Dipping Instead of Drinking

Intinction means dipping the consecrated bread into the wine so that the communicant receives both at once. Mechanically it is simple and it solves an obvious problem: a congregation of several hundred can be given communion in both kinds in a fraction of the time, and nobody puts their mouth where anyone else has. The objection is equally simple and it is as old as the practice. At the supper Jesus is recorded as giving the bread and then giving the cup, and telling his disciples to drink of it; a communicant who is handed a dipped wafer has not drunk of anything. Several western councils from the seventh century onwards forbade intinction on exactly that ground, and the argument has never been answered so much as outweighed by circumstances.

The Byzantine practice is a different case and should not be read as western intinction with a spoon. There the consecrated Lamb is broken into the chalice, so that the bread and the wine are together in the cup before anything is administered, and each communicant receives from a spoon. That is not a shortcut around drinking; it is a settled way of giving the whole sacrament in one act, and it has been the normal Orthodox practice for about a thousand years.

Where western churches permit intinction they generally regulate who does the dipping. Roman Catholic norms allow the minister to dip the host and place it on the communicant's tongue, and do not permit the communicant to take the host and dip it, on the grounds that communion is given and received rather than helped oneself to.