In my first article on this topic, I made the historical and liturgical case for standing, which is the normative posture for receiving Holy Communion in the United States. Several readers pressed back from various angles. Rather than rehearse those exchanges, I want to explore the deeper question that the first article opened but did not fully develop, and that sits underneath most of the objections I received.

That question is anthropological. It concerns not merely which posture is older or which gesture communicates reverence more immediately, but what the Church believes about the human person who approaches the altar, and what the Eucharist means for that person to receive.

Ressourcement and What the Council Actually Authorized

The most serious objection to the first article’s argument runs roughly as follows. To privilege the practice of the first millennium over that of the second is antiquarianism, the error Pius XII warned against in Mediator Dei when he wrote that “ancient usage must not be esteemed more suitable and proper, either in its own right or in its significance for later times and new situations, on the simple ground that it carries the savor and aroma of antiquity” (§61). The liturgy is a living organism, and the developments of the second millennium, including kneeling for Communion, deserve reverence as expressions of the Holy Spirit’s guidance no less than the practices they replaced.

This is a fair reading of Pius XII, as far as it goes. But it does not go far enough, because the objection proves too much. If any recovery of an earlier practice constitutes antiquarianism, then the entire liturgical reform authorized by Sacrosanctum Concilium falls under the same condemnation—the restoration of the Prayer of the Faithful, the expanded lectionary, the recovery of concelebration, the simplification of the rites themselves. Pius XII’s warning in Mediator Dei was directed primarily at unauthorized private experimentation, at individuals and movements acting outside the Church’s authority to impose their preferred restorations on the liturgy. It was also directed at the misguided practice of recovering older practices on the sole basis that they were older.

What happened at and after Vatican II during the reform’s implementation does not violate Pius’s warning precisely because the Church herself, through the Council and the post-conciliar commissions acting with papal authority, examined her own liturgical tradition, identified elements that “with the passage of time, came to be duplicated, or were added with but little advantage,” and ordered that elements “which have suffered injury through accidents of history” be “restored to the vigor which they had in the days of the holy Fathers, as may seem useful or necessary,” so that “the intrinsic nature and purpose of [the Mass’s] several parts, as also the connection between them, may be more clearly manifested, and that devout and active participation by the faithful may be more easily achieved” (Sacrosanctum Concilium, §50).

The distinction is not between old and new but between ressourcement and antiquarianism. Ressourcement recovers what is genuinely “useful or necessary,” not because it is older, but because the Church, exercising her proper authority, has determined that an earlier practice more fittingly expresses the theology the rite is meant to convey. Antiquarianism, on the other hand, is the private judgment that older is ipso facto superior. The standing posture at Communion was not restored by private individuals out of nostalgia. It was restored by the Magisterium after considerable study, several hundred years of study in fact, out of a sense that this forgotten element was genuinely advantageous.

The Magisterium was not operating blindly. Two thousand bishops debated in Council the principles that would eventually guide the more than three hundred experts and consultants appointed to the Commission established by Pope Paul VI, to interpret and apply the new Constitution on the Liturgy.

A conciliar Constitution, like any constitution, is not self-interpreting. It requires a juridical body to apply its principles to concrete cases, and that was the role the Consilium was established to fill. To this end, it produced five major interpretive texts, titled the first through fifth instruction “For the Right Implementation of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy of the Second Vatican Council.” Changes not found in the Constitution itself were authorized in these documents and on their grounds.

The liturgical movement that informed the reform, represented especially by Jungmann, Guardini, Parsch, Bouyer, and the working groups of the Consilium, had recovered a more ancient and theologically integrated understanding of Eucharistic posture. On the basis of historical study and theological reflection, these scholars recognized that standing was the characteristic posture of the early Christian assembly and commended its retrieval as a normative gesture for Communion, since it most fittingly expressed the freedom and baptismal dignity of the faithful and the resurrectional character of the Eucharistic celebration.

