Despite quickening popular interest in eucharistic devotion, most Catholics in the late nineteenth century still received communion infrequently. Reformed-minded clergy preached monthly reception, although to apparently limited effect, while a good many immigrant Catholics in the United States went to communion only once or twice a year. The latter behavior was explained in part by ambivalence about the sacrament of penance—Catholics at the time assumed that confession was a virtual requirement for receiving communion—and in part by a deeply rooted sense that frequent reception of communion was appropriate only for persons of exemplary piety and virtue. Younger, more assimilated American Catholics by the 1890s typically received communion more frequently than their immigrant forebears, which suggests significant evolution in assumptions about human nature and their own relationship to the Church. But even younger Catholics hardly ever communed on a weekly basis.

Catholics behave very differently now. Of those present at Mass on any given Sunday, nearly all will receive communion. Few if any of those receiving will have been to confession recently; some will not have confessed for years. How to account for so dramatic a change in thinking and behavior? One must surely invoke the Second Vatican Council, which mandated unprecedented reform of the liturgy. But historians of Catholicism generally agree that the Council cannot be held solely responsible for the sea-change that has occurred since the early 1960s. Most point toward developments, dating mainly from the 1930s, that prepared the ground for conciliar reforms among the educated laity and younger clergy—the various forms of Catholic Action, for example. As growing numbers of Catholics came to see themselves as possessed of their own distinctive ministries, the argument runs, so they came to understand their ownership stake in the Church.

Joseph Dougherty, in From Altar-Throne to Table, suggests that we look even further afield for the origins of today's much-altered Church, specifically to the crusade for frequent communion inaugurated by Pope Pius X in 1910. Since the Pope encouraged weekly and even daily communion for the laity, his program can easily seem in retrospect to have been quite radical. But numerous Catholic authorities at the time were partisans of frequent communion. Indeed, the decree which Pius caused to be issued in 1910 was occasioned by a contentious debate between two Belgian theologians over the necessary disposition for receiving communion and the effects of frequent reception of the sacrament on lay persons. Were exemplary piety and virtue preconditions for daily communion, or did daily communion promote such qualities in the souls of well-intentioned, if otherwise quite ordinary, recipients? The Pope endorsed the latter position in 1910, when he pointedly prohibited further debate over the appropriateness of frequent communion. The 1910 decree was also part of a program, which included modifications of the pre-communion fast for the infirm and the lowering of the age at First Communion to about seven. Pius did not intend his sacramental agenda to be ignored.

That agenda enjoyed significant, if partial, success in the United States. The lowered age at First Communion, coupled with growing enrollments in the nation's Catholic schools, meant that Catholic youngsters could be accustomed early on to frequent reception of the sacraments, which helped to prompt new habits among adults. How frequently did the modal American Catholic receive communion in, say, 1925? In the near absence of statistical evidence, it is difficult to come up with a precise estimate. Dougherty is vague on this point, perhaps because his reading in the relevant historical literature appears to have been very limited. But historians of American Catholicism will attest that practice did indeed change. Most English-speaking Catholics by the 1930s probably communed monthly, or at least aspired to do so; a disproportionately female elite communed weekly or even daily. Weekly and monthly communicants typically confessed prior to receiving communion and would continue to do so into the mid-1960s.

Why does this change matter? Dougherty makes two principal arguments. First, the campaign for frequent communion quite unintentionally weakened the connection between confessing and receiving the Eucharist. Daily communicants necessarily received the sacrament without having gone to confession immediately beforehand. All that was required was personal conviction of being in a state of grace. Second, frequent communion helped to erode the once immense distance between the lay and clerical states. (During the centuries of infrequent communion, it was priests alone who regularly received the Eucharist.) “Thus the priesthood of all the baptized, a concept completely submerged well into the twentieth century, was given a ritual occasion to bloom in the decrees of the Second Vatican Council” (xxvi). Dougherty elaborates on these and other points in his learned and subtly argued book, linking the frequent communion crusade to its origins in the eucharistic movement and exploring its intersections with the slightly later movement for liturgical reform. He makes a strong case for the long-term importance of a change in practice that has hitherto received only passing attention from theologians and historians.

As a social historian of religion—Dougherty himself is a theologian—I was admittedly frustrated by certain of the author's choices. He has little to say about the specifics of implementing the decree on frequent communion in the United States, in which he professes a particular interest. And by ending his narrative in 1926, despite frequent references to later developments, he ignores the period when the most dramatic changes in Catholic sacramental practice actually took place. On the eve of the Second Vatican Council, most Catholics still confessed as a prelude to receiving communion. Little more than a decade later, they had ceased to do so. Why did it take so long for the radical potential of frequent communion to be fully realized? And why did a change so long delayed then transpire with such startling rapidity?