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Mary's wedding procession

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In the early ages of the Church, no special prayer was designated as a preparation for Communion. The Eucharistic Prayer and the Lord's Prayer were sufficient. Our Mother the Church saw it fitting, nevertheless, to offer two prayers of preparation for the coming of the Lord to the temple which is our body. These prayers are of Gallican origin, dating from about the tenth century. They are full of fervor, rather subjective in tone, and suited for private piety, since they are intended as a personal preparation for the priest who recites one of them.

In the first prayer, the priest begs Christ, Son of the living God, to grant salvation to his servant and to deliver him from all his sins and from every evil. "Keep me faithful to your teaching, and never let me be parted from you," he ends.

In the other, the priest declares his own unworthiness and his confidence in Christ's mercy. He asks that the reception of the Eucharist may work not to his condemnation but to his own good.

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The personal preparation of the priest gives us the opportunity to also prepare ourselves in silence, without the noise of words but with an abundance of acts of love. We feel unworthy as the moment for receiving our Lord approaches. But we decide to go on because we know he wants to remain in the consecrated species to be our nourishment and the cure for our weaknesses.

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We should never dare to receive the Eucharist in a state of mortal sin. To do so is to sacrilegiously abuse the mercy of God. Only a shallow and false love, based on mere sentimentality, can bring us to such a detestable course of action. This mistreatment of the sacrament is a grave offense against God.

St Paul's warning on this issue is quite clear:

Anyone who eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily will be behaving unworthily towards the body and blood of the Lord. Everyone is to recollect himself before eating this bread and drinking this cup; because a person who eats and drinks without recognizing the body is eating and drinking his own condemnation (1 Cor 11:27‑29).

And Pope John Paul II warns us:

We find in recent years the following phenomenon. Sometimes, indeed quite frequently, everybody participating in the eucharistic assembly goes to Communion; and on some such occasions, as experienced pastors confirm, there has not been due care to approach the sacrament of penance so as to purify one's conscience. This can of course mean that those approaching the Lord's table find nothing on their conscience, according to the objective law of God, to keep them from this sublime and joyful act of being sacramentally united with Christ. But there can also be, at least at times, another idea behind this: the idea of the Mass as only a banquet [1] in which one shares by receiving the body of Christ in order to manifest, above all else, fraternal communion. It is not hard to add to these reasons a certain human respect and mere "conformity." [2]

Therefore, we cannot  --and should not--  receive our Lord with a soul dirtied by sin. If we realize we have a serious sin, even though we may seem to be contrite, we cannot go and receive the Holy Eucharist without previous sacramental confession.[3]

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It is interesting to notice the connection among the sacraments, specifically between the sacrament of penance and the Eucharist. John Paul II points out:

The two sacraments of reconciliation and the Eucharist remain closely linked. Without a continually renewed conversion and the reception of the sacramental grace of forgiveness, participation in the Eucharist would not reach its full redemptive efficacy.[4]

It is not only that penance leads to the Eucharist, but that the Eucharist also leads to penance. For when we realize who it is that we receive in eucharistic Communion, there springs up almost spontaneously a sense of unworthiness, together with sorrow for our own sins and an interior need for purification.[5]

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We do not believe those who, challenging the teaching of our Lord, say that "they confess directly to God." That act of atonement is good in itself but incomplete. If they are really sincere, they should put into action their desire for atonement by going to the sacrament of penance. As the Lord commanded the apostles and their successors:

For those whose sins you forgive, they are forgiven; for those whose sins you retain, they are retained (Jn 20:23).

1. GIRM, nos. 7‑8; Missale Romanum, ed. typica altera 1975, p. 29.

2. DC, no. 11.

3. Sacred Congregation of Divine Worship, Holy Communion and Worship of the Eucharist Outside the Mass, no. 23; cf. Council of Trent, Denzinger no. 880.

4. John Paul II, Letter of Holy Thursday (1986), no. 8.

5. DC, no. 7.

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