What the Consilium eventually produced, in collaboration with the Sacred Congregation for Divine Worship, was not vague, and it did not leave the question of Communion posture to inference. The 1975 editio typica of the Roman Missal, prepared under its direction, prescribed standing as the normative posture throughout the Communion rite. Its General Instruction directed that the faithful “should stand . . . from the prayer over the gifts to the end of the Mass,” with a single exception: “They should kneel at the consecration unless prevented by the lack of space, the number of people present, or some other good reason” (GIRM, 1975, §21). And the rationale the General Instruction offered for its posture norms was not pragmatic but theological: “The uniformity in standing, kneeling, or sitting to be observed by all taking part is a sign of the community and the unity of the assembly; it both expresses and fosters the spiritual attitude of those taking part” (GIRM, 1975, §20, emphasis mine). The posture is, in the Church’s own judgment, both expressive and formative. It communicates the theology of the rite and simultaneously shapes the dispositions of those who perform it.

The very fact that standing was reintroduced as a permissible and normative posture, after centuries in which kneeling was the only option in the Latin Rite, is itself a theological act. If the Church believed kneeling was simply superior, she would not have authorized its replacement as the norm. She would have left the discipline untouched.

Because the 1975 General Instruction had already established standing as normative from the Offertory through the end of Mass, the question that followed was not whether standing was theologically warranted but how much latitude local churches would have in adapting the norm. That the 2002 editio typica tertia subsequently granted conferences the faculty to determine “kneeling or standing” does not signify Rome walking back a preference. It represents Rome enshrining in law the subsidiary principle that this decision belongs to the local church, within a framework the universal Church created precisely because it recognized the theological value of what had been recovered. If Rome had judged that the 1975 norm was a mistake and that standing lacked sufficient theological warrant, then the 2002 revision was the occasion to say so. It did not. Instead, it widened the range of permissible local adaptation while preserving the framework that made standing normative in the first place.

Now, not every historical change in liturgical practice constitutes organic development analogous to the development of doctrine. Sometimes a shift in practice is simply a contingent reaction to historical pressures, shaped by circumstances that no longer obtain. The withdrawal of the chalice from the faithful is perhaps the clearest example. It relied on a legitimate theological truth, that Christ is fully present under either species. But the practice of withdrawing the cup was not itself a theological development. It was a disciplinary response to practical concerns and, in part, to the polemics of the Reformation. While affirming the dogmatic principles recognized at Trent, Vatican II recognized the contingent character of this disciplinary restriction and authorized the chalice’s restoration (SC, §55).

The same logic applies to the question of posture. Eucharistic devotion genuinely deepened in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This included the institution of the Feast of Corpus Christi, the elevation of the Host, and the flowering of Eucharistic theology in the schools. Yet intensification of devotion cannot be equated with theological maturation, and neither is the posture involved—that of kneeling—directly correlative with the intensification that occurred. Kneeling arose within a medieval devotional and anthropological climate marked by heightened affective piety, an accentuated consciousness of sin and corresponding sense of unworthiness before the sacred, and an increasingly object-focused Eucharistic gaze. To infer without theological basis that kneeling for Communion represents a development or maturation rather than merely a historical embodiment of reverence has to be established on its own merits. Otherwise it is to confuse doctrinal development with the evolution of discipline or mere rigor. To treat kneeling as the necessary and integral culmination of Eucharistic piety, is implicitly to canonize the medieval Latin synthesis as normative for all times and places, thereby binding the Church’s process of doctrinal development to one contingent ritual grammar and symbolic worldview.

Standing for the Gospel, Standing for the Lamb

One point that has emerged in conversation since the first article deserves more attention than it received there. This was an insight I received from Patrick Gill, a sacramental theologian at St. Mary’s University, Twickenham, London. He noted in a discussion following the publication of my first article on this topic, that the liturgy already asks the faithful to stand at the moment when Christ is most directly encountered through his Word—at the proclamation of the Gospel. We rise not because the Gospel is entertaining or because the Church wants to provide us opportunities stretch our legs but because she teaches that Christ is truly present in the Word proclaimed. Vatican II insists on this real presence of Christ in the Scriptures alongside his presence in the Eucharistic species, and the liturgy expresses this insistence through the body: for this reason, during the Gospel, we stand.

