'Silly' Sarah

Editorial in the current issue of The Tablet.

In the middle of the fourth century Bishop Cyril of Jerusalem gave this instruction to those who were about to join the Catholic Church: “When you come forward for Holy Communion, do not draw near with your hands wide open or with fingers spread apart; instead, with your left hand make a throne for the right hand, which will receive the King. Receive the body of Christ in the hollow of your hand and give the response: Amen.”

According to Cardinal Robert Sarah, head of the Vatican’s Congregation for Divine Worship, this way of receiving Communion constitutes “the most insidious diabolical attack” on the Blessed Sacrament, organised by Satan himself. Probably the kindest thing to say about this is that it is just plain silly.

Cardinal Sarah is evidently a very square peg in a round hole. He is an able, pious and learned man, but he holds opinions at variance with normal Catholic practice throughout the world. He advocates the saying of Mass facing East, for instance, with the priest’s back turned towards the congregation. 

Few agree. Now in the preface to a book on the subject of Communion in the hand, he does not just advocate Communion by mouth simply as a personal preference, nor even as being a more respectful way of taking Communion, which might be arguable, but because Communion by hand is part of a deliberate attack on faith in the Blessed 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,” he writes.

To be fair, Cardinal Sarah often pushes theological rhetoric to its apocalyptic limits in order to underline his point. For instance in his book 'The Power of Silence' he declares: “Without silence, God disappears in the noise. And this noise becomes all the more obsessive because God is absent. 

Unless the world rediscovers silence, it is lost. The earth then rushes into nothingness.” He presumably does not mean to be taken literally. But one sees his point.

Regarding the reception of Communion at Mass, he is missing an important symbolic dimension – a point that Pope John Paul II himself would have favoured – namely that “body language matters”. To hold out one’s hand to receive the Host is symbolic of one’s cooperation with divine grace, a gesture signifying acceptance of the offer of salvation. 

To kneel with one’s mouth open, putting out one’s tongue, is as passive and submissive as it is possible to be. It takes unworthiness to new heights, suggesting that human sinfulness removes all merit from one’s own actions and that the divine presence among us is remote and unearthly. 

It smacks of Donatism – that only the pure may participate in the Sacraments – and it rejects the fundamental truth, rediscovered by Vatican II, that participation in Christ’s priesthood is not confined to the clergy but includes all the faithful.