Today we celebrate the solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ. Many of us still refer to this day under the traditional name for today’s celebration – Corpus Christi. I remember when we celebrated the year of the Eucharist when I was newly ordained as a priest in the Diocese; we have celebrated the year of the eucharist in different ways since then. I love looking at the history of our faith, so I wondered how the solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ got started in our Church. The idea for this celebration started with a nun in Belgium, St Juliana of Liége, who lived way back in the 13th century. Since the time she was a teenager, she had a great devotion to the Eucharist and she longed for a feast day in its honor in our Church. Today’s solemnity can be traced to this nun, as her idea was passed down to Pope Urban IV, who declared Corpus Christi as a universal feast in the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church in 1264.
Back in the 13th century, Sister Juliana saw a world where there was a lot of irreverent and sacrilegious behavior toward the Blessed Sacrament. She hoped that the believers who were seeking love, truth, and piety in their lives would be able to draw inspiration and strength from the Most Holy Eucharist. She saw a world where many people were drawn to heresies and were walking away from their faith. That may have described the 13th century, but it describes the world today as well. Thus, it is so relevant to our modern world that we celebrate the Body and Blood of Christ in such a special way today.
In The Book of Saints, author Anne Gordon states that long ago she realized in her life of faith, that “unless we are clear about what we believe and what we do not believe,…it is quite impossible to live with any degree of depth, conviction, or purpose” in life. Our Church is very clear about our belief in the Eucharist being the real presence of Jesus’ Body and Blood, of the Eucharist being the source and summit of our lives of faith and what we believe as Catholics. But how does this affect our daily reality?
When I graduated from seminary, our rector Father Thomas Cassidy communicated to us his conviction in what we needed to do in order to be true to our priesthood and to make it through any crisis moments that we might have as priests. First, he said that we had to be strongly connected to the word of God, to read and pray the word of God each day in the liturgy of the hours. Second, we need to have a strong love for the mass and for the Eucharist, to the Body and Blood of Christ we receive through the Eucharist. Third, we had to find ways to truly live out our lives of faith and our priesthood each day. All believers are also called to live out these ideals: to be tied to God’s Holy Word, to have a strong love for the Eucharist, and to find the ways that God is calling us to live out our faith.
In the Gospel of Luke, the disciples see the hunger of the crowd, but wondered where are they going to get food for them them in this deserted place. In response, Jesus invites the disciples to look at their faith in him in a deeper, more profound way. Jesus tells them to give the crowd food themselves, bu they only have a small amount of loaves and fish. Such a meager amount of food would not satisfy the crowd’s hunger. Yet, Jesus invited them to trust. There takes place the miracle of the feeding the vast crowd, even with food leftover. The story of Jesus and the disciples satisfying the crowd’s hunger for food sets the foundation for our belief in Jesus present in the Eucharist. We human beings not only have a physical hunger for food, but we hunger for we are all hungry for justice, for mercy, for forgiveness, for meaning, for faith, and for a sense of belonging. The food we receive is from the action of the Eucharistic celebration that feeds us repeatedly with the eternal real presence of Jesus Christ.
It is important for us to see how God is calling us to live out our Eucharistic identity, both as individuals and as a community of faith. The Eucharist is not just something we receive in mass. The Eucharist should affect our outlook on life and how we live out our faith both as individuals and as a community. As we receive the Holy Eucharist at mass today, let its presence really penetrate our hearts and our lives.
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