In the Catholic Church, Communion is the very body, blood, soul, and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ under the appearance of bread and wine. Reception of Communion is an affirmation of that belief – which is why Catholics ordinarily say “Amen” when presented with Communion – and an indication of the communicant’s full personal communion with the mystical body of Christ, which subsists in the Catholic Church. If a person does not believe that the Eucharist is the very body and blood of Christ (as most Protestants do not) and is not in full personal communion with the Catholic Church (as all Protestants are not), then that person’s reception of Catholic Communion is an act of dishonesty. In other words, by his actions he is indicating that he holds beliefs he does not in fact hold and is in a communion that he does not in fact share.
It is also worth mentioning that there is something very troubling about the tendency of some Christians to take the Catholic Church’s ordinary reservation of its Communion to believing, practicing Catholics to be a personal rejection over which they apparently feel entitled to nurse wounded feelings. These same Christians likely would not dream of feeling slighted by being denied the opportunity to vote in a country where they do not hold citizenship. They would understand that a country has the right to restrict voting privileges to its own citizens. Perhaps they should consider that the Catholic Church likewise has the right to reserve its sacraments to its own members – especially since the Church does offer the sacraments to non-Catholic Christians occasionally under special circumstances, which is an act of generosity toward non-member Christians.
