Communion on the Tongue: Episcopal Oversight, the Common Good, and Useful Lessons from Tradition

A number of people online have been promoting the idea that Canon 223 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law gives bishops the authority to deny the Catholic faithful communion on the tongue and to require communion in the hand for anyone receiving.

Let’s have a look at the canon.

Can. 223 §1. In exercising their rights, the Christian faithful, both as individuals and gathered together in associations, must take into account the common good of the Church, the rights of others, and their own duties toward others.
§2. In view of the common good, ecclesiastical authority can direct the exercise of rights which are proper to the Christian faithful.

As I mentioned in my last article, “Contempt for Communion and the Mechanization of Mass,” the notion of “the common good” can be too breezily invoked to cover a multitude of sins.

The first thing we need to consider is a theological fact that has more authority than any canon law or any interpretation thereof: that, as St. Thomas Aquinas teaches [1], the common good of the entire universe is found in Christ, and Christ is really present in the Holy Eucharist, as the same saint memorably conveys in the Magnificat antiphon for Vespers of Corpus Christi:

O sacrum convivium, in quo Christus sumitur: recolitur memoria passionis eius: mens impletur gratia: et futurae gloriae nobis pignus datur. Alleluia. (O sacred banquet, in which Christ is received, the memory of his Passion is renewed, the mind is filled with grace, and a pledge of future glory is given to us. Alleluia.)

This means the Holy Eucharist IS the common good of the entire universe. Therefore, when we are considering how Communion ought to be distributed, the first and last consideration must be what we owe to God in loving Him above all others; we owe Him fitting reverence in all that we do and say. The Blessed Sacrament is not just “one more thing” over which a bishop has control, even if there is a limited sense in which he may establish norms for his diocese not contrary to universal norms (unless expressly permitted to do so; and even then, we should recall the statement of the Apostle: “all things are lawful to me, but all things are not expedient,” 1 Cor. 6, 12).

If we take seriously the truth of which Aquinas reminds us, we will see that Can. 223 §1 is obliging us to “take into account the common good of the Church” — above all, Christ Himself in the Eucharist — and, in that light, “the rights of others, and their own duties toward others.” The faithful have the right to see the Eucharist properly treated by all; our duties include building up the Body of Christ in holiness, which is incompatible with any kind of irreverence or unworthy experimentation, such as the German methods of Coronacommunion depicted in my last article.

Inevitably, the question arises: What is and what is not reverent? It seems to me very dangerous to say that bishops, all by themselves, get to determine the answer to this question, in a positivist vacuum. That is an anti-traditional nominalism that Catholics should not abide. Meanwhile, it is clear that the current situation will show which bishops have a supernatural perspective and which ones have a merely natural perspective.

More interesting is Can. 223 §2: “In view of the common good, ecclesiastical authority can direct the exercise of rights which are proper to the Christian faithful.” This canon suffers more than usually from the vagueness that is a necessary fault (as it were) of any code of law, but it is clear that it must be interpreted in light of the general norms of the law. Thus, for instance, Can. 135 §2 states, in part: “A lower legislator cannot validly issue a law contrary to higher law.” Given no provision for overruling the liturgical norms in force — which norms are extremely clear, repeated numerous times, as I and others have demonstrated (most recently in this article) — any bishop’s attempt to deny the right to receive Holy Communion on the tongue is unlawful on its face. [2]

Beyond this more theoretical consideration, we may note — as countless bloggers and online commenters have already done — that the USCCB has quasi-adopted a set of guidelines from the Thomistic Institute that state: “We believe that, with the precautions listed here, it is possible to distribute on the tongue without unreasonable risk.” [3] Although I do not agree with many of the Thomistic Institute’s precautions (for the reasons given in my last article), they at least recognize, as have various dioceses here and there (Portland being the best known), that there is no unreasonable risk in proceeding with the method that is still the Church’s universal norm.

Archbishop Chaput giving Holy Communion:
note optimal height relationship

Practical Issues with Communion on the Tongue

However, here I must speak plainly, and cut through the rigmarole. It is time for the hierarchy of the Church to recognize that the bishops themselves have caused the problem with sanitary communion on the tongue precisely by abolishing (or, at any rate, discouraging for decades) the traditional manner of receiving — namely, kneeling shoulder-to-shoulder along an altar rail, with a server holding a chin paten. [4] This method became universal for good reason. Quite apart from its superior reverence,[5] it is highly practical, for three reasons:

First, it was normally done only by a priest, who had gained expertise from daily experience, as opposed to the rotating schedules of Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion who may or may not know how to place the host properly on the tongue, and who often come across as hesitant, embarrassed, perplexed, or irritated at having to do so.

