Year of the Eucharist: Suggestions and Proposals

ZENIT has today published a translation of guidelines issued yesterday by the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments for parishes to consider during the current "Year of the Eucharist."

These include (with some paraphrasing):

• Where necessary, reorder places of celebration (altar, ambo, presbytery) and to the reservation of the Eucharist (tabernacle, chapel of adoration); highlight the truth and beauty of signs (ornaments, sacred vessels, ornamentation).
• Enhance the parish liturgical committee.
• Supervise instituted ministers and extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion, of the acolytes, of the schola cantorum, etc.
• Give special attention to liturgical singing.
• Schedule formative meetings on the Eucharist in the life of the Church and of the Christian.
• Review and communicate official instructions and documents on Liturgy
• Educate how to be in church: what to do on entering church; how to reverence the Most Holy Sacrament; how to foster interior recollection, and how to acclaim in community.
  Celebrate appropriately the anniversary of the parish church’s consecration.
• Rediscover one's parish church: the meaning of the altar, the ambo, tabernacle, iconography, stained-glass windows, vestibule, etc.
• Promote Eucharistic worship and personal prayer before the Most Holy Sacrament: individual visits, community adoration, Benediction, Forty Hours, Eucharistic processions.
• Ascertain the regularity and dignity with which Communion is taken to the sick.
• Make known the teaching of the Church on Viaticum.
• Support the spiritual life of those who, being in irregular situations but participating in Holy Mass, cannot receive Eucharistic Communion.