The continuity between the Church’s call to stand for the Gospel and for Communion is worth noting. Both are moments of encounter with the living Christ. Both call forth a posture that expresses readiness and speaks to the dignity of those who have been claimed by baptism for a share in Christ’s own life. If standing before the proclaimed Word during the Gospel is not irreverent—and no one argues that it is—then standing before the same Lord received sacramentally cannot be, either. The consistency of posture is itself a catechesis. It trains the faithful, through our own bodies, that the Christ who speaks to us is the same Christ who feeds us.

This is not a modern inference. The Council of Nicaea itself legislated on the question. Canon 20 prohibited kneeling on Sundays and during the Paschal season, as I discussed in the first article, precisely because the Church understood standing as the bodily expression of the Resurrection. That the first ecumenical council thought it necessary to codify this tells us the recovery of standing is not an innovation but a return to a principle the early Church enshrined at the highest level of her authority.

Jansenism, the Body, and What Was Lost

The question of posture cannot be separated from the larger theological atmosphere in which the Latin West formed its Eucharistic piety, and from the distortions that crept into that atmosphere over the centuries.

The shift from standing to kneeling for Communion did not occur in a vacuum. It unfolded within a broader transformation of Western Christianity’s self-understanding as Christendom emerged and the Church’s liturgical and architectural imagination increasingly reflected the structures of imperial and feudal authority. Within this paradigm, kneeling carried not only devotional but courtly resonances. The faithful’s primary posture before the Eucharist came to mirror the posture of subjects before a sovereign, and the dominant liturgical mood shifted toward an emphasis on unworthiness before a transcendent and unapproachable majesty.

This was never the whole of Western Eucharistic theology, of course. The tradition always also knew the Eucharist as food, as medicine, and as the Wedding Feast of the Lamb. But the Christendom paradigm exercised enormous gravitational force on how the faithful experienced the rite, and it was intensified after the Reformation by a defensive posture that overemphasized certain truths to the exclusion of others. The sacrificial dimension of the Mass was stressed to the point where the communal and meal dimensions became diminished. The defense of the Real Presence, entirely justified in itself, so dominated the theological landscape that Christ’s equally real presence in the Word proclaimed and in the assembly gathered received far less attention than the Council would later insist it deserved. And the sense of unworthiness before the Eucharist was sharpened until, under the influence of Jansenism, it became a reason not to receive the Eucharist at all.

Antoine Arnauld’s De la fréquente Communion (1643) is the most famous expression of this trajectory. Arnauld argued that the faithful were so unworthy of the Eucharist that frequent reception without extensive penitential preparation was presumptuous and spiritually dangerous, and if not a kind of sacrilege, at least a cheapening of the Sacrament. In his view, Communion was a reward for the already-perfect, not a medicine for the sick. His conditions for worthy reception were so severe that they effectively barred ordinary Catholics from the Sacrament. The Jansenist rigorism that followed from this spread throughout France and beyond, and its effects persisted for centuries. As late as 1905, Pius X found it necessary to issue the decree Sacra Tridentina Synodus explicitly to counteract what he called the lingering “poison of Jansenism, which, under the pretext of showing due honour and reverence to the Holy Eucharist, had infected the minds even of good men.” He insisted that daily Communion was the desire of Christ and of the Church, and that the Eucharist was, in the Council of Trent’s phrase, which the decree endorsed, “the antidote whereby we may be freed from daily faults and be preserved from mortal sin,” not a reward for the already-perfect.

The Jansenist impulse, that the human person is fundamentally too wretched to approach the sacred without elaborate purification, maps naturally onto a posture of maximum self-abasement. If the dominant note of Eucharistic reception is unworthiness, then kneeling (or prostrating) expresses the logic perfectly. But if the dominant note is what the Church actually teaches, that the Eucharist is given precisely to sanctify and elevate the one who receives it, then a different posture is called for. The question is whether the gesture expresses what happens to us in the sacrament or merely what we feel about ourselves approaching it.

