The Practical Consequences of Faith and Love in the Eucharistic Lord, Corpus Christi, June 6, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Shrine of Our Lady of Martyrs, Auriesville, NY
Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ (Corpus Christi), Year B
June 6, 2021
Exod 24:3-8, Ps 116, Heb 9:11-15, Mk 14:12-16.22-26

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily please click below: 

The following text guided today’s homily:

• “Take it; this is my body.” “Take and drink. This is my blood of the covenant, which will be shed for many.” These words would have been shocking to the apostles on Holy Thursday night as they prepared for the traditional Jewish Passover meal, which relived the meal they had with loins girt and sandals on their feet the night God finally liberated them from the Egyptians. They were expecting to eat unleavened bread, to drink four symbolic cups of wine and to consume the meat of the Paschal Lamb. They were not expecting Jesus to change the unleavened bread and wine into his own body and blood and to have them consume him as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Jesus was fulfilling what he had told them exactly a year earlier when he said, in the synagogue of Capernaum, that we needed to gnaw on his flesh and drink his blood to have life in him, and the one who eats his flesh and drinks his blood will have eternal life. Jesus was inviting them, through Holy Communion, to enter into the definitive passover from death to life, the new and eternal Covenant he was making to giving his Body and shedding his Blood on Calvary for our salvation. With the same verbs, and the same saving love, Jesus tells each of us, “Take and eat.” “Take and drink.”
• Today is a day we thank the Lord for this awesome gift and beg for his help to receive him more worthily and more fruitfully. Corpus Christi, the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of the Lord, is a special day wanted by the Lord Jesus himself. He asked for it in two different stages in the 1200s. He desired that our faith in the Eucharist would pass from our head, to our heart to our knees, that our response to him in this gift would go from theology to devotion, that this day would help us to grow from knowledge of his real presence to passionate love. 800 years ago, people knew the truth of Jesus’ real presence in the Eucharist intellectually but for many it really didn’t impact their life the way Jesus wanted. Mass was for most a duty, a duty some fulfilled faithfully, and others neglected. It wasn’t a thing of love. Jesus wanted us to love him back in the Eucharist. He wanted us to receive as much as we possibly can from the gift of himself in the Eucharist, not for his sake, but for ours.
• The first intervention of Jesus in asking for this Feast occurred in the early part of the century, when the Lord Jesus began to appear to a contemplative nun in Belgium, St. Juliana of Mont Cornillon (1193-1258). Beginning from the time she was 15 in 1208, a moon would appear to her throughout the day with a black band in it. She wondered what it meant and the Lord Jesus appeared to her in a dream and mentioned that the moon referred to the liturgical year and the black band to the fact that the liturgical year lacked one thing, a day in honor of His Body and Blood in the Eucharist. Up until that point, the Church had marked the institution of the Eucharist each year on Holy Thursday, when the Lord gave the Apostles His Body and Blood for the first time and instituted the priesthood so that through His priests, that Body and Blood might be multiplied to every land in every age. But on Holy Thursday, the focus of Christians is divided. Yes, we think about the Eucharist, but we also ponder the imminent betrayal that will occur after the Last Supper. Even the Gospel of the Mass of the Last Supper does not focus on the Eucharist, but rather on the Lord’s washing His Apostles’ feet and commissioning them to do the same in loving, humble service of others. Jesus was saying that missing from the liturgical calendar was a feast specifically dedicated to rejoicing in the incredible gift of the Eucharist and thanking God for it. After 20 years of these apparitions, Saint Juliana went to the local bishop, Bishop Robert de Thorete of Liège, and asked him to institute a feast in their diocese in Belgium, which he did beginning in 1246. The Archdeacon of the Bishop of Liège, who presented her to the bishop and was his point man in working out all the details for the feast, was someone named Jacques Pantaleon. Seven years later he was ordained a priest and consecrated Bishop of Verdun. Two years later, during the age of the crusades, he was named Patriarch of Jerusalem. And in 1261, he was elected Pope Urban IV and would be intimately involved in the second part of the Lord’s manifestation of his desire for a universal feast dedicated to his Body and Blood.
