Beyond the “Early Church Received in the Hand” argument and that St. Cyril quote

A closer examination reveals that this statement, while containing an element of truth, represents only part of a broader historical and theological picture.

Image: Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, fresco at a Greek Orthodox church.

The debate surrounding the proper manner of receiving Holy Communion continues to be a point of contention among Catholics, particularly between those who advocate for receiving in the hand and those who follow the traditional practice of receiving on the tongue.

This, my loved ones and I, once again recently found out the hard way.

Proponents of the former often invoke the historical argument that “the early church received it in the hand,” a claim which, at first glance, seems well-supported by early Christian practice. However, a closer examination reveals that this statement, while containing an element of truth, represents only part of a broader historical and theological picture.

Early Christian Practice

In the formative years of Christianity, the Eucharist was celebrated in a context that was far more intimate than the later institutionalized liturgies. Early Christian communities were small, deeply bonded groups in which every aspect of worship was lived with immediacy and fervor. In these communities, there was indeed evidence that the faithful often received Communion in the hand. For instance, St. Cyril of Jerusalem, in his Catechetical Lectures, provided specific instructions on how one should approach and receive the Body of Christ. His guidance is not merely a procedural note but is imbued with symbolism and a deep sense of reverence:

"In approaching, therefore, come not with thy wrists extended, or thy fingers spread; but make thy left hand a throne for the right, as for that which is to receive a King. And having hollowed thy palm, receive the Body of Christ, saying over it, Amen.’”

(I will shortly return to this quote by St. Cyril and his famous Catechetical Lectures, as it (the quote) has become one of the most abused in the history of the Catholic Church and its post-Vatican II offshoot)

Here, the act of forming a “throne” with the left hand underscores that even though the Eucharist was received in the hand, the gesture was far from casual. The posture was meant to be a sign of deference and honor toward the King—Christ Himself.

It is important to understand that early Christian communities were marked by their close-knit, catechetical nature. Most of the faithful had undergone a rigorous process of preparation for receiving the sacraments (On the subject of rigorous catechesis, I know of a “Eucharistic Minister” who believes the sacrament is just a symbol. Just saying), and the risk of profaning the sacrament was minimal. In such a milieu, receiving Communion in the hand did not invite irreverence; rather, it was a natural extension of the personal, heartfelt devotion of a community living in the shadow of martyrdom and persecution. (Wanting to rush home for a barbeque, football, and beer, is hardly living in the shadow of martyrdom and persecution!)

In my humble opinion, one of the best works on the subject, especially in its concise simplicity, is Barry Forbes’ “The Eucharistic Storms: Communion in the Hand and the Marginalization of the Real Presence”. Although the book covers the history of the mode of reception literally from its Old Testament roots through to the post-Vatican II disasters, I will only stand still at Forbes’ chapters on the early church as this is the argument that is usually bandied about.

Forgive me for quoting Forbes's work in large swathes, but I see no point in reinventing the wheel.

Of the practice in the Early Church, Forbes writes “The faithful washed the palms of their hands before receiving the consecrated Bread. Communicants bowed earnestly, receiving the Body of the Lord into the mouth directly from the right hand, and not from the left. Their fingers never touched the Host. The palm of the hand served as a kind of paten or corporal, especially for women, who wore a cloth known as a dominica over their hands.

Thus, one reads in a sermon of St. Caesarius of Arles (470–542): “When they desire to communicate, all men wash their hands, and all women show their splendid garments when they receive the Body of Christ.”

Customarily, the palm of the hand was purified or washed after the reception of the eucharistic Bread… Large basins were placed by the doors to the church or the room where the Eucharist was to be celebrated. Propriety demanded that hands be scrupulously clean, for communicants would receive the Eucharist on their palms. There was also another higher reason for the washing: that of symbolizing freedom from all stain of sin. Certainly, the hand that touched the Blessed Sacrament was to be clean physically, and the soul spiritually. The washing of hands symbolized the internal purification from all that stained body and soul”.

Clearly, this type of reverence is a far cry from the fast-food version of the post-conciliar church where women in scandalous outfits and men in shorts and slops stand chewing gum as they await to receive the One True God in the Eucharistic host!

Forbes goes on to point out that there was another group of early “Christians” who did receive communion in the hand and went to great pains to do it reverently. The problem is, they were heretics – the Nestorians. Not a group you would want to model yourself after, but here we are.

