Saturday, December 03, 2005

Eucharistic Minister = Police?

I went to a Eucharistic Minister training today at our parish. Lisa and I have decided that we would like to be available to help distribute the Precious Body and Blood of Christ during our regular Mass time. We are already on the schedule for the 18th of this month.

The one thing that I came away with during the training was how important it is to make sure that people coming up for Communion actually consume the Host in my presence. I need to make sure that this is done. If someone starts to walk back to their seat with the Eucharist still in their hands, I must follow them and politely ask them to consume. We spent a lot of time talking about how to deal with these types of situations. We also talked about how to deal with situations when people come up to receive and they do things that are out of the 'normal' or correct way to receive Communion.

I hope that I will be able to deal with these situations if they should occur during my duty as an EM. At this time, it feels that I will be more like a policeman than a eucharistic minister.