Corpus Christi: The Body and Blood of Christ

Imagine that Someone you love deeply promised to stay with you forever — and kept that promise in a way so concrete that he could be received within you, adored in silence, and carried in procession through the streets. This is what we celebrate on Corpus Christi: our faith that Jesus is truly present in the Eucharist, not as a memory or an image, but in person. On this day the Church stops everything to tell the world what she has believed since the Last Supper. And she invites us to look again, with washed eyes, at what we may have seen a thousand times without ever truly noticing.

Corpus Christi means, in Latin, “the Body of Christ.” The full name of the feast is the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, and it celebrates one of the highest points of our faith: the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. When the priest, at Mass, repeats the words the Lord himself spoke at the Last Supper — “this is my body,” “this is my blood” — the bread and wine cease to be merely bread and wine. They truly become the Body and Blood of the Lord, together with his soul and his divinity. It is the whole Christ who gives himself there.

This changes everything. If he is truly present in the consecrated host, then the tabernacle in your parish does not hold a sacred object: it holds Someone. The Church calls this transformation transubstantiation — a big word for a reality that is at once simple and immense: the substance of the bread and wine becomes the Body and Blood of Christ, even though to our eyes they still keep the appearance of bread and wine. The Council of Trent defined this faith with full clarity, and it has crossed the centuries unchanged. This is not a figure of speech or pious poetry; it is the realism of the Catholic faith.

This is why the Second Vatican Council could say that the Eucharist is “the source and summit of the whole Christian life.” The source, because from it flows the grace that sustains everything else — the other sacraments, prayer, charity. The summit, because everything converges toward it: there is nothing greater we can receive in this world than God himself given to us as food. In some way, everything in the life of the Church revolves around this mystery.

The feast was born in the thirteenth century. Sister Juliana of Liège, in present-day Belgium, felt in her heart that the calendar was missing a day dedicated solely to this mystery. That longing kept growing until, in 1264, Pope Urban IV extended the celebration to the whole Church through the bull Transiturus de hoc mundo. It fell to Saint Thomas Aquinas to compose the liturgical texts of the feast — from him come hymns we still sing today, such as the Pange Lingua, which ends in the Tantum Ergo sung at Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, and the Adoro te devote. They were written by one of the greatest theologians in history, yet they rise up from a man on his knees before the tabernacle.

From this come the two gestures that mark the day. The procession, in which the Blessed Sacrament is carried through the streets inside the monstrance, out beyond the church walls — Jesus going out to walk among his people, blessing homes, squares, and cities. And adoration, that unhurried staying before him, in silence, simply gazing and being gazed upon. In Brazil, the faith of the people finds beautiful expression in the colorful carpets of sawdust, salt, flowers, and coffee grounds that cover the ground along the path the Lord will pass.

Today, June 7, the Church in the United States celebrates this solemnity. Liturgically, the Body and Blood of Christ falls on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday, but in most U.S. dioceses it is transferred to the following Sunday, so that more of the faithful can take part. The reason is simple: the Church wants the day to be free for us to stop, come to Mass, and adore — to give back to the Lord a little of the time that usually slips away from us.

The danger, for those of us who go to church regularly, is that familiarity slips into distraction: receiving Communion on autopilot, walking past the tabernacle without our hearts ever bending the knee. Corpus Christi is the nudge to begin again. Why not, on this day, go to Mass with a living awareness of Whom you are about to receive — and, if something is weighing on you, seek out confession first so that you may receive Communion with a clean heart? If there is a procession in your town, go; let yourself be seen walking behind your Lord through the streets. And even on an ordinary day, try slipping into a church just to pay a visit to the Blessed Sacrament, to sit in silence for five minutes and say with simplicity: “I believe that it is You, and I am staying here with You.” To go deeper, it is well worth reading the encyclical Ecclesia de Eucharistia, by Saint John Paul II, devoted entirely to this mystery. Faith in the real presence is not won by an argument: it is discovered on one’s knees.

I am the living bread which came down from heaven.

Jo 6:51 (Douay-Rheims)