Yet, before the Protestant Reformation, even the Western Church herself fluctuated between post-catechetical ‘Child Communion’ on the one hand and the Biblical practice of post- catechetical ‘Adolescent Communion’ on the other hand. Sadly, Rome’s movement toward and final adoption of the blasphemous doctrine of transubstantiation in 1215 – first warped and then finally overshadowed but did not dispense with her correct and prior practice of catechizing people before eucharizing them.
Notwithstanding the above, the Western Church’s Pre-Reformation Proto-Protestants – the Piedmontese Waldensians, Wycliffe’s Lollards, and Huss’s Bohemian Wycliffites – all required prior catechizing before one’s first admission to the Lord’s Supper not before around puberty. So too – especially against the post-infantile paedocommunionistic arguments of Servetus and his Anabaptists – did all the great men of the Early Protestant Reformation: Luther, Melanchthon, Zwingli, Oecolampadius, Bucer, Hyperius, Bullinger, á Lasco, Beza, and especially Calvin.
