The silver cross was offered to be kissed.
The men came up, lugubrious, but not sad,
And knelt reluctantly, half-prejudiced.
(And kissing, kissed the emblem of a creed.)
Then mourning women knelt; meek mouths they had,
(And kissed the Body of the Christ indeed.)
Young children came, with eager lips and glad.
(These kissed a silver doll, immensely bright.)
Then I, too, knelt before that acolyte.
Above the crucifix I bent my head:
The Christ was thin, and cold, and very dead:
And yet I bowed, yea, kissed - my lips did cling.
(I kissed the warm live hand that held the thing.)
The earlier subtle emphasis on the  server-lad  had a purpose.  But this is unexpected. 
 The speaker reacted to his disenchantment with Christianity by kissing the  server-lad ’s hand. 
 So what do we make of this? The modern reader will see this as homoerotic; an unexpected and blasphemous (given the context and the era) yearning for a young man, while supposedly praying in church. Owen is known to have been homosexual and that is certainly a correct interpretation. 
 But it is also relevant to view this as his contemporaries might have done in a more innocent era, as simply an act of warmth towards another human, given that he was not drawn in by the Catholic mode of worship. Note the rather contemptuous ‘thing’. 
 There is also the possibility that Wilfred Owen’s compassion simply drew him to humanity and the ‘warm live hand’, rather than what he saw as a meaningless ritual. We should bear in mind the suffering he witnessed during the War and his deep sadness for the men who perished.