• That second began with a Czech priest, Father Peter of Prague, who had lost his faith in the reality of Christ’s Body and Blood in the Eucharist. Sometimes priests can start to take for granted that what starts out as mere bread and wine in theirs hands totally changes, after a few words, into the Body and Blood of the God-man, Jesus, even though all the appearances of the bread and wine remain.Father Peter began to feel like a hypocrite celebrating the Eucharist while having some doubts about whether the Lord Jesus was truly there. 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. This was a drastic move, because to make a pilgrimage to Rome was quite an undertaking then. Today we can hop on a plane at JFK airport and arrive in Rome eight hours later. To make a pilgrimage from Prague to Rome in 1263, however, would have meant walking 851 miles, like walking from New York City to Jacksonville (834) or St. Louis (874). 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.
• Why did he make the pilgrimage to St. Peter in Rome? There were tombs of saints and pilgrimage destinations in and near Prague, but Father Peter did not choose any of them. He went to the tomb of his patron because St. Peter has always been an example to the whole Church of faith in the Eucharist. We remember what happened at the end of the famous Gospel when Jesus was in the Synagogue of Capernaum talked about the reality of the Eucharist for the first time. He told his listeners that unless they ate His flesh and drank His blood, they would have no life in them, and the one who ate His flesh and drank His blood would have eternal life. St. John tells us that many of the disciples, those for whom the Lord had worked so hard for the previous two years to bring to the truth, walked away, thinking that Jesus was mentally ill, teaching them the necessity of cannibalism. They complained, saying, “This teaching is hard! Who can accept it?” Jesus then turned to His closest followers, the Twelve, and asked them, “Do you also wish to go away?” None of them could have understood what Jesus was talking about any better than those who had just abandoned Jesus. It would take a year before what Jesus was saying would make any sense, when Jesus, during the Last Supper, as in the Gospel we just heard, took bread and wine into His hands and changed them into His body and blood, saying. “This is my body”; “This is the chalice of my blood.” Nevertheless, even though they didn’t understand truly what Jesus was saying and why He was saying it, St. Peter stood up after the Lord asked whether they, too, would leave Him over His teaching on the Eucharist, 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.”That’s the reason why Father Peter of Prague made the pilgrimage to Rome, to ask for faith in Christ’s words just like his St. Peter had.
• He finally arrived after a long and lengthy journey. He prayed for a few weeks in front of the tomb of his patron, but after all of that, it seemed as if nothing had happened. Thus Fr. Peter started to question his entire faith in God. Hadn’t Jesus said that whoever knocked would have the door opened, whoever asked would receive, whoever sought would find? Hadn’t He said that the Father knows how to give good things to His children? Yet when Father Peter, a priest, had asked for something so important for him to be a good disciple and apostle of the Lord — faith in the Lord’s presence in the Eucharist — it seemed like he had come up empty. So, crestfallen, he began his journey north, now with very little faith at all.He was traveling in a group of returning pilgrims, because there was safety in numbers in warding off bandits who would wait in hiding to ambush individual travelers. When it came to be Sunday, members of the group asked Fr. Peter if he might celebrate Mass for them. More out of courtesy than faith, he assented. They stopped at a small church dedicated to St. Christina in Bolsena, Italy, and 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, started to shriek. 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 so they went to inform the Pope of the miracle and the Pope sent the local bishop to investigate the Blood Stained Corporal. Eventually the Corporal was brought to Orvieto in a caravan of all those who had witnessed the miracle. We can imagine Fr. Peter’s telling Pope Urban IV his story, about how he had lost his faith in the Eucharist, made a pilgrimage to Rome, thought that the Lord hadn’t heard his prayer, but then He had made His real presence incontrovertibly present during the celebration of the Mass in Bolsena. Father Peter would have punctuated the truth of the Lord’s presence in the Eucharist by saying something like, “Holy Father, bread can’t bleed.” Urban IV, the former archdeacon of Liège, Jacques Pantaleon, took that miracle as a sign that Christ wanted a feast to His Body and Blood celebrated not just in his home diocese in Belgium, but throughout the whole Church. He wanted the routine Eucharistic miracle that was the basis of the extraordinary Eucharistic miracle to be celebrated.The first one was celebrated in 1264 and it has been celebrated ever since. The Lord appeared to St. Juliana of Liege and then worked the miracle in Fr. Peter’s hands so that we and the whole Church might fittingly celebrate His Body and Blood to this day, in our own parishes, throughout the world.
• What impact should the truth of the Real Presence of Jesus in the Holy Eucharist and love for Jesus’ self-outpouring have on us? I’d like to focus on five practical consequences.

