percent of the total number of Catholics who attend Mass in this archdiocese each Sunday.”

As may be imagined, this has generated a bit of controversy, with plenty of comments on the original article both in agreement and in disagreement. Corpus Christi Watershed and Fr Zuhlsdorf have both weighed in on his piece, and raised some points in contrast. As CCW points out, the absolute number of TLMs offered in the United States has risen to the point where 92% of our dioceses have at least one weekly EF Mass. This is a remarkable degree of progress, considering the miniscule number which were available when the Apostolic Letter Ecclesia Dei came out in 1988.

In that letter, Pope St John Paul II wrote that “respect must everywhere be shown for the feelings of all those who are attached to the Latin liturgical tradition, by a wide and generous application of the directives already issued some time ago by the Apostolic See (in the 1984 decree Quattuor abhinc annos) for the use of the Roman Missal according to the typical edition of 1962.” There is no point in denying that under the Ecclesia Dei indult, which lasted for just over 19 years, these words were met in a great many places with a shameful lack of generosity, and that in such places, the traditional Mass has really only been available since Summorum Pontificum handed control of the matter to individual priests, less than nine years ago.

Fr Zuhlsdorf rightly points out that Msgr Pope’s article takes as its starting point some excessively and naively optimistic predictions about the results that the TLM might have on a given diocese or a community. Msgr writes “But one of the promises was that if parishes would just offer the Traditional Latin Mass each parish would be filled again,” to which Fr Z comments in his well-known bold red type, [“Filled”? Not in my circle they didn’t.] Such predictions, to whatever degree they were made, were simply not realistic to begin with. I say this with all due respect: we need to measure the progress of the TLM by more realistic yardsticks.

Nevertheless, I think the good Monsignor is absolutely right when he says:

This is why evangelization and effectively handing on the faith to the next generation is so critical. Simply having a beautiful liturgy, or a historic building, or a school with old roots in the community, is not enough. Attracting, engaging, and evangelizing actual human beings who will support and sustain structures, institutions, and even liturgies is essential. No one in the Church is exempt from this obligation.
If we who love the Traditional Latin Mass thought that it would do its own evangelizing, we were mistaken. It is beautiful and worthy of God in many ways. But in a world of passing pleasures and diversions, we must show others the perennial value of the beautiful liturgy.
The honest truth is that an ancient liturgy, spoken in an ancient language and largely whispered, is not something that most moderns immediately appreciate. It is the same with many of the truths of our faith, which call for sacrifice, dying to self, and rejecting the immediate pleasures of sin for the eternal glories of Heaven. We must often make the case to a skeptical and unrefined world.

I would like to invite NLM readers to sound off on this. (See paragraph below first.) What is your church or apostolate doing to promote greater interest in, understanding of, and love for the Traditional Mass, and is it working? And conversely, if your TLM congregation is shrinking or failing, why do you think this is happening, and what do you think could be done to change it?

Please read this before commenting: I believe I can trust our readers to contribute to such a discussion in a constructive manner, without bashing people or airing grievances. If you want to report that your local TLM is not doing well for whatever reason, DO NOT mention anything specific to identify it, such as the names of people (clergy or lay), dioceses, churches, congregations, choir directors etc. Comments which stray out of these boundaries will be deleted.