Kneel vs stand for Communion: the debate again ignites
The recent letter of Cardinal Blaise Cupich of Chicago on the manner of receiving Holy Communion has reignited the long-standing debate over kneeling and standing. Contrary to the impression one might receive from the at times acrimonious online debate, Cardinal Cupich’s instructions are par for the course and certainly not outlandish. The problem derives from The post Kneel vs stand for Communion: the debate again ignites appeared first on Catholic Herald.
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The recent letter of Cardinal Blaise Cupich of Chicago on the manner of receiving Holy Communion has reignited the long-standing debate over kneeling and standing.
Contrary to the impression one might receive from the at times acrimonious online debate, Cardinal Cupich’s instructions are par for the course and certainly not outlandish. The problem derives from the complex relationship between the norms agreed by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and a deeper layer of liturgical law and magisterial teaching, which I summarised for Una Voce International here.
Like nearly every Bishops’ Conference around the world (that of Kazakhstan is one exception), the US Bishops long ago asked for, and received, permission from the Holy See to permit the Faithful to receive Holy Communion in the hand, instead of on the tongue. At the same time, communion rails were being torn out in churches all over the world, and instead of priests moving up and down a row of communicants kneeling at the rail, they got the Faithful to queue up while they stayed in the same place.
The two practices – kneeling vs. standing, and receiving on the tongue vs. in the hand – have become fused into a single issue: a traditional practice which emphasises reverence, and a post-Vatican II practice that is promoted in the name of an “adult” attitude, and, when conflict arises, in terms of uniformity and obedience to official directives.
Accordingly, Cardinal Cupich insists on standing to receive Holy Communion on a number of grounds. First, he makes reference to the Second Vatican Council, though it must be to the spirit rather than the letter to which he appeals, as that Council made no reference to the manner of receiving Holy Communion.
Second, he demands obedience to the rules set down by the Bishops’ Conference. Third, he appeals to the conceptualisation of the queue for Holy Communion as a “procession”, which is made by the General Instruction of the Roman Missal (44), which calls for “decorum” in this regard.
His Eminence suggests that it is disruptive to the procession if it terminates with people kneeling, as opposed to standing still, to receive Holy Communion; though it is unclear why this should be so. Far more disruptive to the flow, surely, is the “gesture of reverence” (bowing) that the General Instruction calls for (160), which introduces a pause in proceedings with every communicant.
Finally, Cardinal Cupich suggests that kneeling “draws attention to oneself”. It is this, perhaps, that explains the heat of the recent debate, since it seems to be more a calculated insult than a reasoned argument. The point of kneeling, after all, is to draw attention, particularly one’s own attention, to the Person to Whom one kneels. Indeed:
“It may well be that kneeling is alien to modern culture – insofar as it is a culture, for this culture has turned away from the faith and no longer knows the One before whom kneeling is the right, indeed the intrinsically necessary gesture. 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.”
This passage constitutes a rather robust reproof of Cardinal Cupich’s suggestion that kneeling is “contrary to the norms and tradition of the Church”; I didn’t write it – the author was Cardinal Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI (The Spirit of the Liturgy). If kneeling is ever called for in the liturgy, it is at the moment one receives one’s Creator in Holy Communion.
It seems reasonable for Cardinal Cupich to urge that which liturgical norms recommend. For the sake of completeness, though, he might have mentioned that the same rules forbid priests from refusing Communion to anyone who kneels; demand the use of the Communion plate; severely limit reception of the Chalice; limit the use of lay Ministers for Holy Communion to exceptional circumstances; and recommend reception on the tongue (see Redemptionis Sacrosanctum 91, 93, 102, 158, and Memoriale Domini, respectively).
At this point, complaining about failures to keep liturgical law is like handing out speeding tickets at Brands Hatch. A meaningful discussion has to go deeper: we have to ask why kneeling might be appropriate, or not.
And we need to do that, precisely as Cardinal Cupich invites us, in terms of the principle that “the law of praying establishes the law of believing”. That is the task undertaken by Cardinal Ratzinger in the earlier passage: “the man who learns to believe learns also to kneel”.
Photo: Roman Catholic Austrian pilgrims receive Holy Communion in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, considered by many the most holy shrine to Christianity and the burial and resurrection site of Jesus, in Jerusalem’s Old City, 3 April 2005. (Photo by EITAN ABRAMOVICH/AFP via Getty Images.)
Dr Joseph Shaw is Chairman of the Latin Mass Society (lms.org.uk), President of Una Voce International (fiuv.org), and a public philosopher and freelance writer.
The post Kneel vs stand for Communion: the debate again ignites appeared first on Catholic Herald.
