Reception of Communion in the Hand - A Brief History
The manner in which the faithful receive the Body of Christ in Holy Communion is not a matter of indifferent custom. It is among the most sensitive index of a people's faith in the Real Presence, and its history in the Latin Church records both a long development toward greater reverence and, in the last sixty years, a startling and largely unrequested reversal of that development. This essay sets out that history in full, with expanded patristic, conciliar, and magisterial sourcing, and then turns — deliberately and without the false neutrality that so much contemporary catechesis affects — to the case against the practice of Communion in the hand as it has come to be practiced in the ordinary form since 1969.
I. The Early Church: Reception in the Hand as a Reverent, Regulated Practice (1st–8th/9th Centuries)
In the first eight centuries, more or less, reception of the Eucharist in the hand was the ordinary practice of both East and West. It must be understood, however, that this was not the casual, standing, self-service reception familiar in many parishes today. The faithful approached with hands extended and joined — the right hand cupped beneath the left to form what the Fathers called a throne — received the Sacred Host in the palm, and consumed it immediately and without delay, under the eye of the minister, with extraordinary care taken against the loss of any fragment.
Tertullian, writing in North Africa around the year 211, refers to the daily habit of Christians touching the Eucharist with the same hands used in ordinary life, and does so in the course of warning against the incompatibility of idolatrous practices with hands that have touched the Body of the Lord.¹ St. Cyril of Jerusalem — or, on the view of some scholars, his successor Bishop John of Jerusalem — gives the fullest surviving instruction in the fourth-century Mystagogical Catecheses: the communicant is to make of the left hand a throne for the right, to hollow the palm, to receive the Body of Christ while responding “Amen,” and then “to be careful lest you lose any of it,” for “whatever you lose is a loss to you as if it were one of your own members.”²
St. Cyprian of Carthage, writing during the Decian persecution, describes the peril of profanation among the lapsed and the gravity attached even then to unworthy handling of the Sacrament.³ St. Augustine's Sermon 227 and his commentary on Psalm 33 press the same theme of reverent awareness in reception.⁴ St. Cyril of Alexandria's Commentary on St. Luke and Theodore of Mopsuestia's Catechetical Homilies attest the same discipline in the Christian East, as does the Apostolic Constitutions (Book VIII), which prescribes the bishop's formula of distribution and the deacon's care for what remains in the vessels.⁵ The Council in Trullo of 692 — binding in the East, though never received as such in the West — went so far as to prefer the bare human hand, fashioned in the image of God, to gold or silver vessels devised by human art for receiving the Sacrament, and threatened excommunication against any communicant who employed such a vessel instead of the hand.⁶
Even here, though, the practice was hedged with restriction rather than left to private impulse: distribution belonged to the ordained minister, self-communication outside emergency circumstances (Viaticum during persecution, for instance) was progressively restricted to clergy and consecrated virgins, and the faithful were repeatedly warned, in terms that would strike the modern communicant as severe, of the danger of sacrilege. The record does not support the claim, sometimes advanced today, that the ancient practice was casual. It was reverent, but it was also transitional — the Church had not yet drawn the full disciplinary consequences of her own developing theology of the Real Presence.
II. The Turn Toward Reception on the Tongue (6th–9th Centuries)
As the Church's articulation of the Real Presence sharpened — a development traceable through the Christological and Eucharistic controversies of the patristic age — external discipline moved to match internal conviction. The distribution of the Sacrament was reserved ever more exclusively to the ordained, and the custom of placing the Host directly upon the tongue of the kneeling or standing communicant, without the intermediate contact of lay hands, gradually displaced the older practice.
The custom is attested in Rome from the sixth century.⁷ Pope St. Gregory the Great's Dialogues (Book III) already presuppose ministerial placement rather than self-communication in several miracle accounts. In Gaul, the change is documented through the Carolingian reform councils: the Synod of Rouen, meeting around 878, decreed in terms that leave no room for misconstruction — “Let not the Eucharist be put in the hand of any layman or laywoman, but only in the mouth” — a canon directed at curbing abuses (including the alleged use of the Sacrament in superstitious folk practices) that had crept in where lay handling was tolerated.⁸ The Synod of Tours (813) and the Council of Chelsea in England (816) issued parallel legislation restricting lay contact.⁹
By the High Middle Ages the theological rationale had been fully articulated. St. Thomas Aquinas holds that, out of reverence for the Sacrament, nothing may touch it except what has itself been consecrated — hence the corporal, the chalice, and the priest's own hands, anointed at ordination for this very office. “It is not lawful for any other person to touch it,” he writes, “except from necessity, for instance, if it were to fall upon the ground, or in some other case of urgency.”¹⁰ Kneeling reception on the tongue had by this point become the sole ordinary practice of the entire Latin Church, a discipline of more than a thousand years' standing, presupposed rather than newly legislated by the Council of Trent's twenty-first session.¹¹ The Eastern Churches, for their part, retained reception in the hand or by intinction, generally standing — a divergence of discipline the Latin Church has never treated as doctrinally significant, though it has treated her own discipline as a matter of the deepest pastoral seriousness.
