Contra Frequent Holy Communion? 

How can anyone be against frequent access of the faithful to the Lord of Life, the Panis Angelicus, the medicine of immortality? That’s the very opposite reaction, you say, that one should have to the marvelous availability of Eucharistic Communion with the Risen Lord that the Church in the last century or so has made an integral part of the spiritual life of the majority of Catholics. I agree. But if one looks at the history of Eucharistic discipline, certain conditions come into view which, when lacking, can make this otherwise holy and salutary practice produce effects antithetical to the spiritual health of the faithful. 

Prior to the early 20th century, frequent Communion was usually the privilege of religious—vowed men and women, often living in monasteries and convents—and not the daily reality of the laity. Since the 12th century, the Church has required each Catholic to receive Communion only once per year, with Confession if needed. How each period in the Church realized this minimum standard varied due to levels of devotion driven by many things, not least the Holy Spirit.  Prior to the early 20th century, frequent Communion was usually the privilege of religious—vowed men and women, often living in monasteries and convents—and not the daily reality of the laity.Tweet This

We can pinpoint a significant change in the sacramental life of the laity, however, with St. Pius X’s decree of 1905, Sacra Tridentina: On Frequent and Daily Reception of Holy Communion. The title comes from the pope’s opening quotation from the Council of Trent which declares that it is the wish of that Council that at each Mass the “faithful” present should communicate not “just spiritually but sacramentally.” 

This decree is still pertinent today for several reasons. It’s conversant with history and Scripture as to the desirability of frequently receiving Communion and the obstacles, often expressive of bad theology, that rose up to hinder that practice. Reception of the Eucharist on a daily basis, says Pius, is consistent with the typology of the “Hebrews being fed with manna in the desert” so that its primary purpose is “not that the honor and reverence due to our Lord may be safe-guarded, or that it may serve as a reward or recompense of virtue bestowed on the recipients.” 

Pope Francis echoed the latter point in 2021 in a homily. The Eucharist, after all, is our “panum nostrum quotidianum.” Yet, as we will see, each of these two popes shepherded a Church with different conditions under which their flock met their Lord at Mass. 

Pius X, quite coherently, given his focus on the healing aspect of the sacrament, called out examples of “rigorism” (often inspired by Jansenism) that set too many barriers to Communion. These theologians demanded “a most pure love of God, without any admixture of defect” of those who receive. This led to whole segments of society being forbidden to receive Communion on a daily basis. Among these were “merchants and those who were married.” Reading this now, it’s hard not to think of Newman’s alleged quip that the Church would look quite silly without the laity. 

Over time, Pius X in this decree laid the basis for the overturning of Eucharist practices that had taken root in many parts of the Catholic world. In 1910, Pius also lowered reception of one’s first Communion to around the seventh year. Pope Pius X, however, didn’t just fling open the gates, and, as it were, allow the flock entrusted to him to crowd the sanctuary. There were paths one had to walk before one could approach the altar of God. 

In 1905, numerous practices mandated by canon law prepared Catholics for their momentous meeting with our Eucharistic Lord. The propaedeutic of fasting not only aided in the strengthening of their wills, it gave them a vivid sense of expectation that taught them in their flesh the significance of what was going to happen at Mass. They, dust and ashes, breathing each breath by the generosity of God, were going to meet Him at the renewal of the Cross’ bloody sacrifice so that He, their life-giving sustainer, who also sustains the cosmos, can become food, sustenance, their bread. The earth-shaking imbalance of favors in such an exchange would dwarf the mightiest of Archimedes’ levers. 

Fasting was a strong weave, therefore, in the fabric of the wedding garment (Matthew 22:11-13) that Christians have worn for centuries before approaching this mystery. Their hunger for food reflected the hunger they ought to feel for the living God. It was preparatory, educative; a non-abstraction even the simplest souls could taste. 

Here is another significant difference between St. Pius X’s celebration of Mass and ours today: paradoxically vivid in a sensory way, every Mass, until the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, was offered with what is known as the “silent canon.” Hence, after the Sanctus, the priest prayed “sotto voce” until the Pater Noster. Everyone knows the old adage that silence can at times communicate a reality more clearly than any words. This is what silence in the liturgy is about, and as such, it is another condition that in Pius X’s day prepared the faithful for a proper meeting with their Lord. 

