Cardinal Cupich gets a fellow thinking with his newspaper announcement of Eucharist Revival doings, including a special June 30 Mass at Holy Name Cathedral . . .

Processions where you might not have realized, the importance of singing, Communion standing up and the like.

I wonder, can’t help it if I wonder . . .  about the bee in the bonnet of our archbishop as he considers our “core belief” in Holy Mass. (As opposed to our not-core ones, take-or leave-’em.)

He says we express these beliefs twice in a Mass — once when two or more of us bring up the bread and wine to kick off the offertory and again when we go to Communion. Each is a “procession,” he says, and a “profoundly religious” one at that, echoing in all this the U.S. bishops on The Reception of Holy Communion at Mass.

News to this mass-goer. Must confess I’ve thought of  procession as something grander, longer — forgetting the aisle-long bride-and-father walk, to the strains of a wedding march, no less. So much for the procession issue.

But . . . “profoundly religious”?

Yes. The second procession, from pew to host-distributor, an “action of the community, rather than of an individual’s faith or piety” — stash your individual faith and piety, if you don’t mind — carries the “profoundly religious” burden of the standing-to-receive requirement.

We see now why the faith and piety part has to go — because it’s what makes the communion recipient drop to his or her knees at just the moment when the priest or other is about to drop the host in the hand of one standing before him or her!

Hence the standing requirement, without which God knows what happens to the profoundly religious part. How many of these kneelers does it take to wreak chaos? God only knows.

The procession that led to reception has an adjunct by the way. The processioners are to “be encouraged” to sing a hymn as they make the procession (not to mention to keep to their feet, as we have seen).

In any case. I know I’m way off base with this suggestion, but how about they sing Onward Christian Soldiers? It would go with the grandeur of their walking back and forth for Communion and would douse or at least mute any temptations to faith and piety. Get people in the spirit of the thing, you know.

Something else. Alert the ushers that they are not to block the path of any marcher on his or her way to the front. I’ve been blocked, by a very big guy, same one who tore into me for not wearing a Covid mask back in the day. Oh my.

He was part of a crew under leadership of a long-term lady parishoner who took her duties very seriously.

Not as bad, I guess, as the deacon in another parish who came upon me unawares during Kiss of Peace time when I had my head down and was ignoring the Kiss with eyes closed, and slammed me on both shoulders. He’d left the altar to do this. Again, taking his duties very seriously.

Back to the cardinal:

This expression of unity is . . . an answer to the prayer of Christ at the Last Supper. . . : “Holy Father, keep them in your name . . .  so that they may be one just as . . . as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us” (John 17:11, 21).

Excellent. We’re in this together.

Keep in mind when you receive, walking (processing) back to your pew. You are not alone in this, no. You are mystically united with the people in church with you for starters, and the whole world of Catholics.

It’s a mouthful for the communicant to keep in mind. I like “Lord Jesus come,” an Advent theme with year-round uses. Yes, he’s coming to me, setting up the most intimate experience I am about to have in at least the next 24 hours. Intimate, I say, which seems the guts of the matter, not the imagined connection with everybody everywhere.

My prayer at this point? For an increase in my ability to take my “brothers and sisters” as they are, no strings attached, redeemed by Jesus as am I and full of needs as am I, mystically understood, hence part of one mystical body, a marvelous reality.

Worldwide, but where it begins with me is my concentration at the moment, rather than the somewhat wooden concentration, as the cardinal has it, on being in a mystical procession, profound or pedestrian.

By the bye, there’s the tongue business —Karen Hall, The Sound of Silence: The Life and Canceling of a Heroic Jesuit Priest — per:

the document Redemptionis Sacramentum, which in its paras 91–92 makes it clear that I have a right to receive on the tongue, and a 2009 dubium during the Swine Flu epidemic got the answer from the Holy See that not even for sanitary purposes can the faithful be denied Communion on the tongue.

Oh. Reminder there of our recent experience. And why tongue?

The tongue is not “consecrated,” but is an interior organ, belonging to the inside of the body, such that the Body of Christ is not bounce-passed by the priest but placed directly into the communicant.

Yes.

Communion in the hand makes the communicant an intermediary, usually cooperative, sometimes not. We’ve all seen sulky or bored teenagers take the Host in hand and start walking away with it at belt level, popping it into their mouths like popcorn ten or twelve steps down the aisle.

Yep.

The Eastern Rite Christians (Catholic and Orthodox) are shocked to see Communion in the hand, and in the Patriarchate of Jerusalem (including Jordan, where I [the late Fr. Paul Mankowski SJ] was pastor), Communion in the hand was forbidden precisely out of a concern that the Orthodox not be even further alienated from the Catholic Church.

Finally, for this posting’s purposes:

Communion in the hand doesn’t have to be casual, but Communion on the tongue can’t be casual, and I think everyone realizes the difference at some level.

And herein lies the tale of ritual demoted, the casual and personalized enabled. The old Mass kept the priest, now the “presider,” in check.

And God bless the cardinal for getting a fellow thinking.