III. From the Middle Ages to the Mid-Twentieth Century: An Unbroken Norm
For more than a millennium, reception on the tongue while kneeling was not merely the prevailing custom of the Latin Church but its only ordinary form, protected by canonical legislation, catechetical instruction, and — not least — by centuries of Eucharistic piety in which saints from Thomas Aquinas to the Curé of Ars to St. Thérèse of Lisieux formed their interior lives. No pope, council, or Roman congregation before the 1960s contemplated the reintroduction of lay reception in the hand as a general discipline. Pius XII's encyclical Mediator Dei (1947), the last great pre-conciliar statement on the liturgy, presupposes the traditional manner throughout and nowhere suggests its alteration.¹²
IV. The 1960s: An Illicit Revival
In the early 1960s, without any authorization from the Holy See, the practice of receiving the Host in the hand reappeared in parts of the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Germany. It spread through unauthorized liturgical experimentation, encouraged in some quarters by a mistaken identification of “active participation” with the mere alteration of external gesture, and by an appeal — historically thin, as the foregoing sections show — to supposed primitive practice. Whatever its motives, the innovation was, canonically and liturgically, an abuse: it was introduced against the standing law of the universal Church, and it spread by the same logic of accomplished fact that governs every liturgical abuse — first tolerated locally, then normalized by repetition, then presented retroactively as a fait accompli to which Rome had little practical choice but to accommodate itself.
V. Memoriale Domini (29 May 1969): Rome's Answer
Alarmed at the spread of the practice, Pope St. Paul VI ordered a worldwide consultation of the world's bishops on whether the innovation should be permitted. The result, reported in the instruction Memoriale Domini issued by the Sacred Congregation for Divine Worship, was overwhelmingly negative: of the bishops responding, 1,233 opposed any change, 597 favored it, and 315 favored it only with reservations — a supermajority, on any reckoning, against innovation.¹³
On the strength of that consultation, Paul VI directed that the traditional method “must be retained,” and gave his reasons in terms later generations of catechists have too often allowed to lapse from memory: the traditional manner of distribution is to be kept “not merely because it has many centuries of tradition behind it, but especially because it expresses the faithful's reverence for the Eucharist” and because it “removes the danger of profanation.”¹⁴ The instruction is explicit that the later development — placement upon the tongue by the minister alone — arose from “a greater feeling of reverence towards this sacrament and a deeper humility,” and it enumerates, without euphemism, the risks attending any relaxation: “the danger of a loss of reverence for the August sacrament of the altar, of profanation, and of adulterating the true doctrine.”¹⁵
Only where the contrary usage had already become so entrenched that its suppression could not be achieved without serious pastoral harm did Memoriale Domini permit episcopal conferences to petition Rome for an indult, by a secret ballot requiring a two-thirds majority, subject to strict conditions detailed in the accompanying letter to the conferences (En réponse à la demande): the new manner was never to exclude the old; its introduction was to be gradual and preceded by thorough catechesis stressing reverence and the danger of profanation; the communicant was to consume the Host immediately, in the minister's presence; special care for fragments — including retention of the paten — was required; self-intinction and the passing of the Host from hand to hand were forbidden outright; and each conference was to report to Rome after six months.¹⁶ The instruction is, in short, a document of reluctant toleration hedged about with warnings, not an endorsement.
