So, Why Not Houseling Cloths?

The idea of a houseling cloth on the communion rail stuck with me after yesterday's post. A web search brings up remarkably few results ("Did you mean housing clothes?") Now and then someone posts on a forum that within living memory, such a thing was done, and some people seem to regard it with the same nostalgia as ad orientem celebration, the 1962 liturgy, and chapel veils. However, they don't seem to appear even at FSSP or SSPX venues now.

An exception is Fr Z, who installed them at his home parish, but even he was stumped at how they were normally attached to the rail. The most authoritative discussion, at least as it relates to Catholic practice, is here:

In modern times the Communion cloth was called for in the Roman Ritual and Missal, although the Catholic Encyclopedia gives the Communion paten as an alternative. Apparently this was considered an abuse, for roughly ten years later the Sacred Congregation for the Sacraments issued a decree requiring the cloth, and allowing the additional use of the paten. The paten was to be larger than the paten used at the altar, and unconsecrated. At first it was given to the laity to pass from communicant to communicant, but often came to be carried by the server.

As employed during the 20th century, the cloth was handled by the acolytes for the reception of Communion at the altar, and was extended to full length for use at the altar rail. It obviously was not treated with the same minute attention as the corporal was at the altar, although the priest would have carefully recovered any visible fragments if a Host were dropped on to it. In practice, a Communion cloth was sometimes semi-permanently attached to the sanctuary side of the altar rail, and flipped over it at Communion time. This practice may have led to the exclusive use of the paten, as being less likely to scatter Host fragments.

The Communion cloth is mentioned by rubricists and remained in Ritus servandus (X. 6) of the Roman Missal until the 1960 revision of Pope John XXIII. Curiously, the Rubricæ generales (XX) of the earlier Missals did not mention the cloth among the items prepared for Mass at the credence table. The 1960 Missal removed the Confiteor with its associated prayers as well as the Communion cloth from X. 6, mentioning a Communion paten on the credence in Rubricæ generales 528.

Interestingly, the discussion never quite comes to a conclusion as to exactly what purpose they served. The illustration from Fr Z's blog that I carried here yesterday shows the communicants with their hands under the cloths, but apparently this was never a requirement, and not everyone did this. Perhaps more important, as far as I can tell, houseling cloths were never an Anglican, or even Anglo-Catholic, usage. Can someone confirm or deny this? In any case, while some still living do remember them, they pretty clearly disappeared even before the post-Conciliar revisions.

UPDATE: My regular correspondent points me to a 1929 tract by Percy Dearmer on liturgical linens:

Of little more than antiquarian interest are the houseling cloth and the font-cloth. The latter was almost entirely given up because fresh water was used for the Prayer Book service of baptism. [It was retained into the nineteenth century in five churches to my knowledge, where it hung over the cover like a pointed extinguisher.] The use of the former continued as a local custom in one or two places, and has been revived in recent times. Before the Reformation there were no communion rails, and houseling cloths or 'Easter towels' were [7/8] held by assistants under the hands of communicants as they knelt for their annual communion. When they are used at the present day they are generally laid on the altar-rails; and, being mere strips of linen, there is nothing more to be said about them, except that they do not serve any practical purpose and have little or no aesthetic value, though they may perhaps act as a reminder that the primitive Eucharist was a sacred meal eaten round a table.'

Hmm. By pretty much general consensus, a useless item that may or may not prove something.

So that shouldn't keep the North American ordinariate's "Angelicans" from installing and using them, should it? And just to be sure, everyone should be keeping their hands under the cloth, this should not be just an option. That'll fit well with the compulsory chapel veils, baskets full of them in back in generous allowance for those who might embarrassingly have forgotten them. Forsooth, even if this is not part of our Anglican patrimony, we ought to declare that it is!

Frankly, I wonder why Fr Barker hadn't implemented this back in the 1970s at St Mary of the Angels -- they had patens even then, but no houseling cloths. An omission that Fr Bartus should be eager to correct!