Adoration and Presence

Your concerns regarding the use of the Blessed Sacrament are very important and most legitimate. The Eastern Orthodox Church as a whole agrees with your position to a great degree. The extra-liturgical use of the Blessed Sacrament for the purpose of adoration and devotion is admittedly medieval and uniquely Western in origin, introduced both to encourage faith in the Real Presence and to fill the spiritual vacuum created by infrequent communion. Although extra-liturgical devotions to Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament are an excellent audio-visual aid for teaching the doctrine of the Real Presence, they are not part and parcel of the substance of Catholic Eucharistic belief. The Orthodox prove this beyond question. While the Orthodox indeed offer divine worship, latria, to the consecrated Elements of the Holy Sacrament as to the True Body and Blood of Christ, which They are, Orthodox generally do so only within the confines of the Eucharistic Liturgy itself. The Eastern celebrant prostrates before the Sacrament at the epiklesis and the people bow in adoration at the presentation of the Holy Gifts, but otherwise they demonstrate no particular acts of adoration outside of the Mass. The only exception to this rule in the Eastern Rite is the Lenten Liturgy of the Pre-Sanctified, in which the people prostrate on the ground before the Blessed Sacrament as It processes at the Great Entrance before the communion of the faithful. Even here, however, the adoration of the Elements takes place within the Liturgy, never outside of it. I believe it helps to distinguish the question of adoration of the Sacrament into two categories:

1. Is the Holy Eucharist the True Body and Blood of Christ under the species of bread and wine, and therefore is It to be adored at all?
The universal Catholic answer, Eastern and Western, is an emphatic 'yes' to both questions.

2. Is the Eucharistic Lord Jesus Christ to be adored in a special service apart from the use of the Blessed Sacrament in the Mass?
Here the answers differ according to rite and culture - the Latin or Roman Church says 'yes;' the Eastern Orthodox say 'no;' the Anglican Church says in typical comprehensive style, 'it depends where you are.'

In these questions what we want to avoid is raising doubt about belief in the Real Objective Presence. If Our Lord is really, truly, and essentially present in the Holy Eucharist under the form of bread and wine, then He must in some fashion be adored in It. To paraphrase Blessed John Keble, 'wherever Our Lord is, there we must adore Him.' If Christ is in the Eucharist objectively, we cannot help but offer Him divine adoration in It. Such adoration has always been rendered by the Church Catholic in the context of the Eucharistic Liturgy. The secondary question of extra-liturgical devotion is of lesser importance, and the Church's approach to this subject has differed with place, time, and ethos. The first point is the crucial one, from an historic Catholic perspective. I personally respect the view that the Blessed Sacrament should not be used outside of the Mass for adoration, so long as those who object to the extra-liturgical practices do not fail to adore the Lord's Eucharistic Presence in the Liturgy, where such adoration rightly belongs if no where else. As Saint Augustine famously writes:

It was in His flesh that Christ walked among us and it is His flesh that He has
given us to eat for our salvation. No one, however, eats of this flesh without
having first adored it ... and not only do we not sin in thus adoring it, but we
would sin if we did not do so.