Beneath the Jansenist error lies a deeper anthropological tension: what Patrick Gill, has described as a post-Cartesian suspicion of the body and of the natural order as such. In conversation about my earlier article, Gill posed a sharper question: whether the Western stress on self-abasement before the Eucharist at times risks obscuring the implicit goodness of the redeemed body. He asked further whether the instinct to diminish bodily posture in the presence of the sacred reflects not simply the primacy of spiritual goods over temporal ones, but a subtle Cartesian cleavage of soul from body, a privileging of the supernatural that depreciates rather than perfects the natural. This is the very dualism 20th century theologian and Vatican II peritus Henri de Lubac labored to overcome in his theology of nature and grace, wherein matter is not suspect or to be suppressed, but assumed, healed, and elevated. Gill’s point is de Lubac’s point translated into liturgical gesture: if nature is not negated but perfected by grace, then the body that stands before the Lord is not being casual but is testifying to the integrity of the nature grace has claimed. As Gill put it, “standing in front of the Lord and receiving Him standing would profess an adult stature in the baptized Christian.”

Lowering oneself before the sacred is not in itself a symptom of anything gone wrong. Eastern prostration, for instance, carries an entirely different theological weight. The body is pressed into the ground by the overwhelming reality of what it encounters, not diminished but overwhelmed. A particular strand of post-Tridentine Latin piety, however, did collapse reverence into self-effacement, and that collapse has consequences that still reverberate today. When the natural order must be negated for the supernatural to appear, when the body must be punished or suppressed before the sacred can be received, something has gone wrong, not with devotion as such, but with the anthropology underneath it.

The Anthropological Heart

The International Theological Commission, in its 1981 document Theology, Christology, Anthropology, stated the principle with apt precision: “man’s true hominization . . . attains its apex in his divinization, in his friendship and communion with God, by which man is made the temple of God” (I.D, §2.2).

Deification, or theosis, is not the negation of the human person, but his perfection. The more deeply we participate in the divine life, the more fully human we become. “Deification properly understood can make man perfectly human: deification is the truest and ultimate hominization of man” (I.E, §4).

[T]his deification is not communicated to the individual as such but as a member of the Communion of Saints. Moreover, the invitation given by divine grace to the human race takes place in the Holy Spirit. Christians therefore should realize the holiness they have achieved in their way of life (LG 39-42). (ITC, I.E. §5).

As Vladimir Lossky argued in The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (1944), Eastern Orthodoxy preserved the mystical and deifying dimension of theology in a far more integrated way than the Latin West after the schism. In his view, the Western tradition gradually subordinated the language of theosis to juridical and penitential categories. Yves Congar, whom Lossky cites, conceded as much from the Catholic side: “We have the same God but before him we are different men, unable to agree as to the nature of our relationship with him.” The disagreement is dogmatic, not liturgical, but a theology of the God-human relationship does not leave the liturgy untouched. When the dominant theological grammar becomes juridical rather than mystical, it’s no surprise then that the faithful’s posture before God comes to express an anemic theology, that of the guilty subject before the judge, rather than the communion relationship that theosis implies, namely, the creature in the process of being drawn into the divine life. Lossky was writing from an Orthodox perspective and with Orthodox apologetic aims. But the observation that the West has at times underemphasized the divinization of the human person in favor of an exaggerated stress on divine transcendence and human corruption is difficult to deny. And it is precisely this imbalance that the Jansenist trajectory described above both reflected and intensified.

Writing in the decades leading up to the Second Vatican Council, Henri de Lubac saw that modern secularism had grown out of a theological mistake that separated nature from grace and left human life spiritually self-contained, detached from its supernatural end.

The late David L. Schindler, in his introduction to de Lubac’s pivotal work Mystery of the Supernatural, identified this as the central problem de Lubac set out to address. Schindler writes:

De Lubac’s work originated in the face of what may be termed the problem of Catholic theology’s exile from modern culture and of the secularism resulting from the mutual estrangement of the Church and the world in the modern period. The key to de Lubac’s response to this problem lies in the organic relationship between theology (Christology) and anthropology affirmed in the statement [”By revealing the Father and by being revealed by him, Christ completes (achève) the revelation of man to himself.”] . . . As is widely known, nearly every encyclical of Pope John Paul II invokes [Gaudium et Spes §22] in a prominent way. Indeed, John Paul has stated on several occasions, referring to this text, that an organic relationship between “theo-[Christo-]centrism and anthropocentrism” is perhaps the most fundamental principle taught at Vatican II.

