. . . where permitted but some prefer on tongue, then what?

Of course, says Congreg. of Divine Worship in February.

Moreover,

. . . let all remember that the time-honored tradition is to receive the host on the tongue. The celebrant priest, if there is a present danger of sacrilege, should not give the faithful communion in the hand, and he should make them aware of the reason for way of proceeding. [Emphasis added]

Note the concern. Note also that this is the Vatican before Francis.

So it goes, so it went.

Weekdays at our parish in 2026, it’s common for communicants to take the host in the hand but also on the tongue and not infrequently while dropping to his or her knees. What’s common to all of it is our parish’s attentiveness to mass. Indeed, piety abounds, especially as always in weekday masses.

I wrote about this some time back, with a 2014 Crux mag post by Margery Eagan, “LET’S HEAR IT FOR WEEKDAY MASS”. . . where the worship is peaceful, quiet, and fruitful:

My mother, a musician, struggled to endure the off-key singers who led hymns, unfortunately for us all, at Sunday Mass in my hometown parish.

So sometimes she’d sneak out of Mass early Sunday and during the week, take me to daily Mass instead. No off-key singing there. No singing at all, actually. There was quiet, peacefulness, intimacy among the 20 or 30 communicants.

The lights were dim, the sermons short and to the point. “The apostle picked up his cross and followed Him,” the priest began one sermon I remember, then paused, then ended it: “Would that we would do the same.” [!]

More:

Barely a half-hour long, daily Mass felt to me mysterious and holy and sacred in a way a very busy Sunday Mass, with its ups and downs and all arounds, could not. All these years later, I still prefer it.

Try it, I tell lapsed Catholic friends who complain of no inspiration on Sundays.

It could change everything.

Deliver the body, I say. Show up.

More:

I’ve tried daily Mass at St. Anthony’s Shrine in downtown Boston, seven lightning-fast Masses per day for businesspeople on lunch hours, off-duty cops and firefighters, schoolteachers and bankers on their way to or from South Station’s buses and trains. Sometimes I’d see well-known locals, rich and powerful or politically wired, slip in and out of pews.

Like St. Peter’s in the Loop, Chicago, with its Regular Mass Times:

Monday – Friday: 6:15, 7:15, 8:15,
11:40 am, 12:15, 1:15, 5:00 pm

Saturday: 12 noon and 5:00 pm
Sunday: 9:00, 11:00 am, 12:30 and 6:00 pm

As I say, show up.

Finally, words of wisdom from a master of same who wrote of having trouble “devoutedly” hearing a “sung mass” in which “the choir makes so much noise that “I can’t hear myself pray”!

Thus spoke Ronald Knox, in his 1948 book The Mass in Slow Motion, which is to be highly recommended. And which shows that issues about mass attendance did not start with Vatican 2.

One more thing, no Ronald Max am I, but I recently attended a Sunday mass that was started with “Good morning” from the priest, sigh, but thenceforward featured the priest delivering the most seriousness I have run into in a long time.

I mean a delivery that with the utmost of appropriacy told this worshiper that he meant every word.

Not a matter of meaning it, about which I have no qualms in re the others of our parish, but a matter of communicating whole-hearted endorsement of what he was saying and even singing at several times.

Ages ago as a young Jesuit in training, I argued in a debate in favor of the vernacular language mass vs. my opponent who argued against it because too few priests can deliver it well in the native tongue.

I won, but if he was right, then he should have allowed for the good guy in this story about mass going.