In our Lord’s encounter with the woman at the well as related in the Gospel of St. John, He tells her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water” (John 4:10).
At the outset of her conversation with Christ, she has no idea whatsoever with whom she is speaking, and so her attitude is at first almost flippant and defiant. But as the conversation continues, the Samaritan woman begins to understand that she is dealing with someone the likes of which she has never met before, most especially when she learns that this stranger at the well knows the most intimate details of her life.
When at last He declares to her that He is the Messiah, the Christ whose coming was foretold, she is ready to believe and becomes almost instantly an “ambassador for Christ,” going into the Samaritan city of Sychar to tell everyone she could about the “man who told me all that I ever did” (John 4:29). And within a span of just two days many of the people of Sychar came to believe in our Lord.
Our Lord’s words that day at Jacob’s Well challenge us also, especially in our encounters with the Holy Eucharist: “If you knew . . . who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink. . .’.” How perceptive are we of the reality that in the Holy Eucharist we are encountering Almighty God Himself? I raise this question here in the context of a question that a friend recently posed to me: “How can we change people’s attitudes about their habit of receiving Holy Communion in the hand?”
As I think so many of our readers know all too well, the practice of receiving Communion in the hand arose in the post-Vatican II era not as an intended “liturgical reform” of the council but as a rank liturgical abuse introduced by those intent upon changing the eucharistic theology of the Church.
The 1969 decree of Pope St. Paul VI, Memoriale Domini, that opened the door to this unfortunate manner of receiving Holy Communion, was originally intended to grant nothing more than a reserved toleration of the practice in only those places that expressly requested this concession. Ironically, in this decree that ultimately unleashed a veritable avalanche of such concessions in one country after another, the case is strongly made for maintaining the traditional practice of receiving Holy Communion on the tongue, a plea that was largely ignored.
So at present, regardless of how it came about, we have two manners of receiving Holy Communion that the communicant can choose from: Communion on the tongue and Communion in the hand.
Clearly, given the current liturgical legislation, it isn’t possible to tell people that they can’t receive Communion in the hand — except in celebrations of the Traditional Latin Mass in which the very form of the rite forbids receiving in this manner.
But what we can and frankly ought to do with regard to Holy Communion in the Ordinary Form liturgy is to make an effort to persuade those in the habit of Communion in the hand to open their hearts and their minds to hearing the reasons why they ought to change to Communion on the tongue.
The late Pope Francis repeatedly chastised tradition-minded priests and laity for supposedly refusing to accept change, accusing them of clinging to the maxim, “But we have always done it this way!” Yet those who refuse to consider any turning away from practices introduced after Vatican II are often basing their own intransigence in this regard on this very same premise: “But we have always done it this way since Vatican II!”
In many places we now have several generations of Catholics who scarcely know that there is any other way of receiving Holy Communion apart from receiving in the hand. I have witnessed how children being prepared for Holy Communion are instructed only on reception in the hand without being told that they have the option of receiving on the tongue.
So when attempting to persuade those who for several decades or for their entire lives have been receiving Communion in the hand that they ought to make a fundamental change and begin receiving on the tongue instead, getting in the way is the formidable obstacle that people do not want to change what they have grown accustomed to — let’s face it: we are all creatures of habit. So these people need to be given reasons sufficiently compelling to break away from what they have done for so many years.
This brings us back to where we started, our Lord’s words to the Samaritan woman, “If you knew . . . who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink. . .’.” Do we fully appreciate and comprehend just who it is that we are receiving in Holy Communion? It’s the question I would like to pose gently and respectfully to those who receive Holy Communion in the hand, yet it’s also a question we would all do well to consider.
Have we taken fully into consideration that the One present in the Holy Eucharist is the infinitely powerful and all-knowing Lord of creation, the almighty King of the universe who imparts to us every breath we take, whose love and mercy are beyond all telling, so much so that for our sake He became incarnate and died a bloody death on the cross for us?
