Today I received a text from a priest friend who sent photos of the brand new COMMUNION RAIL which they just installed in the “old church”. This one these places where they built a new church but kept the old building as a chapel. The rail had been removed in the bad old days. He found a local woodworker and the project was paid for in one weekend.
The Whatever High Atop The Thing™ is so out of touch with what the people in the pews want.
Anyway, we have seen panicked reactions in places like New York and Chicago, et al., about the horror of returning to kneeling for Communion. “How backwardist of those troglodytes! They must be forced to walk-together… in lock-step!”
Today I saw at National Catholic Register a piece by Joseph Pronechen, about the return of Communion rails. HERE
Furthermore, TWHATT™ will never succeed in crushing out the Traditional Latin Mass. Why? Because that means crushing out the people who want it. They are the true target. But the people who want it are believers.
Communion Rails Return as Churches Embrace Beauty and Reverence
A growing number of Catholic parishes in the U.S. are restoring altar rails, renewing reverence and transforming the faithful’s experience of the Holy Eucharist.Every Sunday at St. Anne Church in Richmond Hill, Georgia, the Hilleary family — mother Michelle, father Brian and five children — receives Communion at the altar rail.
“It creates a more sacred space. And it draws your attention to the sacred,” Michelle Hilleary told the Register.
“It sets apart the sanctuary,” observed her 15-year-old daughter, Malia.
That wasn’t always the case.
When St. Anne’s was built in 2016, there was no Communion rail. Today, a redwood altar rail — installed in July 2024 — now surrounds the sanctuary.
[…]
Father Kwiatkowski recounted that the former pastor had placed one kneeler in front of the sanctuary. Father Kwiatkowski added a second kneeler to enable a more reverent reception. Then one family offered $50,000 toward an altar railing if he could raise the remainder of the money needed to complete the project. “Within a week, I found the rest of the sponsors,” he said, explaining that parishioners supported the addition of the altar railing costing a total of $90,000.
[…]
For weeks before each Sunday Mass, he explained to parishioners how to use the altar rail, depending on people’s choice of how to receive Communion, and he posted these explanations on the parish website.
So far, he has found that “about 90% of the people will kneel to receive Communion. Even if they are receiving on the hand, they will still kneel and use the altar railing.” Naturally, those unable to kneel will stand.
[…]
In Springfield, Virginia, St. Raymond of Penafort Catholic Church was completed in 2006 — without altar rails.
[…]
Father De Celles has found that “about 80%-90% of the people kneel.” Most who don’t kneel “tend to do so because they physically have a hard time kneeling and standing back up, or because they are visiting the parish.”
[…]
There’s more. It’s a very good article.
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I know it is not always beneficial to compare Eastern vs. Western expressions of the liturgy…but…but…are there equally strident calls among the Orthodox or Eastern Catholics for the demolition of iconostases and for the faithful to no longer communicate via the liturgical spoon? I really don’t know the answer to this question, but would dearly love to. Perhaps our Eastern brethren have had more experience (and success!) dealing with iconoclasts and their progeny and so any such ideas were more quickly stamped out than over here in the West. Something to ponder, anyway!
Now THESE are the type of extinct creatures we need to resurrect!
It almost seems like God allowed us decades in the liturgical desert simply so we would appreciate the promised land of traditional architecture and practices.
Yes, we continue to observe these boomer bishops as they try to put the traditional genie back in the bottle. This is how you know the battle is already won. The traditional practice has infiltrated the Novus Ordo parishes. We are the mainstream now.
Take the ‘Way Back’ machine 500 years to the time of Henry VIII, and before, and then tell me that the communion rails of 1962 are justly annnihilated and their restoration reprehensible.
In 1400 – 1500 the rood screens dominated medium to large churches and you had to choose a seat wisely to be able to see the altar through the equivalent of a porthole. (See Eamon Duffy’s book ‘The Stripping of the Altars:,,,’ for a pretty detailed account of look and life of the church towns of the period. You also received a pseudo-communion most of the year and got the Eucharist only in Eastertime – and maybe just once.
Going ‘back’ to communion rails is nothing terrifying or extraordinary.
I looked at a picture of St. Anne’s before the rail. Even if it wasn’t used for communion a railing would greatly improve it visually.
They are acquiring St. Michael hymnals. Now all they need to do is add an altar for an ad orientem Mass!
