The Vatican’s most senior liturgical official says the pra- ctise of receiving communion on the hand is part of a “dia- bolical attack” on the Church which diminishes reverence to God.
Cardinal Robert Sarah, Prefect for the Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments, is now calling for Catholics to start receiving the host kneeling and on the tongue which he says is “more suited” to the sacrament.
“Truly the war between Michael and his Angels on one side, and Lucifer on the other, continues in the heart of the faithful: Satan’s target is the Sacrifice of the Mass and the Real Presence of Jesus in the consecrated host,” the Guinean Prelate, 72, writes in a forward to a book by Fr Federico
Bortoli, “The distribution of Communion in the hand: a historical, juridical, and pastoral overview.”
Receiving communion in the hand was practised by the early Christians and re-emerged in the years following the Second Vatican Council, the 1962-65 gathering of the world’s bishops which voted for changes in the liturgy including the use of vernacular languages.
Nevertheless, the Holy See has allowed a large number of countries across the world to allow communion to be given in the hand, and in those places it has become the widespread practise. Some of these include: the United States, England and Wales, Canada, Scotland, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Ireland, Pakistan and Malaysia and Singapore.
