Where does the practice of passing the Peace before Communion come from?
In the Exchange of the Peace, Christians are reconciled with each other before we take Christ’s body into our body and are ourselves changed into God’s new creation. Most Episcopalians are used to exchanging the Peace after the Prayers of the People and Confession. This placement has greatest antiquity. By the time of Ordo Romanus I, a manual of directions for carrying out solemn Pontifical Mass at Rome in the seventh century, the Peace was exchanged at three points in the service, at the Entrance (preserved in the Medieval English rites), before the Offertory (the current placement in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer), and at the breaking of the bread as a Fraction Anthem (where it occurred for a second time in the English rites, where it became fixed in the Roman rites). This later position is where the Peace is passed at Saint Ignatius, a placement permitted in the rubrics of the 1979 Prayer Book on page 407.
