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To: Romulus
act of witness of reverence to the Blessed Sacrament

Isn't receiving on the tongue related to the consecration (or should that be anointing?) of the priest's hands?

So I guess it would fall in the "one wrong is better than two wrongs" category?

16 posted on 09/14/2009 2:28:28 PM PDT by trad_anglican
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To: trad_anglican
Isn't receiving on the tongue related to the consecration (or should that be anointing?) of the priest's hands?

Sort of. The priest exercises his ministry not in his own name but in the name of Jesus, who's the true High Priest. In this capacity we say he's "alter Christus" (another Christ). I'm sure you understand this has nothing to do with the man's personal merits or faults; he is the consecrated instrument of the Lord who works through him. The annointing of his hands is one of the external signs of this consecration: when we receive from his hands we're making more visible the sign that we're really receiving from Jesus Himself.

So I guess it would fall in the "one wrong is better than two wrongs" category?

Yep.

18 posted on 09/14/2009 2:36:08 PM PDT by Romulus (The Traditional Latin Mass is the real Youth Mass)
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To: trad_anglican; Romulus
When I was in grade school (back in the Jurassic) I was quite impressed with Saint Thomas Aquinas' teaching that only the consecrated (hands of the priest) should touch the consecrated.

Later, a wise person used that concept by analogy to help me grasp the underlying spiritual meaning of sexual purity: that in marriage, the spouses' sexual organs --- their procreative/amative capacities --- are blessed by God's law and consecrated "to each other." which makes one realize that immodesty, fornication, sexual impurity, etc. are to be avoided, not just because they have bad consequences, but because they're actually a kind of sacrilege: the trivialization of a high and holy thing to base usage.

It made sense to me as I pondered it. But the sacred-specialness of the way we handle (or don't handle) the Eucharistic gifts, seemed to be lost, to become casual and coarsened, at just the same time that the desacralization of the sexual gifts was running rampant.

The very concept of sacredness becomes unteachable, then unthinkable, because we don't have anything sacred we can even use as an analogy.

I don't suppose I've expressed this very well, but it's something I've thought about a good deal.

22 posted on 09/14/2009 3:04:43 PM PDT by Mrs. Don-o (Viva sweet love.)
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