Second, the priest walking along the communion rail stands at an optimal height at which to place the host easily on the communicant’s tongue. It is vastly more awkward to try to give communion on the tongue to someone standing in front of you, especially if he or she is taller. The traditional method makes it far more likely that a priest will not have any immediate physical contact with the faithful, as opposed to communion in the hand where he will touch many, many germy hands — unless he follows the proposal to drop the host into the hand like a payload from a bomber, which brings with it problems of its own.

Third, because the faithful come up to the altar rail in waves, they have a chance to settle themselves on their knees and can calmly prepare for the priest coming to them. By the time he arrives, the communicant can have his or her head tilted back and be ready. There’s no unseemly rushing. (In the traditional form of communion, the priest says the prayer: “Corpus Domini nostri…” and concludes with the “Amen”; the recipient does not have to move his lips and risk either discharging saliva or accidentally touching the priest’s hand. In other words, it works perfectly in a time of epidemic.)

Bishop Ronald Gainer distributing Holy Communion in the traditional manner

All Catholics should be aware that if they wish to receive on the tongue, they should kneel — regardless of which form of the Mass they are attending or whom they are receiving from. They should kneel, first, because it is the Lord God before whom the angels fall on their faces; and second, because, when they kneel, tilt back their head, and protrude their tongue, it will be very easy for the host to be placed on it.

A seasoned priest who celebrates both forms of the Mass, Fr. Allan J. McDonald, shares some excellent thoughts at his blog Southern Orders [6]:

I know because I celebrate both forms of the one Roman Rite that kneeling for Holy Communion makes it easier for me not to touch the tongue of the communicant in the EF Mass if the communicant does what I was taught about receiving Holy Communion as a second grader. You tilt your head slightly back, stick out your tongue in a natural not exaggerated way and wait for the priest to withdraw his hand prior to retracting one’s tongue or moving one’s head forward.
       In the EF Mass the priest responds amen for the communicant thus neutralizing any spittle from becoming aerosolized and attaching to the priest’s fingers while these are close to the communicant’s mouth.
       Other temporal life-saving aspects of the Extraordinary Form of the Mass are these, which the Ordinary Form is recovering for the temporal health of the laity and priest(s):
       1. Ad orientem, the priest’s aerosolized words go toward the wall not the congregation.
       2. Hymn books are now deemed a deadly device if Coronavirus attaches to them and are being removed from pews. Thus the choir or cantor needs to chant the entrance chant, hopefully the official Introit and the laity actually participate by meditating on what is chanted rather than joining in and aerosolizing the air with their viruses.
       3. The offertory gifts are not touched by anyone, similar to the EF Mass where only the priest touches the sacred vessels — except in the EF it is out of reverence, [while] in the OF it will be out of fear of contagion or viruses attaching to the vessels carried by the laity.
       4. Kneeling for Holy Communion will finally be seen by bishops as the only healthy way to receive Holy Communion without hand-to-hand contact or hand-to-tongue contact, unfortunately not because it is more reverent to receive in the EF manner.
       5. The Common Chalice will never return to the laity out an abundance of fear that Coronavirus will live on and in the chalice and the Precious Blood diluted with copious amounts of numerous communicants’ saliva. Unfortunately the concerning of profanation of the Precious Blood by contaminants or spilling it is not the major concern as it should be.
       6. Priests will no longer be glad-handing the laity before and after Mass; although unlikely, this may lead to priests praying privately to God before and after Mass, which is a custom of the EF Mass.
       7. To prevent aerosolizing of speech with Coronavirus in the floating spittle, silence will be demanded in the church before and after Mass and physical distancing amidst the silence not because the Blessed Sacrament is there and demands silent adoration, but out of a concern for temporal health.
       8. Of course the handshake/hug of peace will disappear out of fear of offending social distancing civil law — not because it is a horrible distraction during the Communion Rite.

Bishop Joseph Perry gives Holy Communion at St. John Cantius

As Fr. McDonald frequently points out on his blog, the Extraordinary Form in fact has better customs in everything that concerns the Blessed Sacrament: its preparation, its consecration, its distribution, its reservation. Many of these will end up being adopted again in Coronatide, not (alas) because Catholics are awakening to the Real Presence and what is most fitting for our approach to the Lord, but out of fear of contamination or sickness. Sadly, this motive is even less noble than imperfect contrition — fear of hell — as a motivation for going to Confession. That, at least, is a concern for one’s immortal destiny after this life, rather than a fixation on this fleeting mortal life that we will all one day have to give up, whether from a virus or from one of ten thousand other natural or violent causes that threaten the poor, banished children of Eve.

It is appropriate for us to ask how we can mitigate risks, but not with the secular mentality of agnostic utilitarians who do not remember and do not take to heart the Lord with Whom we are dealing in the Most Blessed Sacrament. Ironically, it is Catholic tradition, not postconciliar praxis, that holds an array of useful approaches in a time of epidemic. These are ready to be implemented — if anyone cares about the common good of the entire universe and our sacramental participation in it.

