Communion Services Discouraged

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For my experience, my parish has a Communion service in the early morning weekdays and a Mass later. On Friday, there is no Mass so it gets replaced with a Communion service. As the Communion service has survived a pastor, administrator, and another pastor in the time I’ve been there, I assume everything is in order and that it is within the guidelines of my archdiocese.
Wannano said:
for the sake of this non-Catholic would you describe what this communion service would look like?
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At my parish I’ve only ever been to it three Fridays. (I was only able to go in the summer and there was a nearby church where I preferred their Friday Mass except when my parish had adoration afterwards.) So it might differ a little on other days.

But how it’s worked is that there’s a deacon and his wife he lead in the Liturgy of the Hours. After those are done, we go through the Agnus Dei (and a couple other things I’ve forgotten as it’s been a while). Then Communion is distributed, the hosts are put back in the tabernacle, and it ends. (And on the days adoration is afterwards, that begins with the associated prayers.)
 
commenter said:
When I was going to campus ministry, communion services were regarded as a great opportunity to expand lay ministry. On the priest’s day off, we would go there rather than to Mass at the neighborhood parish across the street.
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This sounds to me like a reason bishops might frown upon such services. A Communion service with a lay minister is not the equal of Mass with a priest. If you can go to Mass instead, like it’s in the next block at a convenient time, then you should be going to Mass, not “expanding lay ministry”.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
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commenter:
When I was going to campus ministry, communion services were regarded as a great opportunity to expand lay ministry. On the priest’s day off, we would go there rather than to Mass at the neighborhood parish across the street.
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This sounds to me like a reason bishops might frown upon such services. A Communion service with a lay minister is not the equal of Mass with a priest. If you can go to Mass instead, like it’s in the next block at a convenient time, then you should be going to Mass, not “expanding lay ministry”.
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I have numerous questions but don’t want to ask them all at once. If the hosts being consumed are consecrated before hand what is lacking in a communion service that makes it inferior tp Mass with a priest?
 
Does the parish have a pastor? The priest is supposed to offer Mass daily so if there isn’t at least one public Mass in the parish daily, it is rather surprising. A Bishop usually would not go for a regularly occurring Mass to just not take place, or not be scheduled a few hours later or something. I’ve never witnessed a “Communion Service” myself though understand they can occur in rural parishes without a pastor. I can also understand why they are discouraged.
 
The Mass is the unbloody sacrifice of Jesus and is considered the highest form of prayer that a Catholic can engage in. The spiritual benefits of attending just one Mass are huge.

The next most highest form of prayer would be participating in the Liturgy of the Hours because you are joining your prayer to the public prayer of the Church.

A prayer service with pre-consecrated Hosts is intended to allow people to receive Eucharist when no priest is available. That’s the only reason it’s allowed. If we had enough priests that one was always available, we would not be allowed to do this except maybe in a case of somebody who’s housebound or sick in the hospital or in danger of death. The Church does not want people thinking they can just get a year’s supply of hosts consecrated and then Joe the Lay Minister EMHC can hand them out whenever people get together to pray a prayer and no need for the priest. The dangers of that sort of thinking are pretty clear, especially if you’ve hung around enough parishes in the 70s and 80s to see lay ministers who pretty much want to do everything the priest does without actually getting ordained (or they’re female, so they can’t be ordained).
 
midori said:
It’s been about five years since I’ve been to one, but it basically boils down to the fact that there is no priest, therefore there is no consecration, therefore Communion is under one species, and is taken from the previously consecrated hosts kept in the tabernacle. So with no consecration, we keep the first part of the Mass, the Liturgy of the Word, but we have to omit the Liturgy of the Eucharist— we skip pretty much from the Creed to the Our Father.

Everything else is pretty much the same as a usual daily Mass, except it’s all conducted by a knowledgeable, trusted layperson, like the sacristan. So you have your entrance antiphon (spoken) or opening hymn (sung), you have the Collect, you have the normal readings and the normal responsorial psalm, you have a commentary upon the gospel or one of the readings, you tend to have a bit more of a silence to think about things, you have your Creed. Then you jump straight to the Our Father. Then the person goes to the tabernacle and removes the ciborium, and you have your Agnus Dei, have your “This is the Lamb of God…”, followed by the “…only say the word and I shall be healed” response, have Communion under one species and the Communion antiphon, have more silence afterwards, have closing prayers, and maybe some sort of a closing hymn.
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If communion is given to someone at home who is housebound is the same service performed or is there a shortened version for that instance? Assume the housebound individual is not sick but physically not able to attend.
 
