Dear Parishioners,

The Eucharist is at the very center and core of our religion and our faith. Anything that affects the Eucharist,
is going to have profound effects throughout our whole faith experience. I have mentioned the amazingly accurate prophecy of Blessed Paul VI in Memoriale Domini, where he stated so clearly that changing our way of reception of Holy Communion from kneeling down and on the tongue, to reception in the hand while standing would cause, “…a lessening of reverence toward the noble Sacrament of the altar, its profanation, or the adulteration of correct doctrine.” Maybe the question that we still have is how does communion in the hand lead us toward a priestless Church without sacraments? By lessening the reverence, the importance of the sacrament diminishes, by direct correlation the priesthood becomes less important. We have also seen in these years the popular fallacy that all who are at Mass and have made their First Communion have to receive Holy Communion. The Church has never taught this, in fact the Church has always taught that we should only receive communion if we are in the state of grace, i.e without the stain of mortal sin on our soul. Then the same priests and Bishops who were following the false prophets of the age also discouraged the sacrament of reconciliation, either directly by falsely teaching that it was unimportant as God would forgive us anyway, or indirectly by offering fewer and fewer times for it and then doing sessions of general absolutions. Through these practices, communion in the minds of most Catholics (at least 63% according to the latest polls) became just an obligatory part of Mass and had nothing to do with the real presence of Jesus Christ, and the sacrament of reconciliation became only for hideously hardened criminals. Simultaneously with these bad practices and false notions reigning, we stopped teaching the children preparing for the sacraments the full truth about communion and the sacrament of penance. All of this also creates the false perception that the priests and Bishops are useless. As there is no need to go to confession anymore, the laity already handle the sacred vessels and communion, we don’t really believe in the true presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and so we don’t need a priest to confect it. Wel-lah!, we have the priestless church with no sacraments; exactly what the false prophets proclaimed. We have already built or altered our churches (worship spaces) to our standards and not God’s, so now we can invent our own styles of worship (the polka mass, the tambourine mass, the kum-ba-ya mass, etc.) to go along with the spaces we invented, which of course won’t need a priest. This is exactly the reason why priestless communion services began to get so popular in some churches in our diocese, the people, almost unconsciously, were pre- conditioned to it by the false notions, bad practices, and extremely deficient catechism that had been going on for over 40 years. When we demand to receive communion in the hand we are:

• needlessly putting Our Lord Jesus Christ in danger of profanation.
• intentionally or unintentionally giving tacit approval to the agenda of a priestless and sacramentless church, which of course would be a church bereft of sanctifying grace.
• intentionally or unintentionally, tacitly approving of the disobedience, deception, and extortion that has brought it into the Church.

No where in the documents of Vatican II is communion in the hand even mentioned, much less suggested as a possible reform. It is not what the Holy Spirit intended for the good of the Church and the history of the last 40 years gives ample witness to that fact. (to be continued)