The priest would have explained that communicants knelt reverently, received the Host on the tongue, only the consecrated hands of a priest could touch It, or touch the chalice, the corporal, pall, or the purificator which came into contact with the sacred species. [The final three could be washed by religious or lay persons after having first been washed by a cleric in major orders, and the water of the first washing poured into the sacrarium, Canon 1306]. From the moment of Consecration until after the Communion of the people the priest would keep the thumb and forefinger of both hands together, to ensure that the smallest particle of a Host was never dropped.

He would then open them over the chalice while the server poured wine and water over them in a series of meticulously prescribed ablutions. Imagine, therefore, the reply of any priest you knew before Vatican II if you had suggested to him that all these signs of reverence should and would be abolished-----and yet most of the priests who would have exploded with indignation at such a suggestion have accepted the changes without protest, if without enthusiasm. Can it be seriously denied that the Church is in an advanced stage of brainwashing?

 The idea that to kneel is undignified is far from new. It was an important part of Nazi propaganda. Elizabeth Gerstner is a prominent leader of Catholic resistance to the tyranny of the "Conciliar Church" in Germany. During the war her family, like so many of the European traditionalists, were prominent in their opposition to Nazism. She herself was imprisoned at the age of twenty-one. In a recent letter to me she remembered a favourite slogan of Nazi propaganda: Ein Deutscher kniet nicht vor seinem Herrgott, em Deutscher steht vor seinem Gott. ["A German does not kneel before his God, a German stands before his God."] The National Socialist Propaganda for schools [N.S. Schulungsbriefe] issued by Dr. Goebbels' propaganda-ministry, calumniated "the Jewish corruption" of the Catholic Church [semitische Verseuchung]. The slave kneels, claimed Dr. Goebbels; Germans on the contrary are freie Menschen, free men. Equally unacceptable to Dr. Goebbels was the failure to worship in German. Well, he would find much to commend in the "Conciliar Church"!

The fact that kneeling is not usual in the Eastern rites, Catholic or Orthodox, is not relevant to the question of kneeling within the Latin rite. Eastern Catholics have their own traditional manners of expressing reverence, such as very frequent Signs of the Cross. In the West kneeling is a traditional sign of reverence-----this point is emphasized in a recent series of textbooks for Protestant children in Britain: