Communion in the hand, a reluctance to encourage the use of the confessional, and a pivot away from the recitation of the Divine Office in regular parishes have all been pursued since the Second Vatican Council with the intention of lightening the burden on the faithful. The disappearance of altar rails was a casualty of this mindset. Yet did the reform minded clerics of the twentieth century stop to consider what happens to bodies and muscles when they are freed of burdens? They become feeble.
It is the same in the spiritual life. Ease the load, spare the strain, and soon enough the soul atrophies like a limb kept too long in a sling, pale, unsteady, and unable to bear its own weight. What was meant to liberate has only enfeebled. The posture of reverence, once forged in discipline and awe, now slouches forward with the lax confidence of a man who has never been asked to stand at attention.
As this slovenly attitude towards the King of Heaven became the ignorant new rule, and as Holy Mother Church haemorrhaged her flock in scarcely calculable numbers, one might imagine clerics, wanting souls to find zeal enough to carry them along the only conspicuously hard and narrow path back to their eternal home, would welcome older practices that rejected new carelessness in favour of old carefulness.
Not so, evidently. In late 2025, in one east coast province of the United States, the reverse was decreed. Bishop Michael Martin, having already restricted the Traditional Latin Mass to a single parish, issued a pastoral letter directing that “temporary altar rails and individual prie dieus be removed” in the Diocese of Charlotte, North Carolina.
Dr Joseph Shaw, writing on the Charlotte controversy, noted that while the bishop’s policy did not forbid kneeling outright, it ironically ensured that kneeling would be “as physically challenging and awkward as possible”. However, Bishop Martin almost certainly, if aware of this, intended it as a deterrent rather than an opportunity for pious mortification.
Dr Shaw further contrasted the traditional arrangement, kneeling along an altar rail while the priest distributes Communion by moving down a stationary line of communicants from right to left, with the awkward and hurried approach the faithful typically make every Sunday in new rite liturgies where altar rails are either absent or ignored. Here, communicants approach singly, hesitate, bow or kneel uncertainly, and move aside under pressure from the line behind them. The rail allows, he argued, the act of reverence required by the Church’s law to be accomplished simply and bodily, without choreography.
The procession model, Shaw contended, encourages communicants to step away from the priest before consuming the Host, creating the “not ideal” situation in which “laypeople… move around carrying a Host in their fingers”. It also increases reliance on extraordinary ministers, despite the law’s insistence that such ministers be used only in cases of true necessity.
The deeper question, however, is why the removal of altar rails keeps recurring, half a century after their supposed obsolescence. Dr Peter Kwasniewski has addressed this. “There are many elements in our Catholic faith that can easily be thought of as superfluous due to their lack of effecting certain actions,” he writes, before adding that “this minimalistic approach is the opposite of what we are as Catholics”. It is true that the rail does not consecrate the Host. Neither do vestments, chant, incense, or architecture. But Catholic worship has never been governed by a theory of bare minimums.
We have to ask ourselves how we would act in front of a great president, a saintly bishop or cardinal or pope, or an admirable and mighty king or queen. Should we welcome them into our home, or visit their own, how casual would we be? For Catholics, if the answer is anything less than the reverence with which we approach the King of Kings in the consecrated Host, we have discovered a spiritual incongruence.
There is a form of liturgical reductionism that the most zealous defenders of contemporary Catholicism often fall into. “It is still valid,” they assert, while ignoring that with each detail of the Church’s worship carried out sloppily or without care, a disease spreads among the faithful.
The liturgy is not a sacrament machine, and the Mass is not a meal. For generations of medieval Catholics, who often received the Eucharist only once a year yet commonly and voluntarily attended Mass daily, this was clear. Every rubric of this most sacred worship mattered, consecration and communication alike.
God deserves our very best. More than those in our romantic lives. More than those in our family lives. Certainly more than those in our professional lives. These loves are not in competition, nor are they opposed to love of God, and they deserve sincere devotion. But one love stands above all others, surpassing and enlivening them.
The Holy Ghost reminds us that we are to love God with all our heart, mind, and soul, and even metaphorically to “hate” our own family in relation to our zeal for Him. Altar rails remind us of this truth, especially today, when we are so unaccustomed to kneeling in homage. They are tangible and visceral reminders to our innermost sentiments that we approach One beyond the power, dignity, and goodness of any creature.
