Can EMHCs distribute Communion wearing gloves?

[anon64350612]

Our local hospital has a policy requiring extraordinary ministers of holy Communion to wear rubber gloves when giving Communion on the tongue to patients. Because the gloves are then thrown in the trash, is this allowed under Church rules?

 

[Michelle_Arnold]

This is a matter that should be brought to the local ordinary for his assessment. He may wish to petition the hospital to allow EMHCs to give Communion according to Church practice, or to dispense communicants to receive by self-intinction when they are able to do so (i.e., removing the host from the pyx and placing it on their own tongue), or to create protocols for how EMHCs are to handle the gloves they use, or to otherwise adjust protocol for distributing Communion under these conditions.

In theory, it may not be problematic for EMHCs to wear gloves (e.g., Fr. Hermann Cohen, a Carmelite priest, died of smallpox he contracted when he could not find the “spatula” priests used at the time to administer anointing of the sick to smallpox patients and used his bare hands instead), but it is a matter that the local bishop should review.