Which just goes to show how ridiculous excommunicating people for questioning disciplines and rubrics was and is.
Communion in the hand and under both kinds have firm theological bases, and can be traced to early Church practice. They are well established, and there is absolutely no evidence of widespread abuses in either practice.
You can take or leave altar girls, IMO, since altar servers do very little in the Novus Ordo anyway. But reception of the Eucharist is at the heart of Catholic practice, and, without some sort of theological rationale for restricting these practices, the Vatican will have a very difficult time making any retrogression stick. That's why there's so much of an uproar over this draft.
The "crisis" in the Catholic Church is not substantially different from the "crises" being experienced by every other mainstream denomination. The issues are cultural and various, and it is much too facile to blame the current difficulties on "Vatican II."
The Church made a huge mistake in the way it imposed the Novus Ordo in 1969. It would now be another huge mistake to try to restrict options which are common practice all over the world just because, as I suspect, there are Vatican reactionaries who don't like them.
I can't believe this draft would have seen the light of day if John Paul II were in perfect health.
The reason the Church excommunicated people for things like Communion in the hand was because the Church was defending its most precious possession, the Body of Christ. It's a pity that more people don't see that the reason so many Catholics don't believe the traditional teaching about the Eucharist is because of the complete lack of reverence for the Sacred Species. The traditional disciplines have been proven to be correct by the complete shambles the typical parish liturgy has become.
St. Pius X would run out of a typical Church in horror if he saw what was being practiced today. But I'm sure you would just consider him a naive old fool. He can't compare to Annibale Bugnini, Rembert Weakland and the other "liturgists" who have given the Church her "new springtime".
Communion in the Hand was practiced very early in the Church's history, but there were huge differences between the practice as it is today and as it was then. For instance, you had to have a cloth on your hand to receive the Sacred Species, and the cloth was handled with complete care after the reception in order to make sure there were no particles of the Sacred Host left on it. As the Church developed in Her understanding, She realized that the simplest way to preserve the Sacrament from irrevence and profanity was to discontinue the practice and have the recipient receive on the tongue.Of course, no propaganda pamphlet about Communion in the Hand mentions any of this.
You should read Pius XII's encyclical MEDIATOR DEI. He condemned all of these ideas as a heresy called "archaism", as did Pope Pius XI in his condemnation of the Synod of Pistoia, a Jansenist council that wanted to "restore the liturgy to ancient practices". Here is a link to Mediator Dei:
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xii/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_20111947_mediator-dei_en.html
Everything these two Popes condemned is now part of the average liturgy, and now we can see the disastrous consequences of not heeding their prophetic voices.
I leave you with the words of Pius XII:" ... I am obsessed by the confidences of the Virgin to the little Lucy of Fatima. This obstinacy of the good Lady in front of the dangers which threaten the Church is a divine warning against the suicide represented by the alteration of the faith in its liturgy, its theology, in its soul. I hear all around me innovators who want to dismantle the Holy Chapel, destroy the universal flame of the Church, throw away her ornaments, give her a remorse of her historical past. Well my dear friend, I have the conviction that the Church of Peter must assume her past or she will dig her own grave. A day will come when the civilized world will deny its God, when the Church will doubt like Peter doubted. She will be tempted to believe that man has become God, that his Son is a mere symbol, a philosophy like many others and in the churches Christians will seek in vain the red light where God waits for them.”
Monsignor Roche's "Pie XII Devant L'Histoire"