Last Sunday, I hope for the last time, I received communion in the hand. Over the years I have heard a few testimonials, mostly on EWTN, from Catholics who said they'd felt closer to Our Lord when they did so for the first time. That has also been my experience, but what a horrible intimacy it was, I am can hardly express.

After a good, Christocentric homily, Father said the most important part of Mass, and in no time the Eucharist was given out. As always, I switched lines so as to go to Father, bowed, as it's demanded everyone do in a uniform way, clasped my hands and held out my tongue. But Father refused me, arguing, of all things, that it was flu season, and he didn't want to risk the spread of disease. I protested, but he was resolute. I almost walked away, but that would've infuriated him. Reasoning quickly, I remembered that I'd been to Penance the Sunday before, and figured I could bear communion in the hand just this once. Alas, but when I took the light wafer into my hand, a gloom stole over me. I held the Vulnerable, the Betrayed by man, in the species of a tiny round of flat bread with a cross on it. I hastily consumed Him, His grief for Christians sensible. The Virgin Mary, I imagined, must have felt remotely this sorrow when she assisted in bringing Christ down from the Cross.

Such insignificant objections. Yes, the flu is about, and the graying composition of the parish may be more susceptible to said virus, but reverence for the Body and Blood of Christ is in a whole different logical ballpark. Our Lord always comes first. He lay down His life for His friends, setting the example we, His imitators, must follow. For to hold too fast to our lives is to lose them, and to forget them in our loving loyalty to save them. Indeed, some of those Christians who take seriously what God told us this Bread is in John 6 have literally forfeited their lives for our Friend. Paul Comtois is a recent example, and a sure saint. Assuming we, too, desire to be saints, how can we justify forbidding a reverent practice just because it might prevent illness? The bar is high- the Lord tells us that the gate is narrow- and we can conscience such disregard lest we get sick? This, surely, is one of the "outrages, sacrileges, and indifferences" the angel at Fatima spoke of in the Act of Reparation prayer:

O, Most Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, I adore You profoundly. I offer You the Most Precious Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, present in all the Tabernacles of the world, in reparation for all the outrages, sacrileges and indifference by which He is offended. By the Infinite merits of His Most Sacred Heart and through the intercession of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, I beg of You the conversion of poor sinners.

While more Novus Ordo-type Catholics may object by arguing that communion in the hand can be just as reverent as communion on the tongue, I remind them that this is not another debate over whether their preferred practice is legitimate. This is the forbidding of a way of receiving whose holiness is beyond question. Hopefully there will be no conservative/traditionalist debate over the impiety of refusing to give communion on the tongue.

Consequently, I will be at Sacred Heart, Northampton's traditionally French church, for Mass this morning. While my mother worried that the forbidding of communion in the hand may have been imposed by the bishop, making a parish switch futile, I think we would've heard before if that had happened. But believe me, if the pastor at Sacred Heart stoops to the same low level, you will hear about that too!