This is one of those rare books which, although only 50-odd pages, addresses a serious question with such originality and persuasiveness that it will make the reader re-think and possibly change his mode of liturgical behaviour. The question addressed by Bishop Schneider, auxiliary bishop of the diocese of Karaganda, in Kazakhstan, is: what is the appropriate way to receive Our Lord in Communion; should it be standing and in the hand or kneeling and on the tongue?

This question invariably arises in the context of the ordinary or extraordinary form of the Mass; because of the heated nature of this debate it is easy to lose sight of the central issue: reverence towards God who makes himself accessible to us in the Blessed Sacrament. Bishop Schneider is not pressing the case for the Tridentine rite (though I suspect he may be sympathetic towards it); he is simply ‘reflecting’, to use his own word, on the importance of our encounter with God in Communion – and how this should impact on our behaviour.

The book falls into two complementary parts. The first describes what it was like for German Catholics, exiled to remote parts of Soviet Asia during the Stalinist period and unable to practise their Faith or attend Mass for years on end. The author was a child of such a family; doubtless the devotion he witnessed played a large part in his own priestly vocation. Schneider comments that this underground Church was alive because it “did not lack women – often mothers and grandmothers – with a ‘priestly’ soul who safeguarded and even administered the Eucharist with extraordinary love, with care and with the greatest reverence possible.”

He describes three exceptional women: Maria Schneider, his mother; Pulcheria Koch, his great-aunt; and Maria Stang, a parishioner in Karaganda. They were prepared to make great sacrifices and expose themselves to grave danger for the sake of the Faith. They were helped by Fr (now Blessed) Alexij Saritski, a Ukrainian Greek-Catholic priest who visited them in secret to administer the Sacraments. Once he left the author’s mother a consecrated Host to give to her dying mother. For this she wore new white gloves, held the Host with tweezers and later burned the envelope in which it had been kept.

The family then had to move to Kirghistan; Pulcheria was given a consecrated Host to expose in secret on the first Friday of the month for nine months for a little group of the faithful, and then consume. From 1965 Maria Stang, deported to Kazakhstan, used to travel 1000 km to receive from a priest a pyx containing Hosts to take back to her fellow-‘parishioners’; for 30 years she would gather them together on Sundays, teach catechism, prepare couples for marriage and distribute Communion.

The point of these stories is to show the reader both the hunger for Communion and the reverence shown towards the Sacrament on the part of these women and their hidden communities of faith. In the second part of his book, Schneider explains with scholarship and argument how the Church’s gradually developing practice for over 1500 years has been to distribute Communion on the tongue to the faithful kneeling down. There are many references to Scripture, the early Church Fathers and to ancient liturgical rites concerning adoration and the humility and receptivity necessary in the recipient of the Sacrament.

The early Lutheran communities received Communion kneeling and on the tongue as Luther did not deny the Real Presence; the Reformers Zwingli and Calvin, who did deny it, allowed the bread to be distributed in the hand when standing. There is a telling quotation from Faber, when still an Anglican and in the church of St John Lateran Rome in 1843, at how impressed he was by the sight of Pope Gregory who “descended from his throne and knelt at the foot of the altar...a scene more touching than I had ever seen before...”

The author concludes, “The Church must be reformed, starting with the Eucharist!” In his preface, Bishop Malcolm Ranjith, secretary of the Congregation for Divine Worship, reminds the reader, that “It is now time to evaluate carefully the practice of Communion in the hand and if necessary to abandon what was never actually called for in the Vatican II document, Sacrosanctum Consilium.” With its glossary and notes at the end, the book makes an overwhelming case for a return to a reverence now lost in translation.

© 2011 Francis Phillips

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