Should I have given to Communion to someone who hadn't received in years?

[bigred84]

I frequently volunteer as an extraordinary minister of holy Communion at a local hospital. When I was offering Communion to a patient, he remarked that he hadn’t been to Communion in years. I wondered if it was all right to give Communion to him but I went ahead and did it. I know that some people shouldn’t recieve Communion if they are in a mortally sinful state, but is it wrong or sinful to give it to people when I am not sure what state they are in? I can’t know other people’s state for sure, but what if it seems probable that they are mortally sinful like in this situation?

I asked the priest in charge of the hospital ministry about this situation and similar ones in the past. He said that we have to give the patient the benefit of the doubt: If the recipient wants to recieve Communion, we should let him. Each patient has to judge for himself whether he should receive it. Is that a good rule of thumb? As a volunteer, I don’t have much time to probe into people’s state of sinfulness anyway. But when someone makes a comment about not receiving Communion in years, it makes me worry that I am doing something wrong.

 

[Michelle_Arnold]

I think the key place where things began to go awry in this situation was here:

bigred84:

When I was offering Communion to a patient, he remarked that he hadn’t been to Communion in years. I wondered if it was all right to give Communion to him but I went ahead and did it.

Communion should not be distributed quickly, in a willy-nilly fashion, to anyone who happens to be there. There should be some kind of plan in place to give Communion to those who are known to be practicing Catholics and then an outreach to find out if there are other patients eligible to receive.

For example, you might first distribute Communion to the practicing Catholics. Then you might visit other patients on the floor who are open to visits, both as an action of charity and to ask if they are practicing Catholics who would like to receive Communion. (If the nurses are able to let you know if anyone has inquired about receiving visits from a Catholic chaplain or EMHC, that would be nice, but don’t count on it. Medical privacy laws are much stricter now than they used to be.)

If someone you visit says that he is Catholic and would like to receive Communion but “hadn’t been to Communion in years,” you can then say, “I’d be happy to help arrange for you to receive the sacraments again. Would you like me to arrange a chaplain visit from the priest here at the hospital?” Once the chaplain has visited and let you know that this patient is once again a practicing Catholic, you can add that person to your roster of patients to receive Communion when you make EMHC visits.

In this situation, it sounds to me like you asked a patient if he wanted Communion and he said, “Yes, sure, but…” Once you offered Communion to him, I don’t see how you could have then refused it on the basis of his need to go to confession – particularly because it is true that you cannot judge his soul and determine whether he had any unconfessed mortal sin. But with forethought on your part and proper training of the EMHCs by the hospital’s Catholic chaplain, the situation needn’t have gotten to that place to begin with.