Talk about biting the hand that feeds you!

I was alerted by a reader to a post by Fr. Mark Mossa, SJ, in Cambridge, MA.

Father wrote, with my emphases and comments .

I wrote a post a while back in which I spoke about some of the challenges involved in distributing communion. And lately I’ve been noticing that more and more people are choosing to receive communion on the tongue rather than in the hands. After almost a year as a priest, I’ve just about got the technique down for giving communion on the tongue without too much worry of "flying host incidents," which I also wrote about before. But now there is another challenge–people who receive communion neither in the hand nor on the tongue, but between the teeth! At a recent mass, I almost lost my finger a couple of times! I’m thinking that since more people are choosing not to receive in the hand any more, it might be a good time to offer some catechesis as to how to receive on the tongue. I know that since as a child I learned how to receive communion on the tongue only shortly before communion in the hand became more common, there are probably lots of people younger than me who, though they’ve decided to stop receiving in the hand, may never have been taught how to receive on the tongue. And not to lay it all on the young people, there are some older folk who seem to have forgotten how. If I could just make one suggestion: get that tongue out there, enough with the teeth!

Amen and amen.

Please don’t bite the priest. Bad for him… bad for you.

Stick your tongue out far enough that the priest can actually give you Communion. And please don’t go all Gene Simmons and make it a moving target.

This isn’t hard. It is far more reverent and, practically speaking, by far reduces the risk of profanation.