What does this have to do with Eucharistic posture? The Eucharist is the supreme moment of theosis. It is the moment when the baptized, already sharing in Christ’s dignity through the grace of their baptism, are drawn more deeply into the divine life through sacramental communion with his risen Body.

The ITC document states the consequence plainly: “The adoration and worship of God, especially Eucharistic worship, makes man fully human.”

If this is true and the Eucharist is the moment of our deepest divinization, and if divinization is the truest hominization, then the communicant who stands to receive the Risen Lord is not being casual. He is testifying, with his body, to what grace has made of him.

Baptism does not place us on equal footing with Christ. But it confers a real participation in his life, a shared dignity the Fathers proclaimed and the Church has never ceased to defend, because grace perfects rather than annihilates our humanity.

Formation, Not Abandonment

Whether this theology is legible in practice is another matter. Anyone who has watched the average Communion procession in the average American parish knows that standing does not always communicate what the theology says it should. The line can look routine, even casual, and the shuffle forward can flatten the very dignity the posture is meant to express.

But the Church was not naive about it. The 1975 General Instruction did not assume that prescribing the correct gesture would automatically produce the correct interior disposition. It made a subtler and more consequential claim: that the common posture of the assembly “both expresses and fosters the spiritual attitude of those taking part” (GIRM, 1975, §20). That word ‘fosters’ changes the terms of the debate entirely, because it means the Church prescribed standing not as a reflection of a formation already achieved but as a means toward a formation that was expected to follow. That formation, by and large, is not there yet.

Nor will the current liturgical framework supply it on its own. The 1975 General Instruction embedded standing within a coherent theology that ran from the Offertory through the end of Mass. The 2002 editio typica tertia replaced that framework with a delegation of authority to episcopal conferences. The USCCB preserved standing as normative for Communion, but the theological rationale that the 1975 instruction built around it did not carry over. The posture survived. The catechesis did not. If standing is to communicate what the Church intended it to communicate, and the reasons outlined in this article suggest it can communicate something that kneeling cannot, the recovery must be deliberate.

The faithful did not grasp the restored Prayer of the Faithful or the expanded Lectionary on the day these were introduced, either. The three-year Lectionary was criticized for decades as disorienting, and poorly trained lectors made the problem worse. The Church concluded that lectors needed better formation and that the faithful needed time to learn the new rhythm. The same logic applies here. A posture that has not yet been adequately catechized is not a posture that has failed. Redemptionis Sacramentum §91 confirms as much: no one may be denied Communion solely on the grounds that they wish to receive kneeling or standing. The norm is formation, not coercion.

What would that formation teach? That the liturgy already makes the distinction.

The Mass has already enacted the full arc of the Paschal Mystery before anyone approaches the altar. The faithful have already beaten their breasts at the Confiteor and knelt through the Consecration. By the time they cry out at the Agnus Dei, the penitential arc of the rite has been bodily performed. The Communion procession is what comes after. It corresponds not to the prostration scenes of Revelation but to the vision that follows them: the great multitude of the redeemed, clothed in white, standing before the throne and before the Lamb (Rev 7:9). The liturgy moves through these moments in sequence.

That many Catholics do not yet understand this sequence is not an argument against the theology. It is an argument for better formation, for the kind of mystagogical catechesis that teaches the faithful to read the liturgy’s own grammar, so that their bodies can speak the language the rite asks of them.

The Risk of Losing Both

The anthropological question is not abstract. It has direct consequences for the crisis of Eucharistic faith.

When you deny or diminish nature in order to emphasize transcendence, you lose both. This is de Lubac’s central insight, and it is the lesson the Council drew from him. A theology that treats the human person as fundamentally unworthy of encounter with God, and as needing to be abased before the sacred can be approached, does not actually produce greater reverence. It produces either despair or, more commonly, indifference, because it severs the connection between the mystery celebrated and the life of the person celebrating it. If I am nothing, why does it matter that I receive Christ?