Forbes writes, “The Most Rev. Juan Rodolfo Laise captured early reverence and beauty in his work Communion in the Hand: Documents and History. He wrote about the Nestorians, separated completely since the end of the fifth century, not only from Rome but also from Antioch and Byzantium.

The Nestorians represent the oldest schismatic group that still exists. All of their ancient practices have been preserved, including reception only at Christmas and Easter, as well as the actual form of reception. A Western witness is quoted —a Dominican missionary to Mosul, who visited the Nestorians around 1890 and wrote of his experience in detail: All come up seriously and with recollection. At the entrance to the Sanctuary, on the Epistle side, there is a smoking censer. Each communicant, in passing it, incenses his hands, his face and his breast with it, then, upon arriving before the priest, he remains upon foot, kisses his hand and presents his right palm extended and crossed over the left hand. The priest places there a particle of the Host, which the communicant immediately consumes by licking his palm, which he then passes over his forehead to wipe it; after that he goes before the subdeacon, kisses the sleeve of his alb, drinks from the chalice, wipes his mouth with the purificator and then withdraws to the Gospel side, keeping his hand over his lips. The women communicate the same way, but at the end of the Mass, after the men have left …”.

Yes, all very beautiful and “reverent” but they were heretics and worshipped another Christ, not the true Christ, the Founder of the Catholic Church.

Forbes ends his second chapter of the book with the following damning conclusion:

“In the first few centuries, then, every thoughtful communicant would know that he or she was receiving something, and Someone, very special. Accordingly, adoration, veneration, and reverence were expected and due, and the cleansing of body and soul was an unconditional prerequisite to reception. Following the twentieth-century “re-introduction” of Communion in the hand, we often heard that the Church was merely “reviving” an ancient Catholic tradition. That claim was misleading at best. Instead, those words were merely the early warning for a new, breaking eucharistic storm of denial and disbelief, the opening of an epic torrent that has yet to run its course. For today’s Communion in the hand is a close derivative of the communion service from the Protestant Reformation, specifically designed to repudiate the Catholic dogma of transubstantiation and the Real Presence.

By the standards of the Early Church, the commonality of today’s irreverence is stunning. Standing and receiving in the hand is merely symptomatic. The sacrificial fasting of the communicant is minimal at best; reception while in a state of serious sin is reportedly common; any recognition of the Real Presence is often marginal or non-existent; disbelief in the eucharistic God is rampant; adoration, veneration, and reverence are, for many, unknown, unwelcome, or wholly absent; and Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion (EMHCs) often distribute the Bread of Life unnecessarily, despite clear instructions from Rome.

While those distributing the Eucharist have certainly seen many communicants piously receive the Lord on the hands, they also regularly see the opposite: people rarely make the required external sign of reverence before receiving; few make a throne with their hands to receive the Lord, even after decades of admittedly weak catechesis; many try to receive with dirty hands, gloves, or with their fingers; and some walk away without ingesting the Sacred Host.

Worse, Communion in the hand makes it pitifully easy to steal a Host for foolish or even sacrilegious purposes. Priests, deacons, and eucharistic ministers also note the abject inconsistency between piously purifying fingers and vessels of any eucharistic particles for those distributing Communion, while similar requirements are non-existent for those who receive such particles, together with Sacred Hosts, in their hands. Distribution of the Blessed Sacrament in such a disconnected, casual, and irreverent manner places the Holy Eucharist at grave risk. There is often little or no emphasis on Catholic faithful receiving worthily, a core Christian belief spanning two millennia.

To whatever degree humanly possible, the Church is gravely obligated to protect the Bread of Life from those who would receive unworthily, and to discourage those in a state of mortal sin and non-believers from of ending God through reception. That obligation is shared by every Roman Catholic, from the pope, to his priests, and to the laity.

Quite obviously, kneeling to receive on the tongue sends a deeply resonant message that, in its absence, has encouraged denial, disbelief, confusion, and indifferentism.