That’s what the tabernacle’s for. It should be right smack-dab in the middle directly behind the altar though unfortunately many parishes have it hidden off to the side or in some cases almost in a broom closet.
 
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The Blessed Sacrament may be given to someone trusted and stored in a pyx to be given to such a person.
 
Wannano said:
If the hosts being consumed are consecrated before hand what is lacking in a communion service that makes it inferior tp Mass with a priest?
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Because the Mass is the same as the Sacrifice at Calvary.

The Communion Service is consuming the Sacrifice, but skipping all the middle stuff of taking the time to actually re-present the Sacrifice.
 
It’s not the same service if you’re housebound or sick. The way it was done when my mother received while housebound/ sick was, the priest or lay minister would say some short prayers with the person and then they would receive Communion. It’s been a few years since my mother passed so I can’t remember the exact details but it was way shorter and less involved than a communion service in church.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
It’s not the same service if you’re housebound or sick. The way it was done when my mother received while housebound/ sick was, the priest or lay minister would say some short prayers with the person and then they would receive Communion. It’s been a few years since my mother passed so I can’t remember the exact details but it was way shorter and less involved than a communion service in church.
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I sure appreciate all the answers so far…Now I have to go to work but I surely have something to think about all day!
 
Wannano said:
If communion is given to someone at home who is housebound is the same service performed or is there a shortened version for that instance? Assume the housebound individual is not sick but physically not able to attend.
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I’ve never taken communion to the homebound, but generally, it’s a very shortened set of prayers, and everyone I know has generally been in the old/feeble/terminally ill category. For example, when I had to miss Mass because I had just given birth to my baby a few hours previously— I didn’t ask for someone to come visit me. 😛 When I had to miss Mass because I had the flu, and I didn’t want to bring my germs to church-- I also didn’t ask anyone to bring me Communion.

So I would say there are concessions made to certain individuals in poor health.

If you have five or six people all in the same nursing home, you wouldn’t make five or six individual visits— you’d gather them together into one room, and make it a community experience.

But if someone is, say, an Alzheimer’s patient, and is sliding in and out of a good mental place, it would also be unrealistic to expect them to pay attention for 20 minutes. The extraordinary minister has to pay attention to the needs of the individual and use their good judgment to adjust things to the circumstances in front of them.
 
midori said:
If you have five or six people all in the same nursing home, you wouldn’t make five or six individual visits— you’d gather them together into one room, and make it a community experience.
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That’s if people are in shape to be able to do that. The logistics of getting a half dozen people in various states of physical disability all in one room for a service can be tricky. Most nursing homes will have a little chapel or meeting room with a service at a set time each week, but the priest or EMHC will also individually visit anyone who is bedridden or not feeling well enough to attend. Sometimes they will even say prayers with non-Catholic people who just want to pray or have a visitor, if the person wants to do that (though the non-Catholic can’t receive communion of course).
 
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That’s very true.

I used to do a library program that provided outreach at different nursing homes. Some nursing homes had very sharp, high-functioning individuals; other nursing homes had people who could understand you, but were not interactive at all. And a lot of people were in between.

So yes. The individual’s capacity to interact and participate dictates how much you can do, and the circumstances in which it occurs.
 
It could be that when the Vatican along with the USCCB’s issued a mandate that only a priest or deacon were allowed to touch the tabernacle, communion services by the laity were stopped.

Lay Presiders were not allowed to take the Consecrated Host from the tabernacle.

We use to have a Communion Service once a week run by the Deacon. However, when he moved, it ended.

Jim
 
Yeah it was in response to abuses when lay people were going into the tabernacle and taking Consecrated Host home to give to people who didn’t go to Mass for various reasons outside of illness, Some were EMHC’s, others were not.

Jim
 
JimR-OCDS said:
Lay Presiders were not allowed to take the Consecrated Host from the tabernacle.
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I’ve definitely seen this not observed. In at least one parish where the priest was absent, we could not have had the service if the lay minister (the admin for that parish but not to my knowledge a deacon) hadn’t removed the consecrated hosts, as there was no priest at all. I don’t know if he got a special permission or not. It’s generally a fairly orthodox place.
 
We have a Communion Service one day a week. I have to lead it one day a month. I don’t care for it very much. There are enough Catholic churches around here it’s not difficult for me to go to daily mass some where else. When ever I’m driving to church to lead one of these services I’m so uncomfortable that I spend the drive praying for vocations. So, pray for vocations.
 
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