Standing, kneeling for Communion, take your pick. On tongue or in hand. Reverence, anyone? Glad-handing usher, what would Jesus do? What Benedict said . . .

. . . before and after he became Benedict.

For starters, U. S. bishops on standing and or kneeling:

In the U.S., where it’s their call, they have decided for standing, “unless an individual member of the faithful wishes to receive Communion while kneeling."

So it’s a non-issue. That was quick.

They cite canon law, as referenced by a Vatican congregation in a 2004 instruction:

It is not licit to deny Holy Communion to any of Christ's faithful solely on the grounds, for example, that the person wishes to receive the Eucharist kneeling or standing.

They chime in with specifics on tongue or hand:

Those who receive Communion may receive either in the hand or on the tongue, and the decision should be that of the individual receiving, not of the person distributing Communion.

If on the hand . . .

. . . the hands should . . . be clean. If one is right handed, the left hand should rest upon the right. The host will then be laid in the palm of the left hand and then taken by the right hand to the mouth.

If one is left-handed this is reversed. It is not appropriate to reach out with the fingers and take the host from the person distributing.

It’s a prescription for reverence, almost comically spelled out.

How often is it explained from pulpit or podium? Rarely if at all? For that matter, how often is reverence explained, period? Peddled as a requirement? Inner life in general of the massgoer?

Could be a touchy subject. Preacher would want to have his ducks in a row, making a point so his meaning is unmistakable while putting as few noses out of joint at possible. Could be a problem.

The usher who glad-hands people he alerts to get out of the pew for the communion “procession” might prove a hard nut to crack. But if the procession is all it’s cracked up to be, and we best not doubt that, the risks would be worthwhile, or might be.

Jesus said things to the Apostles at which they balked, to which he always answered, If you want to be my disciple, etc. . . . He was not there to negotiate.

A nation’s bishops report what’s been decided by higher authority — but hold your hat on that matter in our age or current episode of synodality — they are making no change in liturgical law. They look to Rome for that, theoretically at least, or hopefully. Anyhow, doesn’t apply here. Just theorizing.

. . . . [It] does re-emphasize, however, the mandate of the Second Vatican Council . . . that the full, conscious, and active participation of the laity is the goal to be considered before all else in the reform of the sacred liturgy.

Yes and no on that before all else, as Benedict XVI said before he was Benedict:

In the renewed liturgy, what is imperative is a new reverence in the way we treat it, a new understanding of its message and its reality, so that rediscovery does not become the first stage of irreparable loss.”

So lay participation isn’t everything.

He likened pre-Vatican 2 liturgy to “a fresco . . . preserved from damage, but . . . almost completely overlaid with whitewash . . . laid bare by the Liturgical Movement and Vatican 2.

Whitewash?

“. . . excessive focus on the liturgy as rubrics or external ceremonial; a textbook, scholastic approach . . . that was concerned with questions of validity and juridical concerns over its theological meaning and true spiritual content; what he refers to as the “wall of Latinity” which prevented a substantial number of the faithful from participation in the liturgy and caused the laity to focus on their own private prayers and devotions and muted the communal nature of the liturgical celebration.^”

No reformer of the ‘70s could have asked for anything more. But . . .

“There must be no question of its being covered with whitewash again, but what is imperative is a new reverence [yes!] in the way we treat it, a new understanding of its message and its reality, so that rediscovery does not become the first stage of irreparable loss.”

It would take some doing, as he understood and later as pope kept in mind when he called for his much maligned “reform of the reform.”

And a word as pope in 2007 for the Western Church’s mother tongue, honored almost everywhere in the breach:

I ask that future priests, from their time in the seminary, receive the preparation needed . . . to celebrate Mass in Latin, and also to use Latin texts and execute Gregorian chant; nor should we forget that the faithful can be taught to recite the more common prayers in Latin, and also to sing parts of the liturgy to Gregorian chant.

Sounds good to some of us, but as we know, it’s a vision under attack. If he could only have thought twice about resigning.

Well if he did and it stopped him cold . . . Then what?