There are entire countries where no one kneels during the consecration. Not due to lack of space, nor illness, nor distraction: simply because it’s no longer done. The episcopal conferences approved it decades ago, the churches removed the kneelers, and the faithful got used to contemplating standing—or even sitting—the most sacred moment of the Mass.
It happens in France, where almost no one bends the knee since the seventies. It happens in Germany, where the gesture has been replaced by a slight bow. It happens in the Netherlands, where there are no longer even kneelers. And it happens in much of de-Christianized Western Europe, where modern man does not kneel before anything or anyone… except the State or fashion.
Meanwhile, in Poland, Spain, or Croatia, the faithful people continue—though lamentably less and less—to fall to their knees before the consecrated Host, as if deep down they intuited that that bent knee holds up the world.
The Disappearance of Kneeling
Kneeling is not a folkloric gesture. It is the bodily confession of faith. From the first Christians, bending the knee was a sign of adoration, penance, and recognition of God’s majesty. Saint Paul wrote it without mincing words:
“At the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven, on earth, and under the earth” (Phil 2:10).
When that gesture is eliminated, more than a custom is erased: the language of the soul is erased. Because the body speaks even when we are silent, and if the body stops adoring, the soul ends up forgetting whom it adores.
From Vertical Liturgy to Horizontal Worship
The abandonment of the kneeling posture is not accidental. It is the visible result of a liturgy that has lost its center: God. The Mass has become an assembly, the priest an animator, and the altar a table of dialogue. The mystery dissolves into pedagogy. The pastoral excuse (“so that everyone is comfortable”) is the disguise of a deeper problem: modern man cannot bear adoration, because it reminds him of his smallness.
Benedict XVI warned of it with prophetic lucidity:
“When the kneeling posture disappears, an essential part of the faith is endangered: the truth of the Incarnation and the real presence.”
The Peoples Who Still Kneel
And yet, there remain places where the soul is still alive. Where the faithful kneel without looking to the sides, without caring about seeming outdated. Where a generation of young people discovers that bending the knee does not humiliate, but liberates. In those countries, faith resists, precisely because it still knows who is at the altar.
Leo XIV and the Return of Adoration
The Church of the 21st century does not need more marketing strategies or more inclusion manuals: it needs to kneel again. Pope Leo XIV, if he truly wants to restore unity and faith, will have to start there: by returning to the world the most revolutionary gesture of all, the one that says without words that God is present and deserves adoration.