NOTES

[1] See Super I ad Cor., cap. 12, lec. 3.

[2] As a side-note: since we know that canon law can, at times, be poorly formulated — criticisms have been freely made by canonists on certain points of both the 1917 and the 1983 codes — I will take this occasion to state that the formulation of Can. 223 §2 is disturbing. How far can it be taken? “Direct the exercise of rights which are proper to the Christian faithful.” All such rights? For example, could a bishop say “I direct you not to get married” or “I direct you to enter religious life”? After all, those are rights proper to the faithful… Without a layman having committed a serious public fault, it is difficult to see how any such directive could be legitimate.

[3] The Thomistic Institute states: “Opinions on this point are varied within the medical and scientific community: some believe Communion on the tongue involves an elevated and, in the light of all the circumstances, an unreasonable risk; others disagree. If Communion on the tongue is provided, one could consider using hand sanitizer after each communicant who receives on the tongue.” This last is a deplorable suggestion, deservedly ridiculed by Fr. Zuhlsdorf.

[4] As demonstrated in “Why We Should Retain or Reintroduce the Communion Plate (‘Chin Paten’),” this practice is called for even by the General Instruction of the Roman Missal that governs the Ordinary Form.

[5] See the article “‘Eat That Which I Will Give You’: Why We Receive Communion in the Mouth.”

[6] I have edited the text slightly.

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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.

Visit www.peterkwasniewski.com for articles, sacred music, and classics reprinted by Os Justi Press (e.g., Benson, Scheeben, Parsch, Guardini, Chaignon, Leen).

Resisting the Lowest Common Denominator: A Priest’s Cri de Coeur

Jesus did not settle for the LCD

A priest shared with me some insights from a meeting he attended of diocesan priests with their bishop. In what follows, I will be drawing upon what he told me.

In the meeting, the bishop said that the clergy should work against the temptation to settle for the “LCD,” the lowest common denominator. For, if we allow every member of the clergy to “roam free,” as it were, and aspire to no diocesan-wide standards of excellence, the principle of entropy, or we could just say man’s fallen nature, tells us that things will tend to roll down hill and decay over time, and eventually — at some point not too far down the road — every parish will face immense pressure to conform to this LCD: whatever options are least confrontational, most politically correct, and most socially acceptable will eventually win the day. It takes real vision to see this inevitable outcome and to combat it from the start. Free choice can be attractive, but ultimately results in division and degradation.

The priest then reflected: this is exactly what I and many brother priests have seen clearly happening with the liturgy. Because of the equivocal nature of the Missal of Paul VI, which leaves so much at the disposal of the celebrant, we have quickly slid to the LCD in every area where there is legitimate free choice. In other words, there is no free choice within the system.

For example:

1. A priest is free to celebrate ad orientem or versus populum — in fact, the Missal presumes celebrating ad orientem, which would put us in harmony with the rest of Tradition. But because of the LCD factor, only versus populum is acceptable. Any priest who chooses to celebrate ad orientem is seen as divisive, and is eventually pressured into conforming, unless he wants to be ostracized not only from the faithful, but even from his bishop and brother priests. But is it the priest who is the source of division? Or is it the freedom to choose either option that creates the division? It is the inevitable result of the LCD factor. Priests are accused of fighting what are called “the liturgy wars,” but are they to be blamed, or does the blame not rest squarely on the shoulders of Paul VI and his ambivalent Missal?

2. A priest is free to incorporate as much Latin as he would like. But because of the LCD, de facto only the vernacular is possible — despite the anathema from the Council of Trent: “If anyone says . . . that the Mass ought to be celebrated in the vernacular tongue only . . . let him be anathema.”

3. A priest is free to incorporate the Extraordinary Form into his parish, or his ministry, but again because of the LCD factor, this is seen as extreme and rigid, and is frowned upon to the point where it is de facto nearly impossible.

4. A priest is under no obligation to concelebrate and is perfectly free to choose to assist in choir so as to be able to celebrate his own Mass, a custom hallowed by many centuries of tradition in the Roman Rite and clearly allowed by the new Code of Canon Law. But de facto, there is immense pressure upon him to concelebrate because of the LCD factor, and to not conform results in receiving the label of being “not community-minded.” At some large gatherings for retreats or conventions or meetings, there is literally no possibility of a private Mass unless you bring your own altar, since such things are no longer even contemplated.

5. A priest is supposed to use a communion paten and not use EMHC’s except under extraordinary circumstances, but because of systemic habitual abuse in the American Church and the LCD factor, doing either of these things would be seen as extreme. The pragmatic norm, on the contrary, is to not have a communion paten but to insist on having EMHC’s.