Of course we profess all this, but do we fully bear it in mind when we approach the priest for Holy Communion? Does the thought of just who Christ is penetrate the very marrow of our being when we find ourselves before Him in the Holy Eucharist? It was just such an overwhelming perception of who Christ really is that impelled the apostle St. Thomas upon seeing the Risen Christ to exclaim, “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28).
This living perception of who Christ is, this perception wrought by our faith, should elicit a commensurate response from us. In this we can be ably schooled by those who perceive the glory and majesty of Christ’s hidden presence in the Holy Eucharist more deeply than we do.
This past Holy Saturday, while I was at a church where the Polish custom of enshrining the Holy Eucharist in a symbolic representation of the Holy Sepulcher from Good Friday into Holy Saturday was being observed, an elderly man with a cane caught my attention as he slowly approached the side altar where the Blessed Sacrament was enthroned in this manner. He clearly had every reason for excusing himself from kneeling before the veiled monstrance, all the more so in that others far younger and healthier than he were not troubling to bend their knees as they passed or paused for a prayer there. Yet as he reached the Communion rail, the man laid aside his cane, and with a heroic effort and struggle managed to lower himself down onto the altar step to pray before his God on bended knees.
He spent a generous length of time kneeling in prayer before undertaking the equally arduous task of raising himself up from his knees to take up his cane and slowly walk away. So deeply ingrained in this man was his perception of the hidden presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist that even in his infirmity it was unthinkable to deny our Lord the humble homage of his body.
More recently, I was in a chapel where the Blessed Sacrament is reserved for daily adoration in a beautifully veiled tabernacle. The chapel was quiet and empty when I first arrived, but shortly before I was to leave a middle-aged Hispanic lady arrived, who headed directly toward the altar step before the tabernacle, where she threw herself down on her knees and immediately began to pour out her heart and her soul in muffled sobs of weeping. I could hear her intently supplicating our Lord in Spanish in a reverently low voice.
There was nothing artificial or affectacious in her manner of praying. It was as if she were seeing our Lord plainly with her eyes, as when St. Mary Magdalene threw herself down at the feet of our Lord and washed His feet with her tears — a likeness that in this case came all the more readily to mind in that this lady had long hair like the Magdalene is thought to have had.
I thought to myself that if only the atheists in our world could have witnessed this woman’s deep faith, surely they could no longer refuse to believe in God.
If these two devout souls described above, gifted with a deeper vision of just who it is we worship in the Holy Eucharist, could not help but throw themselves down on their knees before our Lord present in this manner, can anyone really think that at the sacrosanct moment of Holy Communion it suffices to respond to such a gift of God Himself by “handling” Him like we would a subway token or a French pastry?
In saying this I certainly do not intend to demean the sincere devotion of those who try their best to receive Holy Communion with genuine reverence when receiving in the hand. Yet it cannot be denied that taking the Holy Eucharist into one’s own hands to self-administer it lends itself all too easily to a casual, irreverent perception of the sacrament and to downplaying the importance of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.
This casual attitude and this downplaying of the Real Presence were outcomes intended by those who pushed for the change to Communion in the hand. Hence it is not without good reason that the renowned spiritual master of our own time, Fr. Donald Haggerty, in his 2025 book, The Hour of Testing, when describing the indifference of the many “occasional Catholics” who show up for Mass only once in a while, paints a stark picture of how Communion in the hand becomes in the behavior of these fallen-away Catholics an outward expression of their indifference to God:
“They simply join the Communion line and take the Host as a participant in the ceremony, as it were, thinking nothing of it. Not uncommonly, they reach out a single hand to take hold of the sacred Host as though they were being given a religious souvenir.
“In all this casual indifference to the sacred reality, the wound to the heart of Jesus must be real, and perhaps quite terrible” (The Hour of Testing Spiritual Depth and Insight in a Time of Ecclesial Uncertainty, pp. 218–219).
(To Be Continued . . .)
