Eucharistic Reflection - "The Desensitization to the Most Holy Eucharist"

[What follows is one of the many painful but necessary Truths to ponder if we are to  to re-establish awe, amazement, and belief in, and reverence for, our loving Lord physically present in the Holy Eucharist.]

 

 (Bibliothèque Municipale de Reims, ms. 993, Folio 158v)

"…we did not wake up one fine day in 2016 and find ourselves suddenly confronted with Eucharistic sacrilege being promoted from on high. It was a long, slow process that led to this moment. It consisted in the gradual dilution of the sacredness of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and of the Blessed Sacrament at its heart, with institutionally tolerated sacrilege along the way. Fifty years of desacralization has ended in the temerity of contradicting the entire Catholic tradition about the most holy of all of the Church’s mysteries.

The first major step was the allowance of Communion in the hand while standing - a sharp break from the deeply ingrained practice of many centuries of kneeling in adoration at the altar rail and receiving on the tongue, like a baby bird being fed by its parent (as we see in countless medieval depictions of the pelican that has wounded her breast in order to feed her chicks). This change had the obvious effect of making people think the Holy Eucharist wasn't so mysterious and holy after all. If you can just take it in your hand like ordinary food, it might as well be a potato chip distributed at a party. The sense of awe and reverence toward the Blessed Sacrament was systematically diminished and undermined through this Modernist reintroduction of an ancient practice that had long since been discontinued by the Church in her pastoral wisdom. Nor, as has been well documented, did the faithful themselves request the abolition of the custom of receiving on the tongue while kneeling; it was imposed by the self-styled “experts”.

(Peter Kwasniewski from The Holy Bread of Eternal Life - Restoring Eucharistic Reverence in an Age of Impiety).