Corpus Christi Sunday, Conversations with Consequences Podcast, June 10, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of the Lord, Vigil
June 10, 2023

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us on the Solemnity of his Body and Blood, popularly known as Corpus Christi.
• In the Gospel for the feast, Jesus’ disciples as well as critics grumble after he tells them that he is the living bread that came down from heaven and whoever eats that bread, his flesh for the life of the world, will live forever. “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?,” they mumble aloud. And Jesus doubles down, saying, “Unless you gnaw on the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood you do not have life within you. … Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me.”
• In response, the critics would ultimately say, “This teaching is hard, who can endure it,” and many of Jesus’ disciples — who had listened to so many of his life-changing words, who had witnessed so many of his stupendous miracles, including the multiplication of five loaves and two fish to feed more than 5,000 people — left. They were right in saying that Jesus’ teaching about the Eucharist was very hard. To them it sounded like cannibalism. Jews couldn’t even touch blood without becoming ritually impure and Jesus was telling them they needed to drink his blood. Sometimes I think the reason why some Catholics, like some of our fellow Christians, don’t find this teaching hard is because they think Jesus is only talking symbolically. He’s not. He stresses his flesh is real food and his blood real drink.
• We need to approach this difficult reality with faith. After many of the disciples had left, Jesus turned to the 12 and asked if they wanted to leave. That’s when same Peter who had stepped forward in Caesarea Philippi to say that Jesus was the Messiah and Son of the Living God, courageously stuck his neck out and said, “Lord to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the holy one of God.” What he was essentially saying was, “Jesus, we don’t have the foggiest idea as to how you will give us your flesh to eat and blood to drink but what we do know is that we believe in you, and because of that faith, we believe in what you say. So if you say that we must eat your flesh and drink your blood to have life, just show us how!” And Jesus would during the next Passover, when during the Last Supper in the Upper Room in Jerusalem, he would totally change the bread and wine of the Passover celebration into his Body and Blood and say, “Take and eat. … Take and drink.” St. Thomas Aquinas described the Eucharistic faith of St. Peter and of the Church when he wrote in his famous Corpus Christi hymn, Adoro Te Devote, “I believe whatever the Son of God has said, because nothing is truer than the word of truth.”
• The difficulty of Jesus’ teaching about the Eucharist is what led to the first Corpus Christi. A priest named Fr. Peter of Prague had lost his faith in the Real Presence of Jesus, but he hadn’t yet lost his faith in God and, hence, decided to give God the opportunity to give him that faith by doing something quite drastic. In 1263, he decided to make a pilgrimage to Rome, to pray at the tomb of his patron, St. Peter, for the gift of renewed faith in the Eucharist. To make a pilgrimage to Rome was quite an undertaking. It would have meant walking 851 miles. At twenty miles a day, it would have taken a month and a half, each way. Despite the hardship and sacrifice, however, Peter went, desperate to save his priesthood and save his faith. But after praying for weeks at the tomb of his namesake who had said, “Lord to whom shall we go?,” he sensed no graces at all. Crestfallen, he began his journey home, now questioning his faith as a whole. When those traveling with him out of protection against bandits asked him if he might celebrate Mass for them on Sunday, and out of courtesy, he accepted, they stopped at a small church dedicated to St. Christina in Bolsena, Italy, and he celebrated Mass on a side altar. Right before the “Lamb of God,” when Father Peter broke the host, as a priest always does to put a particle into the chalice, the host in his hands began to bleed over his hands and on the corporal. The people, beholding the miracle in front of their eyes, shrieked. The priest of St. Christina’s came to see what all the commotion was about and beheld the miracle with his own eyes. They had to decide what to do with the miracle. The local priest knew that Pope Urban IV was at that time in Orvieto, the well-fortified papal city only about 10 miles uphill from where they were. And when the Pope examined the miracle and heard Fr. Peter’s story, the Pope took it as sign that Christ wanted a feast to His Body and Blood, a feast of the ordinary Eucharistic miracle that happens in every parish each day, to celebrated throughout the whole Church. It’s been celebrated every year for the last 759 years.
