Greetings in Christ, all! I pray God blesses everyone who reads this with a firm and joyful commitment to live our Lenten Season well.
I’d like to offer some thoughts/suggestions for receiving communion at our Church. We’ve had more drops than usual lately and I thought a reminder might help us tighten up our practices. Please do not interpret this as a criticism; we are human and we drop things, even the sacred. This is simply an effort to help us avoid it where possible.
The first point is for receiving.
If you are receiving on the hand, please try to make a flat surface. Take your dominant hand and place it on the bottom of your non-dominant hand. Receive, then use your dominant hand to place it in your mouth. Making a cup with your two hands leads to problems. I do recognize that arthritis might make the “cupping your hand” your only option. I’m only asking us to avoid that if we are able.
If you are receiving on the tongue, please lift your chin up, open your mouth and extend your tongue. Of particular note on this topic, If you are teaching your child to receive on the tongue, please make sure they know to do these things so that we can place the host in their mouth without incident.
After a lot of wedding Masses and funerals, we find consecrated hosts lying on the ground and it is so heartbreaking. I know that no one doing this intends anything disrespectful, but it is an extremely serious matter for us. This is one of the reasons we ask non-Catholics to not receive communion. What we believe about the Eucharist is unique; most Protestant denominations do not believe it and, as a result, they are sometimes unintentionally disrespectful.
If you are bringing non-Catholics to Church (thank you!), please let them know before Mass about communion. I think the best way to put it would be to tell them that for Catholics, this host is the most sacred thing on earth and we treat it with great respect. We further ask that those who are not Catholic do not receive because they do not believe the same as we do.
If you would like to take someone communion, you can do one of two things:
First, come up to communion, receive and then present a pyx for us to place a host in. This is better than receiving into a pyx and then taking communion for yourself.
You can also choose to ask an acolyte to get you communion after Mass. They are the people in black cassocks with a white garment over it (it’s called a surplus). They have a key to the tabernacle and can help you. We should not take communion out of the Church except in a pyx after we have received instructions on how to handle the consecrated host and the “do’s and don’ts.”
I hope you find this helpful. I do not wish to come across as being picky, my goal is to protect our invaluable sacrament, the Eucharist. The Eucharist is the most sacred thing in our lives and we should always approach it with great joy, dignity and respect.
I’m so very grateful to God for all of you. Thank you for letting me be your priest.
Fjk