Old Indian proverb: "Before you take a fence down, first ask why it was put up in the first place."
All anyone has to do is visit a large antique shop or an Irish pub to see odd pieces of our communion rails. Who was it that took them out of our churches and why (you just know they will reply Vatican II)? Why were they put up in the first place?
As an altar boy as a kid I saw even the practical value of an altar rail: during weddings and funerals it kept the photograhpers and others from the holy of holies and between Masses it kept the thieves away from the treasures.
Why the communion rail born from the wisdom of ages past?
2 comments:
Good post. Not long ago I heard a retired priest ( I shudder every time I hear that phrase here in Toledo ) tell a crowd of people. "You know why that rail was there, don't you? To keep you out! That was the only purpose". I tried to be patient. He'd been asked to repeat a talk he had given on "whatever happened to the Church I knew". He had last given it thirty years ago and he was uncomfortably aware that the tide had turned against his "spirit of Vatican II" notions. Poor man.
friend, soon enough his type will be yet again banished for another thousand years...!
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