ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the meaning that Vatican II imposed upon the sacrament, and different attempts to translate that meaning into practice across the English-speaking world. The transformation of first communion into a 'sacrament of Christian initiation' was the fruit of specialist academic research into the early history of the Roman liturgy carried out in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thus the theoretical model that underpinned the reconfiguration of first communion depended upon a reconstruction of the baptismal liturgies of the first Christian centuries. Furthermore, despite the prominent role played by the Mass of first communion in the lives of local Catholic communities, it does not directly feature in any of the documents emerging from the Council, which have shaped the formal discourses relating to Catholic life and worship ever since. The 'return to the traditional order' does not, therefore, resolve the tensions created by the adoption of the 'sacraments of initiation' discourse.
