Abstinence from Conjugal Relations Before Reception of the Body of Christ: A Brief History

This study addresses a traditional Christian ascetical and liturgical practice that has been largely obscured or forgotten in recent times—the custom of abstaining from sexual intercourse for a period of some days preceding the reception of the Body and Blood of Christ in Eucharistic Communion. This study focuses on abstinence from the conjugal act as a means of preparing for reception of Communion by married Christians who possess the moral and physical ability to lawfully engage in sexual intercourse. Following an initial section on the relevance of the practice to Christian asceticism, the subsequent three sections correspond to three broad historical periods. Section II considers scriptural precedents for the practice of sexual abstinence as preparation for encounters with God’s holiness. Section III addresses evidence of abstinence from the conjugal act as a means of preparation for receiving the Body and Blood of Christ among early Christians. Section IV considers evidence of the practice from the seventh to the sixteenth century.

I. The Relevance of Conjugal Abstinence Before Communion in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century

To some it will seem quaint, outdated, or perhaps unbelievable that married Christians ever practiced sexual abstinence as a means of preparation for the reception of Communion. Certainly this is a topic that few clergy in the early twenty-first century would broach in a pastoral setting. The hesitation among clergy may stem in part from the influence of Karl Rahner over their seminary studies. In an essay titled “Problems Concerning Confession,” Rahner laments several “random” examples of “legalistic and magical” attitudes found in “ordinary man and hence the piety of the people:”

How many taboo-like undercurrents are not present in the medieval casuistry regarding the lawfulness or unlawfulness (even to the point of mortal sin) of receiving the sacraments after having had marital intercourse the night before. In 1277, Bishop Stephen of Paris condemned the proposition: Quod delectatio in actibus venereis non impediat actum seu usum intellectus [that the pleasure in the conjugal act does not impede the act or the use of the intellect]. St Bernardine of Siena (1443) says in one of his sermons that it is a piggish irreverence and a mortal sin if husband and wife do not abstain from marital intercourse for several days before receiving Holy Communion. Even the Catechismus Romanus still properly prescribes a three-day abstention.¹

Rahner mentions failure to abstain from conjugal relations in preparation for Communion as an example of something the faithful confess merely “so that there may be something to confess.”² The dominance of Rahner’s dismissive attitude toward pre-Communion sexual abstinence partially explains the relegation of the tradition to obscurity. Yet even while belittling the tradition, Rahner suggests its significance—at least to Bernardine of Siena, the Roman Catechism, and the piety of ordinary faithful.

If silence on the topic may be considered evidence, the significance of pre-Communion sexual abstinence among the faithful has waned. Any suggestion that sex should be subjugated to other goods is likely to be received with little sympathy. But the subjugation of sex—a created good, but a material and passing good—to eternal goods has been ensconced in the Christian tradition from its inception, in part as an inheritance from ancient Hebrew practices. Ascetical practices bear witness to the preference of mind and heart that Christians should give to the Creator over any created good.³

Ascetical practices also express Christian penance. Pope St John Paul II, in his Encyclical on Reconciliation and Penance in the Mission of the Church Today Reconciliatio et Paenitentia, asserted:

Contemporary man…seems to refuse instinctively and often irresistibly anything that is penance in the sense of a sacrifice accepted and carried out for the correction of sin. In this regard I would like to emphasize that the church’s penitential discipline, even thought it has been mitigated for some time, cannot be abandoned without grave harm both to the interior life of individual Christians and of the...