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“People who receive Holy Communion at an occasional Mass attended during the year, on Christmas Day, for instance, or at a wedding or funeral, are not so unusual. They seem to take Holy Communion with no thought they are receiving anything other than a wafer of bread as part of a ritual that everyone present at Mass does. It is likely that in many cases they have no faith in the reality of the Eucharist as the Body of Christ; nothing prompts them to fear making a grave act of disrespect toward the sacred. They simply join the Communion line and take the Host as a participant in the ceremony, as it were, thinking nothing of it.

Not uncommonly, they reach out a single hand to take hold of the sacred Host as though they were being given a religious souvenir. In all this casual indifference to the sacred reality, the wounds to the heart of Jesus must be real, and perhaps quite terrible. The callousness of an unbelieving touch in this manner when in tangible contact with the Divine Presence is a wound to the heart of God that recalls the roughness of Roman soldiers stripping our Lord at the crucifixion site. It is emblematic of our time in this era of Eucharistic sacrilege that these are not non-Catholics who have strayed onto a Communion line, but baptized Catholics who in their childhood may have made a pious First Communion. Faith seems to have ebbed away and faded from their lives, and they do not realize their grave danger of soul. Rather, they likely claim a relationship with God in their own terms. But true faith disappears, turns to ashes and smoke, by paying no attention to the truths of faith.

These truths, such as the reality of the Eucharist, require a choice, a willed act of believing and committed practices, including the obligatory Sunday Mass. When there is no thought of these truths, and no proximity in life to them, the truths seem to evaporate from the mind. They become a memory in the external aspects alone, like a foreign land looked at in old photographs but never more visited.”

(Father Donald Haggerty from The Hour of Testing – Spiritual Depth and Insight in a time of Ecclesial Uncertainty)