German cardinal tells priests: Communion services cannot replace Sunday Mass

COLOGNE, Germany — Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki used his Holy Week homily to call priests back to the heart of their vocation: the daily celebration of the Eucharist.

Preaching at the chrism Mass at Cologne Cathedral on Monday evening — the annual liturgy at which priests renew their ordination promises before their bishop — the archbishop of Cologne urged the priests of his archdiocese to resist what he described as a troubling trend: the replacement of Sunday Mass with Communion services.

“I am concerned that Communion services — often with the distribution of holy Communion — are increasingly replacing the celebration of the Eucharist on Sundays,” Woelki said. “That, dear brothers, is no longer Catholic, and I urgently ask you to counteract this from the outset!”

The services in question are Liturgy of the Word celebrations in which previously consecrated hosts are distributed to the faithful but no Mass is celebrated.

A call to daily Mass

Woelki devoted much of his homily to the centrality of the Eucharist in the life of the priest. The celebration of the Mass is “ultimately irreplaceable and cannot be substituted,” he said, according to Cologne’s Domradio.

The daily Mass is not merely a devotional practice but is “constitutive of our priestly being and activity,” Woelki told the priests gathered in the cathedral, Domradio reported. He cautioned that if priests neglect the daily celebration, they risk further distancing the faithful from the opportunity to participate in the Eucharist.

“Even if only a few faithful or even no faithful at all should come to celebrate, its daily celebration is meaningful for us priests and spiritually essential for our very survival,” the cardinal said.

Woelki appealed for a conscious return to the central role of the Eucharist, pointing to the practice of the early Church in which the community gathered around a single Sunday celebration. Reviving that spirit, he said, could strengthen parish unity and set in motion a “spiritual and Eucharistic renewal.”

Cologne’s challenges

By the number of registered Catholics, the Archdiocese of Cologne is one of the largest dioceses in Germany. Yet only about 6% of its Catholics regularly attend Sunday Mass, below the German national average of 6.8%.

Sunday Communion services have been an option in the archdiocese only in recent years. Woelki himself proposed the step as early as April 2022, according to reports from June 2023. The services were introduced in 2024.

This story was first published by CNA Deutsch, the German-language sister service of EWTN News. It has been translated and adapted by EWTN News English.