6. The faithful are encouraged to receive Holy Communion on the tongue which is the traditional custom and still the universal norm as per the Vatican; meanwhile, they are permitted to receive in the hand as long as certain serious conditions are met. But because of the LCD factor, somewhere between 95–98% of the faithful receive in the hand. And everywhere, children receiving First Communion are not even taught the traditional practice, in spite of it still being “on the books.”

7. The same can be said of sacred music, church architecture, sacred vessels, vestments, preaching, etc., etc., etc. We are all now forced by social pressure to conform to the LCD. And what happens when a priest doesn’t want to conform to the LCD but wants to raise the bar? Well, typically the choice is either: conform to the LCD, or hit the highway. The dynamic subtly eats away at the bishop’s own integrity, because when he is confronted with complaints about a “difficult” or “demanding” priest — as identified promptly by Susan from the Parish Council — he must either stick his neck out and risk his reputation to defend the priest, or take the quieter path of pressuring the priest to conform to the LCD or be removed.

It is as if everyone is under the spell of the LCD. Such is the division that has been sown into the heart of the Church, and especially into the heart of the priesthood and religious life, by the Missal of Paul VI.

Order — or Disorder?

The laity need to understand this phenomenon if they wish to grasp why so many faithful priests who want to celebrate in harmony with tradition, and want the faithful to experience the fullness of this rich treasure that we have as Catholics, are afraid to do so, or perhaps suffer a crisis when the tension between their ideals and the LCD reality becomes too intense. Some think that there is a huge conspiracy that planned all this, and certainly this may be true, since no doubt the cunning of the devil is involved. But it can also be explained as the result of societal entropy. Because of original sin, everything tends towards decay, as we see in the movies, music, and media of our culture. The Church is immune from this decay only in her divine element; she is by no means immune to it in her human element, unless her members fight consciously and vigorously against it. The traditional liturgy had long been a barrier against this natural process, but the new Mass has let this process into the Church like a flood.

This “Trojan horse in the City of God” (to use the expression of the great Dietrich von Hildebrand), this Trojan horse in the sanctuary in the form of a new Mass, did not spring up out of nowhere. Its principles had been brewing among modernist theologians and their heirs, the theologians of the nouvelle théologie, expressed in the false distinction made by Fr. Yves Congar between the “unalterable structures” of the Church and the “accessory, changeable superstructures.”

But this mentality is nothing less than a betrayal of a mystical person, as one lover of tradition so poetically expressed it:

I do not love a skeleton nor vital organs, I love Her face, Her sparkling clothes and even Her sandals, Her entire being. With the spiritual canticle I will sing of the hair on Her neck that charmed us as well, her children, as it ravished the heart of her Spouse. Oh, may those who love the Church understand! In her features and her slightest gestures, something indescribably exquisite enraptures us to the summit of her essential Mystery. The liturgical movements, the hymns, the ornamentation of churches, the words of the catechism and the sermon, this flesh, this manner of walking, the sound of the voice, the color of the eyes, revealed the very soul, immediately, and we were struck, intoxicated by it, for Her ancient and universal soul, Her intimate life that came to comfort us, was the Holy Spirit in Person! [1]

This is the reverence that a Catholic should have towards the received rites that come down to us from tradition, and all of their ornamentation. But the new Mass incarnates the false principle of Fr. Congar by deliberately tossing all of this out of the window in a massive overhaul, giving the impression to faithful Catholics and to the world that the Catholic Faith can change its entire appearance. Since changing the so-called “accessory, changeable superstructures,” we have become painfully aware that they were instead an important part of the solid rock that formed our sure foundation, or to use the above imagery, the beautiful wedding garments of Holy Mother Church, so visibly radiant in her sacred rites. And now we find ourselves upon a foundation of sand, always shifting, and — if we are willing to be honest with ourselves — a foundation always eroding down to the LCD, again and again, like a bird with a broken wing that can only manage to throw itself a few inches, or an airplane with faulty engines that rises up from the runway only to crash just beyond it.

My correspondent concluded with this cri de coeur:

If other priests want to accept the status quo, the tyranny of the LCD, that is their decision, between them and God. Perhaps not everyone needs to fight on the front lines and resist usque ad sanguinem. But for us whose hearts belong to the Church of all times, and to her traditional rites, we seek nothing more than to access them in freedom, nothing else than to live and die with them, nothing other than to nourish the faithful with this potent food and drink. May God raise up more and more priests with such a heart.

NOTE

[1] From the Abbé Georges de Nantes’s “Letter to My Friends,” no. 178, August 6, 1964. Like Padre Pio, de Nantes was reacting to the devastation already being visited on the Tridentine Mass in the mid-sixties, prior to the coup de grâce of 1969. See here for the quotation as well as the mention of Congar.

Visit www.peterkwasniewski.com for articles, sacred music, and classics reprinted by Os Justi Press (e.g., Benson, Scheeben, Parsch, Guardini, Chaignon, Leen).