Fr. Roger J. Landry
Leonine Forum Summit Banquet
St. Regis Hotel, Washington, DC
Vigil of Corpus Christi
June 10, 2023
Tonight we gather on the vigil of the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of our Eucharistic Lord, which is meant to be the source and summit of the Christian life, the starting point and goal of the Leonine Forum, the beginning and the end even of sumptuous banquets like the one before us.
121 years ago, on the Vigil of Corpus Christi, Pope Leo XIII, the patronal inspiration for the Forum, released an encyclical, his 85th encyclical, on the Holy Eucharist. It was entitled in Latin Mirae Caritatis, which means “Of the Wondrous Love” Jesus shows us in this great gift.
At the beginning of the encyclical, Pope Leo noted that Jesus waited until the very close of his mortal life to give us the memorial of his measureless love for the human race, and said that, at 92 years old, as he was getting ready to depart from this life himself, he wanted to do nothing more than to try to stir up and foster in the hearts of all greater gratitude and devotion toward his wondrous Sacrament where hope, peace and salvation are found (MC 2). He said that that had been the earnest aim and endeavor of the first 24 years of his pontificate and would remain so until his last breath of life (MC 1).
In this encyclical, Pope Leo first grounded Catholic Social Teaching, which we study in depth and from many angles in our first-year curriculum, in Christ’s wondrous Eucharistic love. So many of the problems facing the human race about which he said he had written “before at considerable length” — starting with Rerum Novarum — flow from a charity toward God and others that has grown cold. The remedy, he said, is the ardent charity Christ brought into the world and with which he wanted to set human hearts on fire. That charity toward God and toward others, he continued, is what the Eternal High Priest intended in establishing the Eucharist. “It is not possible,” he wrote, “that there should be any lack of charity among men … if men would but ponder well the charity that Christ has shown us in the Sacrament.”
And so tonight, and tomorrow, and throughout the three-year-plus Eucharistic Revival occurring in the Church in the United States, especially the parish phase of the Revival that begins tomorrow, is a time for us to ponder well Christ’s wondrous charity given for us each day on the altar.
But Pope Leo makes another application of how the Sacred Liturgy that gives us our Eucharistic Lord is meant to be the source and summit of every Catholic activity. It’s supposed to influence each meal. The 265th Pope emphasized that Jesus prepared the hearts of men and women for the worthy reception of the True Manna and Living Bread he was about to give them by the multiplication of the loaves and fish in an exquisite banquet on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. He was showing us all that just as we draw our nourishment and vigor from the natural food he provides us, so God wanted to supply the food by which our souls would be sustained, strengthened and sanctified.
He wanted us through human hunger to yearn for heavenly nourishment.
He intended by the human joy of feasting to prepare us for the joy of a greater banquet in this life and a greater one still in the next.
He desired to teach us through the speeches and courses of a banquet to get ready for the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Word-made-flesh, by which the One who said that he had come so that we might have life to the full will give us His flesh for the life of the world (Jn 10:10; 6:52).
And so tonight, on this vigil of Corpus Christi, we come together with gratitude to God for this banquet and for all of the ways — intellectual formation, worship, friendship and community, opportunities for organized charity, pilgrimages and more — by which God through the Leonine Forum nourishes us.
We thank him for all those whose efforts and generosity make the Leonine Forum possible.
We thank him for the root and fruit of the Leonine Forum, the source and summit of our faith, Christ himself in the Holy Eucharist, as we ask the Lord to give us the same zeal as he gave Pope Leo, so that until our last breath of life we may never cease to glorify him for his wondrous self-gift, for the Church that draws its life from the Eucharist, and for all of the charity the Eucharist inspires and unleashes.
And we beseech our Eucharistic Lord to bless us and our banquet with the words with which Pope Leo XIII himself used to bless each meal:
Benedic, Domine, nos et haec tua dona quae de tua largitate sumus sumpturi. Per Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen.