Reserved Sacrament - Devotion

Devotion

A second purpose of reservation is that it might be a focus of prayer. In the 200s, catechumens baptized at Easter or Pentecost would spend eight days in meditation before the Blessed Sacrment, reserved in a home-church, before Christianity was legalized. However, before the year 1000, or even later, the Blessed Sacrament was kept in churches in order that the faithful might visit It or pray before It. Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament in the Roman Catholic Church and Anglican Churches for the purposes of adoration has been current since the 14th century and may be either private (expositio privata) where only the doors of the tabernacle are opened, and public exposition where the Host is placed in a monstrance so that it may be more readily seen. Public Exposition, formerly permitted only on the feast of Corpus Christi, developed only in recent centuries into a formal service known as Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament.

Reservation was prohibited in many Protestant churches in the 16th century. In England it was permitted in the First Book of Common Prayer of 1549, but disallowed in 1552. The Thirty-Nine Articles stated, "The Sacrament of the Lord's Supper was not by Christ's ordinance reserved, carried about, lifted up, or worshipped." In 1662, the prayer book rubric was altered to the effect that after the communion any remains were to be reverently consumed. The practice of reservation died out among Anglicans until the 19th century when, under the influence of the Tractarians, members of the Oxford Movement, it was restored. In Tract 90, John Henry Newman argued for a permissive interpretation of Article XXVIII.

During the first world war, the practice of reservation was developed in the Anglican church, partly to allow vicars in the Army to give communion in the trenches or on the battlefield to severely wounded soldiers. Nevertheless, this caused energetic debate amongst Anglican theologians of the time.