How Ancient Is Communion in the Hand?

Michie · Jul 22, 2023

A fourth-century bishop and theologian defended receiving Communion in the hand. Or did he?

A perennial source of debate, and occasionally of conflict, is the way we receive Holy Communion. In this article I would like to examine one of the sources often cited in this debate and place the issue into some historical context.

Up until the time of the Second Vatican Council, lay Catholics received Holy Communion under the species of bread alone, kneeling, and on the tongue. They had done so for many centuries. Reception on the tongue was mandated by a local council, at Rouen, in 878, and St. Thomas Aquinas explains that only the consecrated fingers of a priest should touch the host (Summa Theologiae IIIa, Q82, a3). In the East, leavened bread is consecrated, and soaked in the Precious Blood, and Holy Communion is distributed directly into the mouth with a spoon.

The details of earlier liturgical practice—that is to say, what Catholics did in the early centuries of the Church’s life—can be difficult to pin down. In the fourth century, St. Cyril of Jerusalem described the practice of his own time and place in a famous passage (Mystagogicae catecheses 5,21):

Coming up to receive, therefore, do not approach with your wrists extended or your fingers splayed, but making your left hand a throne for the right (for it is about to receive a King) and cupping your palm, so receive the body of Christ, and answer, “Amen.” Carefully hallow your eyes by the touch of the sacred body, and then partake, taking care to lose no part of it. Such a loss would be like a mutilation of your own body. Why, if you had been given gold dust, would you not take the utmost care to hold it fast, not letting a grain slip through your fingers, lest you be by so much the poorer? How much more carefully, then, will you guard against losing so much as a crumb of that which is more precious than gold and precious stones!

This passage is often cited to support the modernpractice of receiving Holy Communion in the hand, with adherents insisting that Cyril’s testimony roots the practice in antiquity—and thus even makes it more respectable than Communion on the tongue.

But Cyril’s description differs from the way Holy Communion is received in the hand today. Today, those who receive in the hand have the right hand under the left. The priest puts the host in the communicant’s left hand, and the communicant, with his right hand, transfers the host from his left hand to his mouth. In the practice described by Cyril, the host is placed directly into the right hand, which is lifted up to the mouth. There is no picking up the host with the fingers—nor is there the curious practice, as Cyril notes, of the communicant touching his eyes with the host.

And so, all in all, there are notable differences between the ancient practice and the modern one.

The purpose here is not to express an opinion on whether the modern practice of receiving Communion in the hand is acceptable, or even whether the practice does indeed have its origin, in whatever form, in the early Church. Rather, the point is to show that anyone who wants to establish an ancient pedigree for Communion in the hand will have to make his case elsewhere from St. Cyril of Jerusalem, whose exhortation on how to receive the Blessed Sacrament (a) differs significantly from how the faithful receive today and (b) shows no evidence that the practice he describes was widespread even in his time.

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