For years our unfortunate diocese was run by modernist types whose policy seemed to be to close traditional church buildings in favor of new theater-in-the-round monstrosities or to wreck the interior of churches to make them forever unsuitable for traditional Catholic worship and to obviate even the reinstallation of altar railings. My parish got the usual treatment of the cutting up and rearrangement of pews and the installation of a large concrete platform placed closer to the center of the church. When it was being done, people wrote letters to the Bishop asking him to stop it, not knowing that he was one of the perpetrators. Those in charge gave every impression of hating their flock.
We are trying to get a safety rail installed in our church. Our paster was very explicit that it is not a communion rail, because saying communion and rail next to each other “sets off the bishop”.
I pray for His Excellency daily.
How is it that a redwood altar rail costs $90,000? It is a sincere question. I assume there is a good reason but I don’t know what it is. If I had been asked to guess the cost without being told the actual cost, my guess would have been way lower than $90,000.
Reading the guidance from the parish, I love that only the priest or deacon is referenced as those giving communion!
How is it that a redwood altar rail costs $90,000?
It’s not just the altar rail. It’s also the labour, the shipping costs, design and drafting costs, material costs, etc.
Response to ajf1984
The short answer is “no.”
Back in the 1940s and 50s there was a great deal of removing iconostases (or prohibiting them in newly-built churches) in North America, especially among the Byzantine Ruthenians, but also among other Byzantine Rite Catholic church jurisdictions, mandated from on high by diocesan bishops “to show people that we’re not Orthodox, but Catholics.” From the late 1960s onward there was a huge reaction against these kinds of “latinizatons” in which both those whom one might term, looking backwards, in-embryo “liberals” and in-embryo “conservatives,” joined, although in some respects for different reasons.
Liturgical follies have been for the most part “stomped upon” in Eastern Catholic churches of the Byzantine ritual tradition (although one does find instances of “giving the sign of peace” and of “girl altar boys,” in some few cases encouraged by a bishop or two – but mostly not). But pity those other “Eastern Rite” churches, the Maronites, the Malabaris, the Chaldeans, and the Ethiopians (and maybe – does anyone know about this? – the Coptic Catholics) which, lemming-like, have “reformed” their rites after the Roman manner, down to the folly of “Mass facing the people” (a practice historically unknown to all the Eastern churches).
And, yes, there are Orthodox who favor “liturgical reform,” but they mostly keep quiet about it, knowing that Orthodox bishops, even those who are a bit liberal-ish on “moral issues” (let the reader understand!) would publicly profess horror at any siuch idea.
Well, it has been indefinitely “prevented” in NE Indiana :/
Hmmm….I need to write a book on ‘Communion Rails’. It will be a coffee table book about communion rails!
A glorious parish church here in the upper midwest with traditional 19th century architecture and decorations was finally shuttered about 20 years ago, during the first round of cuts and combinations. Then, it was deconsecrated, sold to a Muslim congregation, stripped of its distinctive Catholic fittings, and turned into a mosque. The remaining parishioners, who had fought valiantly for it, were told to attend the 1970s Dental Office Moderne parish church nearby.
Then, 11 years ago, the FSSP showed up here (parachuted in by black helicopter in the middle of the night?!) and were given a modest and almost empty church elsewhere in the metro, which had been uglified as well. And in their ongoing work to beautify that space, they managed to buy and restore the altar rail from the now-mosque!!! It had been saved in some warehouse (think the last scene of Indiana Jones) and now I am blessed to kneel at it to receive my Lord every Sunday!
Not in Idaho — except SSPX and FSSP parishes — where the bishop disallowed any sort of furniture for allowing kneeling during Communion back in 2020. He also disallowed Novus Ordo priests from celebrating Mass ad orientam and from telling people there are better ways to things (like receiving Communion on the tongue). He also got rid of all Latin and Greek in the liturgy at the cathedral in Boise. He stills does pro-life stuff, though, so all the conservative Novus Ordo people like him. https://www.ccwatershed.org/2020/04/07/bishop-peter-christensen-ad-orientem/
St. Raymond in VA… Phenomenal parish; there you can find a NO Mass where at least one ( I think both) of the priests says the Mass in Latin(or at least a good bit of it) and ad orientum. I’ve never seen that at a NO Mass before I went there and man it is wonderful. It’s not the same as the Tridentine Rite but it is proof one can still find a very reverent NO Mass… And in a suburb of Washington DC no less…
Added bonus: the Sunday I went there the priest put something in the bulletin about why the lay faithful don’t need to stand in the Orans(sp?) position during Mass. I had never heard of that before. He ( the pastor) is unapologetically honest about matters of faith and doctrine in his homilies. Most refreshing.