Altar rails do not find their origins in the eccentric flourish of Baroque excess or clerical fussiness, as is sometimes claimed. This architectural expression of a theological instinct as old as Christendom’s public peace made itself known shortly after Christians emerged from the catacombs. The impulse to mark sacred space asserted itself almost immediately. As Dr Kwasniewski observes, from the fourth century onwards “a universal constant from this period through the present day was a barrier between the sanctuary and the people”. Forms varied, materials shifted, ornament waxed and waned, but the principle endured.
In the East this instinct flowered into the iconostasis, the gold leafed wall of icons separating priest from laity. In the West it matured through balustrades and rood screens into the humble rail. The sanctuary was never fenced off to exclude the faithful, yet the rail remained as a signal that one was crossing a threshold, a place where heaven stoops towards earth, the profane touches the divine, and man must lower himself in response.
That posture of lowering matters. By the ninth century, popular devotion and canonical tradition together had converged on the practice of receiving Holy Communion kneeling and on the tongue. The Counter Reformation replaced opaque screens with a low rail that preserved distinction while increasing visibility, but it did not abolish the barrier. For some four centuries thereafter, the altar rail functioned as the Church’s quiet tutor, schooling bodies before instructing minds.
The Second Vatican Council never abolished this inheritance. As Kwasniewski notes, the General Instruction of the Roman Missal still requires that the sanctuary “should be marked off from the body of the church either by its being somewhat elevated or by a particular structure and ornamentation”. The rail fits this description with ease. Nor can a lower authority lawfully revoke a liberty permitted by universal legislation. Hostility towards altar rails, then, is not juridical. It is symbolic, and symbols, for good or ill, are powerful.
Bishop Martin defended standing reception as a “symbol of unity”. Dr Joseph Shaw replied with characteristic understatement that unity cannot be manufactured by making kneeling “as physically challenging and awkward as possible”. Rome itself continues to distribute Communion to kneeling Catholics in St Peter’s Basilica. Pope Benedict XVI, whom Shaw cites, put the matter starkly: “The man who learns to believe learns also to kneel, and a faith or a liturgy no longer familiar with kneeling would be sick at the core.”
For all the humanism of twentieth century iconoclastic clergy, one might expect a better anthropology, a clearer understanding of how human nature works. What the body does, the soul learns. The author Austin Ruse has recounted the installation of an altar rail in his Northern Virginia parish, where the priest explicitly permitted every option modern liturgy allows. “In fact,” Ruse wrote, “almost everyone began to kneel. What is more, and this is quite remarkable, almost everyone now receives on the tongue.” No coercion. No pressure. Merely a change in physical arrangement. The rail created the conditions in which reverence could reassert itself, naturally and without division.
Nor should this surprise us. The rail slows us down. It stills the body. It grants the Eucharist time to appear as the Eucharist. It permits what Kwasniewski calls devotion, which he defines without apology: “Devotion is not fanaticism. Devotion is a form of expressing the soul’s inner longing for union with the Divine. The spiritual becoming tangible.” In a culture obsessed with efficiency, such tangibility appears wasteful. In a faith founded on the Incarnation, it is indispensable.
Scripture is unembarrassed by the language of lowering. “Unless you be converted, and become as little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven” (Mt 18:3). The way up is down. “He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble” (Lk 1:52). To kneel is not to abase oneself before tyranny, but to recall the truth about one’s size, power, and sufficiency before God. “Come let us adore and fall down, and weep before the Lord that made us” (Ps 94:6). The rail gives this truth a place to happen.
A generation unaccustomed to kneeling finds its knees unsteady, its balance uncertain, and its posture unsure. This weakness is learned. Having spared ourselves the effort of reverence, we discover that we no longer have the strength to perform it. Knees scarcely able to sustain their own weight become the bodily analogue of a faith no longer practised under load.
Altar rails endure because they answer this weakness. They invite us, if only for a moment, to confront our sinfulness and smallness. Only by doing so do we become small enough to be raised to great heights, renewed by One whose strength exceeds all strength and whose hope surpasses all understanding.