Clergy and faithful in Charlotte Diocese must be feeling a bit shell-shocked by the recent series of instructions, decisions, and leaked proposals from their bishop. Bishop Michael Martin restricted the traditional Latin Mass to just one church in his diocese, and he has now turned his eyes to the celebration of the Novus Ordo. In a pastoral letter dated December 17, he commanded, among other things, that temporary altar rails and individual prie-dieus be removed.
In other words, the faithful will continue to be allowed to receive Holy Communion kneeling (and on the tongue, if they wish), but this will be made as physically challenging and awkward as possible. The traditional arrangement of kneeling along an altar rail, while the priest distributes Communion moving down a stationary line of communicants from their right to left, allows the people to make the “act of reverence” required before reception simply by kneeling. Furthermore, they are then at an optimal height; can pause after receiving and before moving away; and, if less agile, can hold onto the top of the communion rail to get up again.
The method proposed by Bishop Martin is that people come “in procession,” so each communicant has to wait until the one before has moved aside in order the stand (or kneel) in front of the priest. This makes the “act of reverence” rather artificial: when exactly do you bow? In my experience, most people don’t bother, but I know this varies a lot between locations.
The time-consuming nature of this method encourages two further unfortunate things. One is people not putting the Host in their mouths until they have stepped away from the priest. It is not ideal for laypeople to move around carrying a Host in their fingers, and it also makes it harder to spot people who, whether from ignorance or malice, don’t consume the Host, but carry it away. It also encourages the use of extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion, to speed things up, whereas the law of the Church restricts their use to cases of “true necessity” (Redemptionis Sacramentum 151).
Bishop Martin gives the impression, in his letter, that extraordinary ministers are not “supplementary and provisional” (see Redemptionis Sacramentum), but desirable for their own sake, with practical needs an afterthought: “the role of extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion is to be welcomed and used in our parishes, churches, missions, and schools. They are particularly helpful when there is a great number of people.”
There is another tension between Martin’s provisions and the law of the Church in the matter of the reception from the chalice. This is not supposed to be given to large congregations (Redemptionis Sacramentum 102). Earlier instructions from Rome were even more restrictive: “the groups that use this faculty are to be clearly defined, well disciplined, and homogeneous” (Inaestimabile Domum [1980] 12), and the Second Vatican Council envisaged only once-in-a-lifetime occasions, such as at the baptism of an adult (Sacrosanctum Concilium 55). In addition to practical problems, and the difficulty of maintaining reverence, there is also the problem of public health, which is enormously exacerbated when congregations are large. Bishop Martin may have forgotten the COVID pandemic, but many of his people will remember it.
The liturgical tug of war between the bishops of various countries and the Holy See, from the late 1960s into the 1990s, over Communion on the tongue, the distribution of the chalice, extraordinary ministers, and female altar servers was both unfortunate and disedifying. On each of these issues, Rome at first resisted, and then made concessions. It was argued that they did not have immediate implications for the Faith, but their symbolism was contested, and the agendas of many of those pushing for change were problematic.
On kneeling for Holy Communion, the result is that while the U.S. Conference of Bishops has been allowed to establish the “norm” of standing for the reception of Holy Communion, this is still not allowed in St. Peter’s in Rome. The Office for the Liturgical Celebrations of the Supreme Pontiff explained this in an official document in 2010 (“Communion Received on the Tongue While Kneeling”), but Pope Benedict XVI had already written passionately about it before his election:
The man who learns to believe learns also to kneel, and a faith or a liturgy no longer familiar with kneeling would be sick at the core. Where it has been lost, kneeling must be rediscovered, so that, in our prayer, we remain in fellowship with the apostles and martyrs, in fellowship with the whole cosmos, indeed in union with Jesus Christ himself (The Spirit of the Liturgy (2000), p. 194).
Bishop Martin argues, first, that everyone receiving standing would be a “symbol of unity,” although of course not everyone will stand and can’t be forced to. Second, he presses the symbolism of people coming to Communion “in procession,” though the U.S. Bishops’ Conference felt moved to correct the perception, which it admits is a risk, that this approach can feel more like “standing in line in the supermarket.” Third, he is concerned that “pastors should not direct their faithful” to kneel “as something that is ‘better.’”
The difficulty with the last argument is that, as the example of St. Peter’s in Rome and the writings of Pope Benedict show, saying kneeling is better appears to be a legitimate opinion in the Church, and perhaps even the officially favored view. At any rate, it is surely not illegitimate for a pastor to agree with the practice of successive popes when they distribute Holy Communion. (Readers may like to do an image search for “Pope Francis gives Communion.”)
What I will say, in a Christmas spirit of charity toward Bishop Martin, is that he didn’t create this problem. It unfortunately goes far wider and deeper than the Diocese of Charlotte. But it remains to ask whether it was pastorally prudent of him to kick this hornets’ nest.