VI. The Granting of Indults, 1969 Onward
Indults followed in short order: Belgium (31 May 1969), then France and Germany (June 1969), the Netherlands and Bolivia (September–October 1969), and Canada (1970).¹⁷ The bishops of the United States voted in favor in 1977, and the Holy See granted the indult on 17 June 1977, conditioned, as elsewhere, on proper catechesis.¹⁸ By the late 1970s more than fifty episcopal conferences held the indult; within another decade nearly all Latin-rite territories had followed. A small number of dioceses and, in a few cases, entire episcopal conferences never sought the indult or later withdrew it; Communion on the tongue alone remains the practice in such places to this day.¹⁹
VII. Subsequent Roman Documents: Confirming the Norm, Tightening the Conditions
Later Roman documents did not relax the 1969 framework; if anything they tightened it, precisely because the abuses Memoriale Domini had foreseen had by then materialized. Inaestimabile Donum (1980), issued under John Paul II, expressly forbids self-communication and the passing of the Host among the faithful.²⁰ Redemptionis Sacramentum (25 March 2004) restates, in terms that admit no local override, that “each of the faithful always has the right to receive Holy Communion on the tongue, at his choice,” that where the indult for reception in the hand exists the Host must still be placed in the hand by the minister and consumed immediately in the minister's presence, and that “if there is a risk of profanation, then Holy Communion should not be given in the hand.”²¹ The General Instruction of the Roman Missal and its national adaptations (nos. 160–161) preserve the same structure: two permitted manners, but the communicant's choice of the traditional manner — including kneeling — may never be refused or discouraged by a minister.²² Canon 838 of the 1983 Code establishes that even these local adaptations require the confirmation of the Holy See; they are concessions from the center, not autonomous grants to the periphery.²³
VIII. The Present Day
As of 2026, both manners of reception remain permitted in the overwhelming majority of Latin-rite dioceses, and no one may licitly be compelled to one or the other, though local restrictions — most controversially during the 2020 pandemic — have from time to time been imposed and have provoked lasting resentment among the faithful attached to the traditional manner.²⁴ A minority of dioceses and religious communities have never permitted, or have since withdrawn, the indult. No encyclical has directly addressed the question; the governing texts remain the 1969 instruction and its successors. This is worth stating plainly: the practice familiar to most Catholics born after the Council rests not on any conciliar mandate, nor on any decree of an ecumenical council, but on a disciplinary concession granted with evident reluctance, hedged with conditions that are today very widely ignored in practice.
IX. The Case Against Communion in the Hand
Having set out the history at length, this essay departs from the pose of neutrality that so much diocesan catechesis on this subject affects, and states plainly what the history in fact supports: the modern, near-universal practice of Communion in the hand, as it is actually carried out in most parishes today, represents a real diminishment of reverence for the Blessed Sacrament, was never mandated by the Church's supreme authority, was introduced by disobedience rather than legitimate development, and has coincided with — even if it has not been the sole cause of — a documented collapse in belief in the Real Presence among Catholics in the countries where it is practiced.
The argument proceeds on four grounds.
First, on the ground of origin. Communion in the hand entered the life of the Church, in the plain words of Memoriale Domini itself, as an unauthorized innovation that Rome tolerated only after the fact and only where suppression had become pastorally impracticable.²⁵ Archbishop Malcolm Ranjith, then Secretary of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, stated the matter without qualification in his preface to Bishop Athanasius Schneider's Dominus Est: “Speaking of Communion in the hand, it is necessary for all to recognize that the practice was, in fact, an abuse.”²⁶ A discipline whose entire historical warrant is a decades-long act of ecclesial disobedience, subsequently regularized by indult, does not carry the same weight as a discipline of unbroken and legitimate development, and Catholics are entitled to know the difference.