• This year the celebration of Corpus Christi is particularly special, because it is taking place within the context of the US Bishops’ three-year-plus Eucharistic Revival initiative. This year’s celebration should be more special still, because after a year of Diocesan initiatives, the Revival is inaugurating on Corpus Christi its second and most important year: the parish phase of the Revival. Each of the 17,000 parishes in the United States is being explicitly urged by the U.S. bishops to commit “to take one step further” to help grow parishioners’ Eucharistic knowledge, faith, amazement, love and life.
• Some parishes are already thriving in terms of Eucharistic piety. They have reverent, graceful, prayerful Masses with powerful preaching, beautiful music, and infectious hospitality. They feature plenty of opportunities for parishioners to come to pray with adoring love before their Eucharistic Lord. They pass on the Eucharistic faith with fire to first communicants, to OCIA candidates and others. They host 40-hour devotions, lead Eucharistic processions, even establish adoration chapels. The parish phase is a time for them to build on what they already have.
• Many parishes, however, are in need of a greater upgrade. While every parish is formally Eucharistic, insofar as each exists above all to celebrate the Eucharist, not every parish has made Jesus in the Eucharist the source, summit, root and center of its parish life, activity and culture. This Corpus Christi begins a year for parishes to dedicate themselves to improving, and for some improving substantially, their Eucharistic focus.
• The US Bishops have published the Leaders’ Playbook for the Year of Parish Revival so that it might become “the most impactful phase of this multi-year response to the Holy Spirit.” The Playbook contains four “pillars,” each with a specific “invitation.”
• The first pillar is to reinvigorate worship at Mass with an invitation to focus on how the Mass is celebrated. It encourages greater beauty, reverence and liturgical silence in the celebration of Mass, confessions before Mass, as well as personal witness on the power of the Mass.
• The second pillar is to create moments of personal encounter, with an appeal for every parish to host monthly “Eucharistic nights” of adoration to help people meet Jesus prayerfully in the Blessed Sacrament with the help of readings, talks, music, and confession. It also encourages parish retreats, prayer teams and Eucharistic processions.
• The third is to strengthen faith formation through Sunday preaching series on the intrinsic connection of the Eucharist to the Paschal Mystery, the Real Presence, holiness and Jesus’ call to evangelize and serve. It also urges a small group study series called “Jesus and the Eucharist.”
• The last is to form and encourage people to go out to invite at least one person back to Mass and to give special care to those in need and on the peripheries of existence. It asks us to imagine what would happen to our parishes if every parishioner were to reach out effectively to a fallen away family member, co-worker and fellow student and if priests and faithful were prepared with best practices to make them feel welcome.
• The Playbook is an important resource to help every parish take at least “one step” forward during the parish phase. If parishes take it seriously, however, those steps could be enormous strides and create the momentum that the Revival as a whole is seeking to catalyze.
• One of my favorite parts of the celebration of Corpus Christi is the chanting of the Lauda Sion Salvatorem sequence before the proclamation of the Gospel. In the second line of this great prayer written by St. Thomas Aquinas for the first Corpus Christi, we sing, “Quantum potes, tantum aude,” which means, literally, “Whatever you can do, so much dare,” before noting that reality of the gift of the Eucharistic Jesus far exceeds the capacity of all human praise and action. This spirit of “daring to do all we can,” while it is meant to characterize our approach to the Eucharistic Jesus in general, is supposed to mark in a special way the attitude of Catholics toward the Eucharistic Revival as a whole and toward the parish phrase in the particular. It’s meant to encourage us to pull out all the stops to grow, together with our fellow parishioners, in Eucharistic knowledge, faith, amazement, love and life. As we prepare to celebrate the Body and Blood of the Lord and to receive that Body and Blood, together with Jesus’ Soul and Divinity with us, this Sunday, let us ask the Lord to help revitalize our own Catholic Eucharistic life and to be catalysts for the Eucharistic Revival of our parishes, fallen away family members and friends, and the whole Church. Let us ask for the grace that we who feed on Jesus, who gnaw on his flesh and drink his blood, who believe in this difficult teaching, may have life because of him, and help others to come to experience that same gift.

The Gospel on which the homily was based was: 

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