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[quote=Anonymous]If anyone wants to read a more recent story on this here's one: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/21/denum-ellarby_n_1220896.html

In this case the little boy has Down Syndrome.  Evidently this happens more often than people think.  Now the interesting thing to me is that the Eastern rite churches let children take communion from their baptism on...so they don't have the same "rules" as the Latin rite with respect to a person needing to have reached the "age of reason" or to have a specific set of priest interpreted abilities to understand what is going on.  In other words this doesn't need to be the way the Latin rite church handles things, but for reasons that have nothing to do with Jesus they do it this way.  They haven't always.  It's cruel and a completely "man-made" if you will, rule.

Why put so much weight in what a priest decides is a person's spiritual awareness?  How can we say that a cognitively delayed person isn't ahead of the rest of us in their spiritual development.  At a minimum it seems best to err on the side of allowing the person to commune with Christ through the Eucharist and leave it to God to deal with whether or not the person understands as well as we think they should.  After all Catholics think John the Baptist sensed the presence of Jesus as a fetus!  It's another example of the male hierarchy sticking to their rules at the detriment of even innocent children.  Wait, that sounds familiar, doesn't it!?  I hope these families know that there are Catholic (Eastern rite) churches where their children can share in the Eucharist if they want to.   
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