If you had to bring Holy Communion to a dying person, and you were told by the priest to do it with maximum reverence, what would that look like?
I read this story in a little booklet by an auxiliary bishop in Kazakhstan named Athanasius Schneider. That’s a German name, and many Germans were deported to Kazakhstan after World War II when the Soviets dominated that entire part of the world. Many of them were Catholic. During the Communist rule, it was almost impossible to practice the Catholic faith. And if you did, it had to be clandestine.
Priests would come down there, never dressed as a priest, and the word would go out and they would have a secret Mass in somebody’s basement. At night they closed off all the windows so that no light would get out. On one of those occasions, a woman came to the priest with an emergency: her mother was dying and needed Holy Communion. It was too dangerous for the priest to go there himself and she really, really wanted to bring her mother Holy Communion. This was before Vatican II and before they had extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion.
The priest said, “Okay, you can do it because this is a very dire situation, but I want you to treat the Holy Eucharist with maximum reverence.”
You know what she did? She got an envelope, put a white handkerchief inside it, and the priest put the host in the white handkerchief inside the envelope. She put it in her pocket and when she arrived to her mother’s home, she put on white gloves. Then she took out a little pair of silver tweezers to grab the host from the envelope and gave the Host to her mother.
Wow, that’s really maximum reverence! We want to treat Jesus with maximum reverence so that when we receive Him, we’ve kept the one-hour fast from food and beverage. We’ve made sure to confess our mortal sins, and that we look forward to receiving Jesus and treat Him with maximum reverence, because Jesus in the Holy Eucharist is the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords.
And I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for all the people who showed up for Jesus in Indianapolis last summer: 65,000. Thank you, and be sure to watch for another Eucharistic Encounter next week, and may God bless you!
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