Why the Church Restricts Access to Communion

That the Church normally restricts access to holy Communion to Catholics, who must fulfill certain conditions, has become a debated issue in some sectors.
 
Some Catholics do not even know why the Church maintains this custom, which dates back to the early Christian communities.
 
To answer the question, ZENIT interviewed Father Philip Goyret, professor of sacramental theology, ecclesiology and ecumenism at the University of the Holy Cross. Father Goyret is also the pontifical university's director of studies.

Every Catholic should be able to at least understand the answers given to following question:

Q: What is the theological and ecclesiological significance of someone receiving Communion?

And every priest should be able to answer it and explain the answer sufficiently to the faithful.

Now the following is an excerpt of the full article.

Q: Denying Communion, whether to Catholics or in some cases even to Protestants, is criticized as being a divisive measure. What is your opinion?

Father Goyret: To understand this, suffice it to develop the foregoing last lines.

Ecclesial communion as an antecedent condition to access Eucharistic Communion consists, substantially, in the integrity of faith and absence of grave sin. From the Catholic point of view, the first includes, logically, to be a Catholic.

It also implies the absence of situations of habitual sin -- family irregularities, ideological positions that are incompatible with the Catholic faith, professional conduct opposed to Catholic morality, etc. -- in addition to occasional sins.

The moral and pastoral norm followed by priests when distributing Communion is to deny it publicly to those who are publicly known as persons who cannot receive it. To proceed otherwise would mean to cast aside the theological and ecclesiological meaning of which we spoke earlier.

For Catholics, the eventual distribution of Communion to a non-Catholic, within a Catholic celebration of the Eucharist, implies a contradiction, as it would imply an ecclesial communion that does not exist in its fullness. Something similar occurs in the case of the eventual Communion of a public sinner.

Obviously, these ideas presuppose a strong affirmation in faith in the Eucharist -- not as a mere external manifestation of a generic feeling of Christian fraternity, but as the sacrament that truly contains the whole Christ, with his body, blood, soul and divinity.

It is important to see that the necessity of full unity of the faith among the participants in the Eucharist is something exacted by the specific content of this sacrament, namely the substantial reality of the body of Christ -- because in it is necessarily implied faith in everything that Christ has revealed and that the Church teaches.

Therefore, Eucharistic Communion and communion in truth cannot be separated. In this line, the Catholic Church denies Eucharistic Communion to those who do not participate fully of its ecclesial communion, as they cannot participate in the sign of full unity who do not possess it wholly.

In short, according to the Catholic point of view, access to Eucharistic Communion without full ecclesial communion is, first of all, an absurd action, as it does not realize the significant aspect characteristic of the sacramental dynamics; and by not signifying this, it does not cause it either.

It must be added that the desire and spiritual need to receive Communion is something profoundly personal, but never a "private" event, precisely because we are before an ecclesial good -- ecclesial par excellence -- of which we are not the owners.

Not to respect this discipline is not only a contradiction in the one who goes to Communion, but also in the whole ecclesial community.

One last question is this one:
Q: What are the key considerations that bishops are grappling with regarding the debates? What is the bishops' primary concern over the Communion debate?

Zenit Article