Kneel Before Thy God in the Most Holy Eucharist

In July of 2002 the (please withhold the laughter) United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (thank you for your restraint) issued a [IMHO] seemingly-blasphemous statement which read "The bishops of the United States have decided that the normative posture for receiving Holy Communion should be standing. Kneeling is not a licit posture for receiving Holy Communion in the dioceses of the United States of America unless the bishop of a particular diocese has derogated from this norm in an individual and extraordinary circumstance."

Let us step back 12 years to the instruction by Pope Servant of God John Paul II, where in Inaestimabile Donum claims that "When the faithful communicate kneeling, no other sign of reverence towards the Blessed Sacrament is required, since kneeling itself is a sign of adoration." (#11)

Again step forward to October 2001, Cardinal Medina Estévez, Prefect for the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, wrote a letter to the Bishops of the United States regarding certain New Word Innovations (my words) and American Adaptations (his words). He says that "the tenor of not a few letters received from the faithful in various Dioceses of that country leads the Congregation, even after a very careful consideration of such data, to urge the Conference to introduce a clause that would protect those faithful who will inevitably be led by their own sensibilities to kneel from imprudent action by priests, deacons or lay ministers in particular, or from being refused Holy Communion for such a reason as happens on occasion." (full text)

To further illustrate my point, and to completely beat this dead horse into submission, let me relate to you the letter written seven months after the USCCB's letter, again from the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. The relevant portion of this letter reads "communicants who choose to kneel are not to be denied Holy Communion on these grounds. Indeed, the faithful should not be imposed upon nor accused of disobedience and of acting illicitly when they kneel to receive Holy Communion."

And now, to the thick of it. Here at Franciscan University of Steubenville the Pre-Theologate Program has forbidden it's members (young men discerning a vocation to God's Holy Priesthood) from kneeling to receive their Blessed Lord in the Eucharist. They have been accused of disobedience and disunity.

I beg the director to tell me how this position of prayer, the raising of hands, which has been encouraged and fostered here at Franciscan University, is more commensurate with the tradition of the Church than the posture which is cross-culturally, historically and traditionally the posture of surrender, service, worship and obedience, kneeling. I further inquire of the Bishop of this Diocese where he is in regards to liturgical abuses, especially in so prominent and forefront issue and place such as this University.

Is it possible that our Bishops and priests have taken such a stance against outward signs of reverence and devotion? In our seminaries, the men are chastised for, and warned against signs of "clericalism," categorized from believing in the superiority of the Priesthood, to the outward signs thereof, including but not limited to wearing of clerical attire (to which they have been traditionally entitled), formal respect for priests and many other things. But that's a sidebar, and a whole book in itself.

Recently I read a novel called Come Rack, Come Rope by Robert Hugh Benson, and a follow up Martyrs of the English Reformation by Dr. Malcolm Brennan. In it are descriptions of the rabid and rampant hatred and expunging of anything seen as "Romish" or Hoc-Est Popery (see here "Hocus Pocus"). It was here in the mid-late 16th century that the Protestant "Bishop" John Hooper declared that

"The outward behaviour and gesture of the receiver should want all kind of suspicion, shew [show], or inclination of idolatry. Wherefore seeing kneeling is a shew and external sign of honouring and worshipping, and heretofore hath grievous and damnable idolatry been committed by the honouring of the Sacrament, I would wish it were commanded by the magistrates that the communicators and receivers should do it standing or sitting..." (Philip Hughes, Philip, Reformation in England, (London: Hollis Carter, 1953, p. 197)

Why should we agree with these archaic Protesters heresies; these attacks on the Sacredness of the Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the very Soul and Divinity, whole and entire of the God of Abraham, Issac and the Creator and Savior of the world?

An Anarchist, Atheistic-Communist who managed to get himself ordained wrote in his Memoirs that

“To weaken more the notion of the ‘Real Presence’ of Christ, all decorum will have to be set aside. No more costly embroidered vestments, no more music called sacred, especially no more signs of the Cross, no more genuflections, but only dignified and stern attitudes. Moreover the faithful will have to break themselves of the habit of kneeling, and this will be absolutely forbidden when receiving Communion.” (AA 1025: The Memoirs of an Anti-Apostle, p. 90)

*"...kneeling [...] will be absolutely forbidden when receiving Communion.”
- Atheistic Anarcho-Communist 'Priest'
*"Kneeling is not a licit posture for receiving Holy Communion."
- USCCB

Frightening.

The adoration due the Sacrament is lacking. We must halt the tide of modernism and methodical dispiriting of our Church. But yet, how can we if the very men we are relying on to lead us into the next age of Christianity are so indoctrinated by the blasphemies (dare I say Heresies, denying the Real Presence) of their predecessors. I am of the opinion that we have not only innovative and lunatic liturgists who impose their own style and theology on the Liturgy rather than the style and theology proposed, and imposed by the only legitimate source: Rome, but that we also have a flood of anti-Catholicism which seeps in and infects, like a plague even our own bastions of Catholic Tradition and orthodoxy. We must fight back and demand that our bishops, priests and seminarians do and be allowed and encouraged to do what is traditional and necessary for the sustenance of Holy Mother Church. She is the Bride of Christ, and if she is allowed to be stripped of her finery, robbed of her Glory and broken of her Purity and Reality, how, then are we to lend ourselves to her example and prepare ourselves for Christ?

The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is a foretaste of Heaven. We reach out for the Divine, and we join the angels and the saints to sing their eternal hymn of Praise in declaring that God is Thrice-Holy and we beg him to allow us to share in the inheritance of His saints. Can we be expected adore Him properly, to bow before Him when we get to Heaven if we do not do it, if we are infact forbidden from doing it here on Earth?

"Wouldn't it correspond better to the deepest reality and truth about the consecrated bread if even today the faithful would kneel on the ground to receive it, opening their mouths like the prophet receiving the word of God and allowing themselves to be nourished like a child?" --The Most Reverend Athanasius Schneider, Karaganda, Kazakhstan