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Best practices to receive holy Communion
When Pope John Paul II celebrated his 50th anniversary as a priest in 1996 he said: “The most important and beautiful thing for me remains the fact that I have been a priest for more than 50 years, because every day I can celebrate Holy Mass! The Eucharist is the secret of my day. It gives strength and meaning to all my activities of service to the church and to the whole world.”
The Eucharist, then, must be the secret of our lives: the source and summit of our personal life. Jesus is really present in the Eucharist and he’s waiting for us to nourish and strengthen our daily life.
While we go deeper into this time of Lent, which, according to Pope Benedict XVI, must be a “Eucharistic” time, it is appropriate to recall the means that we U.S. Catholic bishops recommended in the document on the Eucharist that we published last November.
In it, we pointed out various ways “in which each individual can better prepare himself or herself for Mass and can enter more deeply into the Eucharistic celebration, in order to receive the Body and Blood of Christ more worthily.”
We explained that there are two interrelated ways in which we foster the worthy reception of holy Communion: through “remote preparation” and “proximate preparation.”
The first has to do with how we live our Christian lives every day and includes: regular prayer and Scripture reading, faithful and loving fulfillment of the duties and responsibilities of our state in life, daily repentance of sin and regular participation in the sacrament of penance: “frequent confession,” we bishops wrote, “is strongly encouraged as an aid to growth in holiness.”
Proximate preparation has to do with how we come to and participate in the Eucharistic liturgy itself.
The means that we bishops suggest are simple, but perhaps for that very reason they are not always sufficiently taken into account by the faithful.
Proximate preparation includes, above all, a prayerful recollection prior to coming to Mass, which includes striving to arrive on time, allowing ourselves to prepare our minds and hearts for the liturgy.
Another important means is the Eucharistic fast, that is, refraining from food and drink (except for water and medications) for at least one hour prior to receiving holy Communion. To this, we added appropriate attire — wearing clothes that reflect our reverence for God — and active participation. In this regard, we wrote, “Because the celebration of the Eucharist is the source and summit of the entire Christian life, nothing is more important than participating in the Mass with our whole hearts and minds and bodies.”
Thus, with active minds, we should listen attentively to the proclamation of the Scripture readings and to the homily; unite ourselves with the priest as he prays the Eucharistic Prayer; pray with our whole hearts the Our Father in spiritual union with Jesus; with sincerity sharing the sign of peace; and approaching the altar for holy Communion with reverence, love and awe, as part of the Eucharistic procession of the faithful.
The gift of himself that God gives to us in Communion calls for a period of reflective silence, during which “we express our love and thanks to Jesus for his mercy and kindness, asking him to fill us with the life and love of the Holy Spirit so that we may truly give glory to the Father in our lives.”
We concluded the document indicating that “by putting these simple actions into practice will help us to enter more profoundly into the Eucharistic celebration, receive holy Communion more worthily, and thus obtain more fully the grace of communion with the risen Lord Jesus and with one another.”
And we also give an important warning for the good of all our faithful: “May none of us ever violate or abuse this sacred mystery. May we always approach this holy mystery with due reverence and awe and love for the Holy One of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, who is in our midst and who comes to abide within us, making us holy as he himself is holy.”
Let us pray intensely at this special time of conversion that our Catholic community in San Antonio will more and more be a Eucharistic community, constantly and increasingly sanctified by the gift of Communion.
God bless us.
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