Spiritual Communion

A spiritual Communion is an act by which the soul, unable to receive the Blessed Sacrament in fact, receives Our Lord by ardent desire — believing in His Real Presence, loving Him, and longing to be united to Him. The great teacher of this devotion is St. Alphonsus Maria de Liguori, Doctor of the Church, whose short prayer "My Jesus, I believe…" is the form used the world over. He wrote it in his classic work Visits to the Blessed Sacrament, and urged the faithful to make spiritual Communions many times a day.

The practice is far older than the prayer. The Fathers and Doctors — St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Teresa of Ávila among them — taught that Christ can be received by faith and desire even when He cannot be received on the tongue. The Council of Trent itself distinguished three ways of receiving the Eucharist: sacramentally only, spiritually only, and both together (the fullest way); those who eat "in desire… by a lively faith which worketh by charity" receive its fruit.

St. Alphonsus's prayer holds the whole act in four movements: faith ("I believe that Thou art truly present"), love ("I love Thee above all things"), desire ("I desire to receive Thee"), and union ("come at least spiritually into my heart… never permit me to be separated from Thee"). It is a prayer for every Catholic who cannot get to Mass or to Communion — the sick, the traveler, the imprisoned — and for anyone who, before the tabernacle or far from it, wishes to open the heart to the Lord who is always near.