CHAPTER LXV -- ADMINISTRATION OF THE SACRAMENTS.
But we, after we have thus washed him who has been convinced and has assented to our teaching, bring him to the place where those who are called brethren are assembled, in order that we may offer hearty prayers in common for ourselves and for the baptized [illuminated] person, and for all others in every place, that we may be counted worthy, now that we have learned the truth, by our works also to be found good citizens and keepers of the commandments, so that we may be saved with an everlasting salvation. Having ended the prayers, we salute one another with a kiss. There is then brought to the president of the brethren bread and a cup of wine mixed with water; and he taking them, gives praise and glory to the Father of the universe, through the name of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, and offers thanks at considerable length for our being counted worthy to receive these things at His hands. And when he has concluded the prayers and thanksgivings, all the people present express their assent by saying Amen. This word Amen answers in the Hebrew language to genoito [so be it]. And when the president has given thanks, and all the people have expressed their assent, those who are called by us deacons give to each of those present to partake of the bread and wine mixed with water over which the thanksgiving was pronounced, and to those who are absent they carry away a portion.
Tertullian On Prayer CHAPTER 19.... Of stations.
Similarly, too, touching the days of Stations, most think that they must not be present at the sacrificial prayers, on the ground that the Station must be dissolved by reception of the Lord's Body. Does, then, the Eucharist cancel a service devoted to God, or bind it more to God? Will not your Station be more solemn if you have withal stood at God's altar? When the Lord's Body has been received and reserved? each point is secured, both the participation of the sacrifice and the discharge of duty. If the "Station" has received its name from the example of military life--for we withal are God's military--of course no gladness or sadness chanting to the camp abolishes the "stations" of the soldiers: for gladness will carry out discipline more willingly, sadness more carefully.
*The Eucharist was received by hand and reserved at home for when their Fast ended
The First Council of Nicaea
Canon 20: On Sundays and during the Paschal season prayers should be said standing.
*So, no kneeling. Standing for Communion. Communion in the hand. Communion brought home to be consumed after a Fast ended.
The deacons have been permitted to distribute communion for ages.
*So, no kneeling. Standing for Communion. Communion in the hand. Communion brought home to be consumed after a Fast ended.
That means the Eastern Orthodox, Latin Catholicism, and Eastern Catholicism are all in violation of that canon.
From the Servant of God Pope Pius XII,Encyclical Letter Mediator Dei (Nov. 20, 1947):
"63. Clearly no sincere Catholic can refuse to accept the formulation of Christian doctrine more recently elaborated and proclaimed as dogmas by the Church, under the inspiration and guidance of the Holy Spirit with abundant fruit for souls, because it pleases him to hark back to the old formulas. No more can any Catholic in his right senses repudiate existing legislation of the Church to revert to prescriptions based on the earliest sources of canon law. Just as obviously unwise and mistaken is the zeal of one who in matters liturgical would go back to the rites and usage of antiquity, discarding the new patterns introduced by disposition of divine Providence to meet the changes of circumstances and situation."
St Justin and Tertullian, great as they were, are speaking of the rites and usages of antiquity, here. The holy Pope, on the other hand, is speaking about the rite and usage in effect for centuries up to that time, and thereafter until 1969. Kneeling and communion on the tongue was continued as normative even after that; the deviation from these norms is what is recent, novel, and dangerous to one's soul.
63. Clearly no sincere Catholic can refuse to accept the formulation of Christian doctrine more recently elaborated and proclaimed as dogmas by the Church, under the inspiration and guidance of the Holy Spirit with abundant fruit for souls, because it pleases him to hark back to the old formulas. No more can any Catholic in his right senses repudiate existing legislation of the Church to revert to prescriptions based on the earliest sources of canon law. Just as obviously unwise and mistaken is the zeal of one who in matters liturgical would go back to the rites and usage of antiquity, discarding the new patterns introduced by disposition of divine Providence to meet the changes of circumstances and situation.
From "Mediator Dei", of Pius XII (1947).
The standing for communion and communion in the hand regimes are not legislative so much as they are permitted deviations in certain debased jurisdictions. You can fill in where, as you wish.
Well, Justin and tertullian aren't in a position here to be writing canons. They are merely illuminating the practices extant in their own day.
All this stuff that the modernists like to point to to justify communion inn the hand is all well and good. But it is largely a smoke screen for a totally different agenda than was on the minds of the ancients. The ancient Church often allowed , or even stipulated, receiving in the hand, it was, as Justin Martyr's excerpt makes clear, primarily motivated in bringing the Sacred Species home to the sick, or, in times of persecution (still raging in both his and Tertullian's time), to people who could not sneak away to the liturgy, or were too impeded by fear.
No such motivations exist in the Western Church today (yet), and an appeal to the older practice was disingenuously made by proponents 30-40 years ago. By modern times, a "tradition of reverence" had long since established itself in the West, whereby the "reverent" consumption of the Host was diectly on the tongue. The sudden push for an appeal to an older form was, in conjunction with many other things calculated to reduce the belief in the Real Presence, simply a shock mechanism designed to diminish the Eucharist.
Communion in the hand, standing to receive (in the West; in the East, this has always been done, with a different sense for what constitutes reverence), incessant references to Communion as a "meal" (again, misusing an ancient sensibility with different implications today) conducted at a "table of the Lord" rather than an "altar of sacrifice," and a host of other diminishing agents to the Western concepts of the Real Presence, all run hand-in-hand.
The saddest things is, after thirty+ years of this, that the majority of the bishops seem clueless when asked "what happened" to Catholic belief in the Real Presence! Reading poll after poll indicating that only 30% (!!) of Catholics believe in transubstantiation should provoke an honest, introspective investigation by the bishops of the underlying poor catechesis and minimalist liturgical example leading to this statistic. It *should*, but it evidently *hasn't*. Please, God, may the synod currently underway bear fruit in this regard, if not by the bishops' own initiative, then by Benedict XVI's own direct intervention.