A major barometer of today’s irreverence is the collapse of the sacrament of confession, one of the more unfortunate after-effects of Vatican II. As confessions dropped precipitously, the percentage of Sunday communicants increased dramatically. Apparently, too few of us were, or are, willing to give any consideration to the inspired wisdom of St. Paul: For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a man examine himself, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment upon himself. That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died. (1 Corinthians 11:26–30)…”

The abuse of the St. Cyril of Jerusalem quote

Just about every apologist for receiving in the hand without fail turns to the following quote by St. Cyril of Jerusalem, to justify their “But the Early Church…” argument:

"In approaching, therefore, come not with thy wrists extended, or thy fingers spread; but make thy left hand a throne for the right, as for that which is to receive a King. And having hollowed thy palm, receive the Body of Christ, saying over it, Amen. So then after having carefully hallowed thine eyes by the touch of the Holy Body, partake of it; giving heed lest thou lose any portion thereof; for whatever thou losest, is evidently a loss to thee as it were from one of thine own members..”.

“This is a beautiful, convincing verse, which goes a long way to explain why we hear it so often. Yet, until the 1969 “reintroduction” of Communion in the hand, the average lay person had rarely, if ever, heard of this reading,” writes Forbes before launching into a biography of the Saint and his struggles against the Arian heretics (which we will skip for the sake of space).

Forbes continues, “Saint Cyril is credited with twenty-four catechetical lectures, considered to be one of the most precious treasures of Christian antiquity. The lectures fall within two groups: The first group includes an introductory discourse and eighteen Catecheses. These were addressed to an audience that consisted principally of those who had, prior to Lent, elected to receive Christian initiation through baptism by total immersion, chrism, and Holy Communion. This would occur during the night of Holy Saturday, and the early morning of Easter Sunday. (Excepting an emergency, adult baptism was the rule in the fourth century.) These Catecheses are classic theological documents, containing an exceptionally clear and well-argued presentation of the main points of the Catholic faith. They seem to have been spoken ex tempore and written down at some later time, probably by what we would consider today to be nuns or monks. The year is almost certainly AD 350.

The second group is known as the five Mystagogical Catecheses, instructions addressed to the neophytes during Easter week. These instructions are based on the liturgical ceremonies of the three sacraments received by the neophytes during the Easter Vigil. The first two deal with baptism; the third with confirmation; the fourth with eucharistic doctrine; and the fifth with the Liturgy of the Mass. Today, the quotation attributed to Cyril—“In approaching, therefore, come not with thy wrists extended, or thy fingers spread; but make thy left hand a throne for the right”—is taken directly from the eucharistic oration. This is the single verse routinely deployed to justify and propagate today’s irreverent Communion in the hand; it is not the only quotation, but assuredly the most common one. Sixteen hundred years after Cyril’s death, his words have become famous… Yet rarely will an apologist for Communion in the hand ever mention that there has been deep and lasting debate as to whether or not Cyril is actually the author of the five Mystagogical Catecheses.

One of the myriad discussions in print appeared in the 1950 series Patrology: The Golden Age of Greek Patristic Literature. The author, Johannes Quasten, pointed to multiple scholars, writers, and theologians (Schermann, Swaans, Richard, Telfer, and others) who attribute the five Mystagogical Catecheses to Cyril’s successor, a presumed Arian named John. At the same time, Quasten wrote that others believed it possible that something similar to these instructions was delivered by Cyril, then later written— and revised, with discrepancies in style—again, perhaps by John. Additionally, there are existing documents in which the introductory discourse and eighteen Catecheses are presented, but the five Mystagogical Catecheses never appear. Thus, some scholars believe the five instructions were simply added by an unknown writer around fifty years later. Others have noted that Arians could have been promoting Communion in the hand as a sign of their disbelief in the divinity of Jesus Christ. Based on the times and the power that Arianism wielded, this could be a convincing theory; however, the reverential tone of the verse makes this assertion somewhat implausible. Absent any new evidence, the debate about the five Mystagogical Catecheses won’t be resolved anytime soon”.

Our friend Forbes is not finished though.

“For knowledgeable progressives, there is no advantage to be gained by admitting controversy and doubt. For similar reasons, the very next reading in the same eucharistic oration is rarely mentioned. In fact, it is usually avoided like the plague:

Then after thou hast partaken of the Body of Christ, draw near also to the Cup of His Blood; not stretching forth thine hands, but bending and saying with an air of worship and reverence, Amen, hallow thyself by partaking also of the Blood of Christ. And while the moisture is still upon thy lips, touch it with thine hands, and hallow thine eyes and brow and the other organs of sense. Then wait for the prayer, and give thanks unto God, who hath accounted thee worthy of so great mysteries.

