The Effects of One’s First Holy Communion

Mother Mectilde on One’s First Holy Communion

Catherine de Bar was nine years old when she received Holy Communion for the first time. She had been longing to receive Holy Communion for years, but the practice at the time was not favourable to Holy Communion at an earlier age. Even as a small child, Catherine used to follow attentively the movements of the priest at the altar, and fix her gaze upon the Sacred Host with yearning and with love.  Years later, she wrote:

On this first action (First Holy Communion) all the others depend: when one makes one’s First Holy Communion well, the effects of it stretch over a lifetime. I know a person who, on that occasion, received all that she asked: the grace she received was like a seed which produced an infinity of other seeds like itself, by which that person was brought to the perfection to which God was calling her. (Ms. P 101, p.10)