Second, on the ground of theological signification. St. Thomas's principle — that reverence for the Sacrament requires that nothing touch it save what has itself been consecrated to that office — was not an arbitrary scruple but a considered theological judgment about the fittingness of contact with the true Body of Christ.²⁷ Bishop Juan Rodolfo Laise, longtime bishop of San Luis, Argentina, and author of the fullest documentary study of the question, makes the related pastoral point directly: “With Communion in the hand, a miracle would be required during each distribution of Communion to avoid some particles from falling to the ground or remaining in the hand of the faithful,” whereas reception on the tongue by the minister's own consecrated hands “avoids placing himself in the occasion of committing a sin by negligently dropping a fragment of the Body of Christ.”²⁸ Bishop Athanasius Schneider — who as a boy received his own first Communion in a clandestine Mass under Soviet persecution, and who later obtained Pope Benedict XVI's written endorsement of his position (“Your arguments are convincing,” the Pope wrote to him in 2008) — argues at length in Dominus Est that the two-millennia witness of the Fathers, East and West, converges on the same conclusion: that the desire to honor the August Person of Christ at the moment of Communion “with love and fear” (cum amore ac timore) is the animating principle behind every later development of the Church's Eucharistic discipline, and that the practice of the last sixty years represents a rupture with that principle rather than its continuation.²⁹
Third, on the ground of documented consequence. Surveys of Catholic belief in the Real Presence conducted in the United States and Western Europe over the past several decades have repeatedly found that only a minority of self-identified Catholics affirm the Church's actual teaching that the consecrated Host is substantially the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Christ rather than a symbol.³⁰ Correlation is not identity of cause, and no serious writer on this subject has claimed that the change in the manner of reception is the sole explanation for that collapse; catechetical failure across the board bears the larger share of responsibility. But it is no accident that the practice which removed the last remaining external sign distinguishing the Eucharist from ordinary bread — the refusal to touch it with one's own hands, as one would refuse to touch nothing else on earth — coincided with the very decades in which belief in what the Eucharist is fell away most sharply. The sign was not incidental to the doctrine it signified; Rome's own 1969 instruction said as much when it warned that the new practice risked “adulterating the true doctrine.”³¹
Fourth, on the ground of testimony. Among the most widely repeated witnesses invoked in this debate is an account, first given publicly by Fr. George Rutler in a 1989 Good Friday sermon at St. Agnes Church in New York, of a conversation with St. Teresa of Calcutta, in which she is reported to have said that the saddest thing she witnessed anywhere in the world was watching the faithful receive Communion in the hand.³² A separate and independent account was later given by Fr. John Perricone, who reported that Mother Teresa named Communion in the hand, without hesitation, as the greatest evil she had encountered in a life spent among the most wretched of the earth.³³ It is only fair to record that the Missionaries of Charity's own center in California has disputed the precise wording of the quotation, stating that it does not appear in her writings and that the sisters do not recognize it, and that Fr. Rutler himself later clarified, in a piece written after her canonization, that her remark to him concerned the interior disposition of communicants receiving “irreverently” in general, and was not, in his own account, a technical judgment on hand versus tongue as such.³⁴ The reader should weigh the testimony accordingly. What is not in dispute, on any account, including that of her own order, is that Mother Teresa herself invariably received on the tongue and kneeling, that she regarded any irreverent reception of the Eucharist as a source of the deepest sorrow, and that she never once, in any authenticated writing, offered a defense of Communion in the hand as spiritually preferable or theologically indifferent.³⁵ A saint's settled practice, sustained across a life of heroic charity spent in constant proximity to the most degraded conditions on earth, is itself a form of testimony that does not depend on the wording of a single disputed remark.
None of this denies that the indult, once granted, was validly granted, that Communion received in the hand under the conditions Rome has laid down is valid and licit, or that countless devout Catholics receive in this manner in good conscience and with genuine faith in the Real Presence. The argument is narrower and, for that reason, harder to dismiss: that the burden of proof was never discharged by those who introduced the change; that the Church's own supreme legislator granted the indult reluctantly, under conditions that are today routinely ignored — communicants who do not consume the Host immediately, ministers who do not verify that the hand is empty, the near-total disappearance of the paten; and that a Catholic who chooses, as is his unqualified right under Redemptionis Sacramentum, to receive kneeling and on the tongue, is not the innovator in this debate. He is the one standing where the whole Church stood, without interruption, for the greater part of two thousand years.
X. Conclusion
The history recorded here is not a story of doctrinal change — the Church has never taught, and could never teach, that the Eucharist is anything other than the true Body and Blood of Christ regardless of the manner in which It is received. It is a story of disciplinary development interrupted: centuries of the Church's own pastoral wisdom drawing her, slowly and for reasons she stated plainly at each step, toward an ever more exacting external reverence, followed by sixty years in which that development was reversed by disobedience first and permitted by concession second. A publication committed to the whole truth of the Church's tradition owes its readers not merely the dates and documents, which are readily available, but the conclusion those documents themselves invite: that reverence, once relaxed, is not easily recovered, and that the faithful who wish to receive their Lord as the Church received Him for a thousand years and more retain, by explicit and unrevoked Roman decree, an unqualified right to do so.
Sourcing
1. Tertullian, De Corona, ch. 3 (c. A.D. 211), on the daily handling of the Eucharist and its incompatibility with idolatrous practice.