In essence, this reading is asking us to smear the blood of Christ on our eyes and ears to protect us from the Evil One. Saint Cyril of Alexandria compared the smearing of the sensory organs with the Blood of the Lamb immolated in the Eucharist to the smearing of the doorposts of the captive Jews in Egypt with the blood of a slaughtered lamb. Just as this practice protected the Jews, so the smearing of the sensory organs would prevent the destructive evil of sensory temptation entering through them. Did anything like this really occur?

It appears so: Jungmann and others believed it did, although this would certainly seem discordant with the veneration due to the Sacred Species; moreover, anything similar could be labeled abusive and even superstitious. If this was indeed a practice of the Early Church in the first few centuries, it faded away for obvious reasons. Still, the practice of actually kissing the Host became widespread. Theodoret, Bishop of Cyrrhus in Syria, confirmed that the excess of kissing the Host was already in use in the first half of the fifth century: “One should consider how during the sacred mysteries we take the limbs of the Spouse, kiss them, embrace them and apply them to our eyes.”This practice—made possible by reception in the hand, thereby opening the door to abuse—persisted at least down to the end of the eighth century at one church or another.

Saint John of Damascus (675–749) wrote: “Let us receive the Body of the crucified, and applying it to our eyes, our lips, and forehead, let us partake of the Divine burning coal.” Progressives love to quote the eucharistic oration, verse xxi (“make thy left hand a throne”), but never mention the following verse xxii (“and hallow thine eyes and brow and the other organs of sense”). However, many theologians believe both verses led to abuses which the Church, in time, decisively corrected. Accordingly, no matter who wrote them, it is evident that the Mystagogical Catecheses cannot be authentically employed to excuse or promote either of these two practices, one of which is, at a minimum, weird and even superstitious [my emphasis]…”.

Forbes concludes his argument with the following statement, and I concur:

“Most specifically, exploiting a questionable reading—the author quite possibly unknown, and the subject ultimately banned—in order to promote today’s irreverent Communion in the hand cannot be justified under any circumstances”.

Another baseless argument for reception in the hand – “But Christ at the Last Supper…”

Right up there with the “But the Early Church…” argument, is the claim that at the Last Supper Christ gave the broken bread to His disciples in their hands. This claim is purely based on an assumption as there is no proof that this indeed took place.

As a matter of fact, according to Forbes, the contrary was probably true. The Gospels teach that Christ dipped the morsels into the slop (John 13:26). Did He then put the soggy morsel in their hands? Surely this would have been a very messy practice?

Furthermore, evidence shows that in the Middle East, during the time of the Last Supper and still today in many areas of the region, hospitality custom dictated that the host would place the first morsel by hand into the mouths of his guests.

Whether this indeed did take place at the Last Supper cannot be proved. But neither can the claim that Christ put the morsels into the disciples' hands. Therefore, not a strong argument for receiving Communion in the hand either.

From Hand to Tongue

As Christianity expanded beyond its initial boundaries and entered into the complex social and political realities of the Roman Empire, the Church encountered new challenges. With the growth of the Christian population came a diversity of practices and an increased risk that the sacredness of the Eucharist could be undermined by either inadvertent or deliberate acts of irreverence. This context prompted a re-examination of liturgical practices, including the manner of Communion reception.

By the fourth century, theological and pastoral concerns led to a preference for receiving Communion on the tongue—a practice that would eventually become normative in the Western Church (and still is). The shift was not arbitrary; it was motivated by a desire to safeguard the sanctity of the Eucharist from any possibility of profanation. Liturgical manuals and catechetical texts began to emphasize that the manner in which the Eucharist was received should reflect the profound mystery of the Real Presence.

In conclusion, then, I would like to ask the following questions, reiterating what I have argued at length in another article:

Why on God’s beautiful earth would we want to return to a practice that the Church clearly saw was fraught with possible dangers but more importantly, why wouldn’t you want to receive the King of the Universe in the most reverent way you can muster?

PS: I want to thank my subscriber, Fr. AM, for recommending Forbes’s book. I highly recommend this to anyone who has a proverbial dog in this very important fight. My international readers can order it here while my South African readers can order it here. This is not a sponsored article, and I do not know Mr. Forbes personally, nor do I benefit from you ordering the book.

Ave Christus Rex!

Recognise & Resist!

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