In truth, by the very fact that we are created in the image of God and redeemed by Christ, we are made worthy of the sacred. To deny or downplay this reality in the name of humility—a false humility, since it lacks truth—is to diminish both creation and redemption.

A common traditionalist argument holds that the shift from kneeling to standing has contributed to declining Eucharistic faith, usually citing a 2019 Pew survey whose methodology has been widely criticized for the way it worded its central question. The better data tell a different story. A study conducted by Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate and commissioned by the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame found that roughly ninety-five percent of Catholics who attend Mass weekly profess belief in the Real Presence, and around eighty percent of those who attend at least once a month do the same. The vast majority of these Catholics attend the Novus Ordo and receive Communion standing. If standing were producing irreverence, these numbers would be inexplicable. The crisis of Eucharistic belief is real, but it is concentrated among Catholics who rarely or never attend Mass at all, which is a catechetical and evangelical failure, not primarily a liturgical one. A large share of those who do not believe in the Real Presence also do not know that this is what the Church teaches.

Yet weak teaching alone does not explain everything. The reduction of Catholic identity to cultural inheritance, without a living encounter at its foundation, also plays a part. Beneath these immediate factors lies a deeper loss of the lived meaning of the Incarnation. If God has truly entered human nature, then that same human nature, even in its sinfulness, is not an obstacle to holiness but the very place where holiness is meant to take root. The main problem is not that people approach Communion too casually. The casualness is a symptom of a deeper loss of the sense of dignity. Many have lost the theological imagination to see that their bodies have been claimed by God for a purpose.

Recovering the standing posture helps recover this sense of the incarnation. It does not do so by making Communion casual. It does so by insisting, through the body, that the person who approaches the altar is not a wretch begging for scraps but a baptized son or daughter of God, dignified by grace, approaching the source and summit of the life they have been given. And in recovering this sense of dignity, we also recover a better sense of sin—not as the permanent condition of a fallen creature but as the obscuring of a dignity that Christ died to restore. The person who understands sin as a wound to something precious will take it more seriously, not less, than the person who understands it as the confirmation of their nothingness.

Excessive self-degradation can become its own species of pride. It tends toward despair about Christ’s care for us and His ability to lift us up, cultivating a permanent sense of wretchedness that is, at bottom, a refusal to accept what grace can and has already accomplished. The better antidote to vainglory is found in obedience to the Church’s considered judgment, even, and perhaps especially, in her smallest details.

The USCCB has established standing as the normative posture for Holy Communion in the United States, exercising a canonical faculty explicitly granted by the universal Church through the GIRM. Some dismiss this as merely bureaucratic, as though a bishops’ conference were a government agency rather than a body of successors to the Apostles exercising a collegial authority that Rome itself entrusted to them for precisely this purpose. But to reject the conference’s norm because it is not a direct Roman decree is to reject the very principle of subsidiarity that the GIRM enshrines. And to reject it selectively, since no one objects when the same conferences establish norms for kneeling during the Eucharistic Prayer. The norm serves what Eucharisticum Mysterium calls the unity of sign: the faithful are directed to follow the common manner of reception so that Communion may “truly be a sign of familial union among all those who share in the same table of the Lord” (§34). This is not a bureaucratic nicety. It is a liturgical principle, and obedience to it, rather than the elevation of a private devotional preference over the Church’s established norm, is sentire cum Ecclesia made manifest.

Conclusion

The first article in this series traced the history and the liturgical logic. This one has tried to reach the theology underneath, the anthropology that makes sense of why the Church recovered standing in the first place, and why that recovery matters now.

The Church has never taught that kneeling is wrong, she provides many places for it in her liturgy. But she authorized the recovery of standing for reasons that reach deeper than piety or convenience, reasons grounded in the patristic, conciliar, and anthropological currents of her own tradition.

If we believe what the Church teaches about what happens in this sacrament—that our redeemer comes to meet in the utmost intimacy a people he has raised up—then our posture should testify to it. Not to our wretchedness, but to what grace has made of us.