A quarter century after its publication, we can still learn much from Ratzinger’s The Spirit of the Liturgy. The second chapter of part four (“The Body and the Liturgy”) is a short virtual charter on a reform of the Novus Ordo promulgated in 1969 aiming at one of the great goals of the future pope’s teaching: cultivating a silence that makes communion with the Lord more interior. Ratzinger writes: “Anyone who has experienced a church united in the silent praying of the Canon will know what a really filled silence is. It is at once a loud and penetrating cry to God and a Spirit-filled act of prayer.” 

Certainly, Ratzinger is writing from the perspective of the celebrant and the faithful. This was the silence of a rite he grew up in and was ordained for. He knew intimately how it provided ample preparation for the faithful and priest to meet inwardly what they were doing outwardly in word and sacrament. 

We are unified in our stunned incapacity before God’s infinite generosity. Silence arrests the mundane, and it brings us closer to the world’s original purpose; for silence becomes “a journey out of our everyday life toward the Lord, toward merging our time with his own.” This suggests a kind of “cloak of reverence,” an “iconostasis of silence” (all Ratzingerian formulations) that makes an encounter with the Lord more personal, more lasting because it is more intimate. 

Silence sheds light on the times in the Gospels when Jesus works a miracle and commands that the recipient “tell no one” (Luke 5:14) except the priest for a testimonial to God’s goodness. Similarly, in all of the synoptic Gospels, Jesus tells His disciples He is indeed the Messiah and then orders them, for the moment, not to tell anyone about this. Of course, in all of these incidents, He was trying to avoid sensation-seeking crowds, but liturgical tradition suggests something more. 

What Jesus was doing in these accounts of Scripture was creating the proper conditions for a continuing friendship with Him after an initial meeting. This was taken up in the liturgical tradition of the Church in many varied ways over the centuries. As the bridegroom was taken away from us in a visible sense, we are obliged to fast as the Master said. As the encounter in the Mass is the highest of sacramental realities, and precisely because we meet Him under the veils of sacramentality, the poise of the soul must be toward an inward, bodily encounter that the practices of fasting and silence foster. 

Hence, the Catholics of St. Pius X’s day had a way to meet their Lord that would “touch the eternal” in a silent encounter, their bodies resonating with earthly hungers mirroring their need for the food that lasts. Silence and fasting are not merely negative realities. They open doors incarnationally to the theophanic, to an inward encounter with God. 

And what have we now? We have the nearly universal practice of everyone going to Communion. We also have a crisis of lack of belief in the Real Presence and a very small percentage of Catholics who visit the confessional on a regular basis (numerous Pian popes, among others, recommend the latter for a fruitful practice of Communion). 

Of course, thanks to St. Pius X, we have a more accurate sense of who should consider themselves invited to the Lord’s table: essentially every Catholic with the right disposition. Like many realities in the life of a Catholic, this truth shimmers with a brightness at once alluring and easy to dim beneath the bushel baskets of our fallen humanity, not least when those baskets are reinforced with ecclesiastically approved custom. 

So, does frequent Holy Communion really drive away Catholics? Unfortunately, tragically, I would say yes, sometimes, maybe even often. Under the regime of our starkly lighted, amplified liturgies in which the bodies and souls of the faithful have little chance to ponder in their flesh the graces that the “negative space” of self-abnegation would open up for them, the Lord can be missed even as He is in our midst. All that is left is the blunt force of the moral law meeting them in this encounter, and so, sadly, the Eucharist becomes a confrontation with their own failures to measure up. No one measures up, of course, which is precisely why we have a savior. 

But many leave after meeting not their Lord but an embodiment of the law no one can live without grace. We do not hunger enough in our bodies (the current fasting requirements are laughable) nor have adequate silence around us to encounter the living God who calls us to Himself even with our self-inflicted wounds. Yet, Good Physician that He is, He always invites us to union with Him in a transformative relationship that enlivens our moral powers by the love which Dante saw fire the sun and the other stars. Would that our shepherds would restore these ancient disciplines that will allow more souls to meet their Lord by clothing their flock in garments suited to that feast at the heart of creation. 

[Image: After First Communion (Carl Frithjof Smith, 1892)]