Cardinal Cupich discourages kneeling for Holy Communion, says standing is the ‘norm’

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Cardinal Cupich discourages kneeling for Holy Communion, says standing is the ‘norm’
Archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Blase Cupich, has written a letter discouraging the laity from kneeling to receive the Eucharist, instead favoring standing, which he described as the ‘norm established by Holy See for the universal church.’



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Dec 13, 2024
CHICAGO (LifeSiteNews) — Cardinal Blaise Cupich, the Archbishop of Chicago, has all but forbidden Catholics from kneeling to receive the Blessed Sacrament.

“[N]o one should engage in a gesture that calls attention to oneself or disrupts the flow of the procession [to and from Holy Communion],” he wrote.

Cupich expressed this interdict – and other surprising statements about the Catholic Church’s liturgical norms and traditions – in a December 11 article in Chicago Catholic, the official newspaper of his current archdiocese. In his statement, the cardinal seemed to express that a Catholic’s membership of a congregation supersedes his or her personal relationship with Christ.

Referring to a small section of Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Second Vatican Council’s 1963 sacred constitution on the Catholic liturgy, Cupich wrote: 

[T]he council called for the full, active and conscious participation of all the baptized in the celebration of the Eucharist to reflect our belief that in the sacred liturgy the faithful become the Body of Christ that they receive.

Our ritual for receiving of Holy Communion has special significance in this regard. It reminds us that receiving the Eucharist is not a private action but rather a communal one, as the very word “communion” implies. For that reason, the norm established by Holy See for the universal church and approved by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is for the faithful to process together as an expression of their coming forward as the Body of Christ and to receive Holy Communion standing.

However, a statement of the U.S. Conference of Bishops on the subject states that the norm for receiving Holy Communion in the United States is “standing, unless an individual member of the faithful wishes to receive Communion while kneeling,” and that a bow is the act of reverence made by those receiving.

Instead of offering arguments regarding any ancient practice of receiving Holy Communion, the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, while standing, the cardinal made a claim for the importance of processions in the history of the liturgy. In his view, processions are so crucial that nobody should “impede” or “disrupt” the “powerful symbolic expression” of the march to and from Holy Communion:

Nothing should be done to impede any of these processions, particularly the one that takes place during the sacred Communion ritual. Disrupting this moment only diminishes this powerful symbolic expression, by which the faithful in processing together express their faith that they are called to become the very Body of Christ they receive. Certainly reverence can and should be expressed by bowing before the reception of Holy Communion, but no one should engage in a gesture that calls attention to oneself or disrupts the flow of the procession.

Cardinal Cupich, who before his surprise 2014 appointment to the See of Chicago, was Bishop of Rapid City, South Dakota, went so far as to hint that kneeling in homage to receive the Blessed Sacrament, “would be contrary to the norms and tradition of the church, which all the faithful are urged to respect and observe.”

In fact, the tradition of the Catholic Church, unbroken until the era of liturgical experimentation in the 1960s and 1970s, is that the lay faithful receive the Blessed Sacrament, administered by a priest, his hands having been consecrated for the handling of the sacred Eucharist, on the tongue while kneeling.

When Catholics were forbidden from receiving Holy Communion on the tongue while kneeling, which is their right, during the COVID “emergency,” many forsook their parish churches to support local Traditional Latin Mass communities, including the chapels of the priestly Society of St. Pius X (SSPX). 

According to explosive testimony by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, Cupich was recommended to Pope Francis as a good candidate for Archbishop of Chicago by then-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.

Dr. Joseph Shaw, President of Una Voce International, which seeks to preserve and promote the Traditional Latin Mass, pointed out to LifeSiteNews a flaw in the cardinals’s reasoning.

“It is difficult to interpret Cardinal Cupich’s remarks, since bowing before receiving Holy Communion is so rare that those doing it, in accordance with liturgical law, will certainly draw attention to themselves, and it is difficult to see how it is possible to bow without disrupting the flow of the procession,” Shaw told LifeSite via social media. 

“Easier to accomplish, in fact, is kneeling to receive Holy Communion, and receiving on the tongue,” he continued. “[N]ot only do these fulfil the obligation to make an ‘act of reverence’ but liturgical law expressly permits them (Redemptionis Sacramentum 91).”

Compounding Shaw’s remarks, Dr. Peter Kwasniewski affirmed to LifeSiteNews that “no one can be denied” reception of Holy Communion by kneeling, which, “moreover, does not interrupt any ‘procession.’”

Kwasniewski noted that Cupich “doesn’t even get the Latin saying correct. It’s not ‘lex orandi, lex credenda,’ but ‘lex orandi, lex credendi,’” and that the prelate “cattily avoids saying that the Vatican has repeatedly affirmed the right of the laity to receive Communion kneeling if they wish.”

Continuing, the liturgical scholar stated that in his note, Cupich “avoids the landmines of communion in the hand vs. on the tongue. We can be thankful he did not try to extend the meal idea to ‘everyone takes food with their hands at a meal’! But his logic fails him when he tries to argue that it’s more communal to receive standing than to receive sitting.”

“First, do people eat standing up? Do they enjoy fellowship standing up? Most of the time, we sit for a meal or a conversation (as indeed Jesus and the apostles did at the Last Supper: they reclined at table). More to the point, it’s far more communal to have the faithful kneeling across an altar rail, shoulder to shoulder, as the priest moves from one to the next. How is it more communal to queue up in a line, one by one, as if buying bus tickets?” he argued.

In a final note, Kwasniewski critiqued “the notion that the Church has been so enriched by Vatican II and its liturgical reforms” expressed by Cupich. This idea, he said, “is belied by the constant decline in church attendance from the mid-1960s onward (that is, from the time when the tinkeritis began in earnest).”

“The most basic form of active participation is to show up for Mass. On that simple criteron, the reform has been a colossal flop.”