2. St. Cyril of Jerusalem (or John of Jerusalem), Mystagogical Catecheses 5.21–22 (PG 33:1125–1128).
3. St. Cyprian of Carthage, De Lapsis 26 (PL 4:488–489).
4. St. Augustine, Sermon 227 (PL 38:1099); Enarrationes in Psalmos 33, s. 1, 10.
5. St. Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on St. Luke, hom. 142; Theodore of Mopsuestia, Catechetical Homilies 16.27–30; Apostolic Constitutions VIII.13.
6. Council in Trullo (Quinisext Council), Canon 101 (A.D. 692).
7. Josef A. Jungmann, The Mass of the Roman Rite, vol. 2 (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1986), on the Roman practice from the sixth century.
8. Synod of Rouen (c. A.D. 878), canon cited in medieval canonical collections; cf. Jungmann, op. cit.
9. Synod of Tours (813), canon 50; Council of Chelsea (816), canon 8, on restricting lay contact with the consecrated species.
10. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 82, a. 3.
11. Council of Trent, Session 21 (16 July 1562), ch. 2 and canons on Communion under one species.
12. Pius XII, Mediator Dei (20 November 1947), on the Church's Eucharistic discipline generally.
13. Sacred Congregation for Divine Worship, Memoriale Domini (29 May 1969), reporting the consultation of bishops: 1,233 against, 597 in favor, 315 in favor with reservations.
14. Memoriale Domini, on the retention of the traditional manner and its expression of reverence.
15. Memoriale Domini, enumerating the dangers of the new manner: loss of reverence, profanation, and doctrinal adulteration.
16. En réponse à la demande (1969), accompanying letter to episcopal conferences outlining conditions for the indult.
17. Indult approvals: Belgium (31 May 1969); France and Germany (June 1969); Netherlands and Bolivia (September–October 1969); Canada (1970).
18. United States indult: episcopal vote 1977; Holy See approval, 17 June 1977.
19. On dioceses retaining reception on the tongue alone, see Bishop Juan Rodolfo Laise, Communion in the Hand: Documents and History (Kansas City: Angelus Press, 1997), appendices.
20. Congregation for Divine Worship, Inaestimabile Donum (3 April 1980), no. 9.
21. Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, Redemptionis Sacramentum (25 March 2004), nos. 90–94.
22. General Instruction of the Roman Missal (current typical edition), nos. 160–161, and national adaptations.
23. Code of Canon Law (1983), can. 838 §§1–4.
24. Congregation for Divine Worship, circular correspondence to episcopal conferences (2020), and related diocesan decrees on pandemic-era restrictions.
25. Memoriale Domini, cited above, nn. 13–15.
26. Malcolm Ranjith, preface to Athanasius Schneider, Dominus Est — It Is the Lord! Reflections of a Bishop of Central Asia on Holy Communion (Pine Beach, NJ: Newman House Press, 2008).
27. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 82, a. 3, cited above, n. 10.
28. Juan Rodolfo Laise, Communion in the Hand: Documents and History, cited above, n. 19.
29. Athanasius Schneider, Dominus Est, cited above, n. 26, pp. 49–50, and conclusion; on Benedict XVI's written response (“Ihre Argumente sind überzeugend”), see Catholic World Report, 4 November 2013.
30. See, representatively, Pew Research Center, “What Americans Know About Religion” and related surveys on Catholic belief in transubstantiation, and prior Gallup/CARA studies from the late twentieth century onward.
31. Memoriale Domini, cited above, n. 15.
32. Fr. George Rutler, Good Friday sermon, St. Agnes Church, New York, 1989, as subsequently reported in print by multiple Catholic outlets.
33. Fr. John Perricone, interview with Matt Fradd, Pints with Aquinas, as reported by LifeSiteNews and Catholic Online News.
34. Mother Teresa Center (Missionaries of Charity, California), public statement disputing the exact wording of the quotation; Fr. George Rutler, clarifying article published after Mother Teresa's 2016 canonization, distinguishing her remark on interior irreverence generally from a specific verdict on the manner of reception.
35. On Mother Teresa's own invariable practice of receiving on the tongue and kneeling, see the testimony of Msgr. (later Cardinal) statements collected in Crisis Magazine, “Memories of Mother Teresa” (2016), and the Mother Teresa Center's own published clarifications.
