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"Take and eat, all of you..."

Communion in the hand was the common method of receiving the Eucharist for four centuries, in the early Church.

But, let us not forget that Our Lord has just instituted the priesthood, and therefore, was talking to a set of Bishops, not lay people.

The practice of Communion in the hand was the single issue that turned me off the Novus Ordo. It came at a stage in my life that I started to actually learn what the faith was all about, what the Real Presence actually meant, and what the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass really was. Up until then, the phrase The Body of Christ was just an empty one, without much impact at all. Why was this? Because the faith in the Real Presence wasn't backed up by the example given in the New Mass. It was treated like a symbol. It is a shocking statistic that the vast majority of Western Catholics that actually attend Mass do not believe in the Real Presence as the Church teach it.

To your point on the practice of the Early Church. Yes, Communion in the hand was widespread, but please consider the context in which this was happening. The Church was either practicising in the catacombs, or had just come out into the open. The faithful were just that - extremely faithful, were extremely close and most of them lived on a daily fear of martyrdom (was it 10 million Catholics killed by the Romans in the first 4 centuries?).

When the Church came out into the open, proper churches were built, and the general populace began to practice. Faith was not as fervent in places, and abuses started to creep in. Eventually, the church condemned the practice as an abuse:

Council of Rouen, which met in 650, says, “Do not put the Eucharist in the hands of any layman or laywomen but only in their mouths.” The Council of Constantinople which was known as in trullo (not one of the ecumenical councils held there) prohibited the faithful from giving Communion to themselves (which is of course what happens when the Sacred Particle is placed in the hand of the communicant). It decreed an excommunication of one week’s duration for those who would do so in the presence of a bishop, priest or deacon.

taken from Some Considerations on Communion in the Hand by Rev. Fr. Paul J. McDonald.

Moreover, times have moved on. The Protestant "reformation" returned to Communion in the hand as a direct expression of their disbelief in the Real Presence. The Roman Catechism put it this way: Christ, whole and entire, is contained not only under either species, but also in each particle of either species, so people are leaving parts of the Real Presence behind on their hands without even knowing about it. Also, our knowledge of the Real Presence has deepened (see someone like St. Alphonsus' writings on the Blessed Sacrament, or St. Thomas Aquinas), so to reverse this is simply illogical - the tree does not revert to the seed). Symbolism has also changed - today, to have something in your hand is to "possess" it - a contradiction in terms of the Blessed Sacrament. We are not to take "possession" of the host, but to be fed by it by the priest, who stands in the place of Our Lord. The practice opens up the possibility of real abuse: taken away for satanic ritual (this does happen!) or even - as I have read recently - framed in a wedding photo album (this almost defies belief!). Finally, the practice was introduced through disobedience of the Dutch Bishops - is this really the sort of president we should follow.

I encourage everyone to shun this practice. It has taken on the baggage of the Protestant faith, has been previously condemned by the Church, Pope Paul VI's inquiry to the Bishops rejected it (but was introduced anyway), and - at the end of the day - is less reverent than receiving Our Lord directly on the tongue in the traditional way.