Receiving Communion the wrong way?

I'M learning more about intincturing (including how to spell it). At the Communion rail, dipping the consecrated bread or wafer into the consecrated wine and then consuming it--at first  it seemed to me a useful method of avoiding spreading cold germs.
     Several correspondents have condemned the practice, but, surprisingly, so far for its impracticalities and not as a breach of doctrine. The disapproval has been mainly of the danger of spreading infection. I thought it avoided infection.
    I wonder whether the discussion will widen. What about the Orthodox Church in which communicants share the same spoon--to drink the consecrated wine--is it? I'm not sure. I'd appreciate information.
     I'd better read Hygiene and the Chalice  published by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York (1989)
    

Castigating correspondence

I WAS shocked to read the cruel condemnation in Charles Kingsley's letters to Cardinal Newman. Talk about anti-Catholicism.
     Then there was poor Gerard Manley Hopkins, who also was an Anglican who converted to Roman Catholicism. Corresponding to his family about his intended visit, he promised he wouldn't try to convert his sister...
     There was so much bitterness and suspicion after the Reformation, which severed Roman Catholicism and the Church of England, some of it justified because of  violent dispute and the need to maintain national unity..
     I praise the Tractarians for  beginning, however controversially,  to bring the two sides closer and friendly in the late 19th and early 20th century. I understand the earlier difficulties when religion had to be intact to hold England together and ward off saboteurs, spiritual and physical.

Rate of the Mass

'It was enough for them to see the Mass being performed.'---reason in mediaeval times for denying ordinary parishioners the Eucharist as frequently as the priests received it, and, I thought, condemned (mildly) as unfair.
     Yet when I asked a Roman Catholic whether it was true the laiety could with modern approval receive communion only once a year, as in mediaeval times, he gave the mediaeval excuse as if it was still fresh: 'It was enough to see the Mass...'
     Perhaps, being an Anglican, I've got it all wrong about the modern Roman Catholic church and what is still taught from mediaeval times.

Thomas Hobbes--he might have meant well, but...

Thomas Hobbes--I'm reading him. He started well, theorising about pulling society together. Unfortunately, his theories put into practice turned out to be the stuff of  political dictatorships.
    I like his titles: The Leviathan and the Behemoth.

Brilliant silly, clever nasty

I relish WH Auden's definitions of Hegel and Hobbes--Hegel a 'clever silly', Hobbes a 'clever nasty'.

Undecided whether to finish Cardinal Newman's 'An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent'.