• First, we should make Sunday Mass by far the biggest priority of our week. There’s the famous story of the martyrs of Abitene from 304. They were told by the Roman prefect that if they assembled on Sunday morning for Mass, they would be arrested and executed. They thanked him for the notice.… but then still all 49 Christians in the town came together on the Lord’s Day. When the flabbergasted prefect asked them why they didn’t heed his warning, one of them, Emeritus, simply said, “Sine Dominico non possumus!” “Without the Lord on Sunday, we cannot live.” Especially in an age in which, even before COVID, many Catholics treated missing Sunday Mass as no big deal, and after COVID, many have not returned to Church, we need to remember what is really going on. The words St. Thomas Aquinas wrote for the celebration of the first Corpus Christi in 1264 have summed up with wonder what should be our attitude of gratitude. In the famous verses we call the Panis Angelicus, we sing, “O res mirabilis! Manducat Dominum pauper et servus humilis.” “O what a mind-blowing reality: a poor and humble servant eats the Lord!” That’s what Jesus in the Eucharist makes possible. We creatures eat Creator. We sinners consume our Savior. We lovers become one flesh with the Beloved.

• Second, we should prepare for Sunday Mass. At the beginning of today’s Gospel, the apostles ask Jesus, “Where do you want us to go to prepare for you to eat the Passover?” They wanted, they needed, to prepare for what they thought was just going to be a reenactment of the Passover Rite when Moses and the Jewish people ate unleavened bread, killed an unblemished lamb, consumed it and wiped its blood on their doorposts. Little did the apostles know that Jesus was going to inaugurate that night the new and eternal Covenant and have us eat him as the Lamb of God and drink his blood as he himself entered through the door our life to make us his abode! And if the apostles wanted to prepare for the Old Passover in the meticulous way Jesus instructed them, how much more do we need to be prepared for something infinitely more awesome? How do we prepare? We prepare by longing for Jesus! Something we can do by spiritual communions, telling the Lord in prayer how much we hunger to receive him. We prepare by cleaning and getting things in order, which is what happens in the Sacrament of Penance. We prepare by looking ahead to the Mass and tilling the soil of our souls so that we might receive the seeds he wants to plant. But preparation for Sunday Mass is the second way we make our faith in the Eucharist practical.
• Third, we should try to make time to come to adore Jesus, to spend time with him, to pray. If we really believe what the Church professes, that the Eucharist is Jesus, then how incredible is it that we have the time to be with him? The more we adore Jesus outside of Mass, the more we will adore him in Mass, and adoring love is the only fitting way to receive Jesus. St. Kateri Tekakwitha is distinguished by her love for Jesus in the Holy Eucharist. As soon as it was explained to her that the Eucharist is not a thing but Jesus Christ, she began to spend as much time before him as she could. After she had escaped this area to go to Kahnawake in Montreal, she used to go to head out very early in the morning to adore Jesus, even kneeling outside in the snow before the Church was opened, and coming back to the chapel as often as she could during the day when she had finished her work. We ask her to intercede for us for a similar love.
• Fourth, I’d like to urge you to consider daily Mass. When I was a college freshman, living on my own for the first time, making choices totally for myself outside of the loving gaze of my parents, the Lord helped me to see with clarity the best use of my freedom. I was fortunate to have grown up in a very faithful Catholic family, had always gone to Mass on Sundays and Holy Days, and was very involved in my hometown parish. From the time I was four, I had believe in what the Church calls the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist and had never disbelieved the truth that after the words of consecration, there’s only Jesus under the appearances of bread of wine. But the consequences of the reality of the Eucharistic Jesus hadn’t struck me. But that day in 1988, I asked myself, “If it is really Jesus, the eternal Son of God in the Holy Eucharist, is there anything more important that I could be doing on a Monday than receiving him in Holy Communion? Is there anything more important on a Tuesday, or Wednesday, or Thursday, Friday or Saturday?” I recognized that the clear answer to that is that there was nothing more important in the whole world than receiving God inside. And from that day, September 24, 1988 until today — 11,944 days later — I have, by the grace of God, never gone one day without Jesus in the Holy Eucharist. I’d ask you to ask yourself that same question. Is there anything more important that you could be doing any day of your life than receiving God inside? Now it may not be possible for you to go to Mass every day because of familial or work obligations or because, sadly, there are not enough priests near you to offer Mass every day. But a Catholic who knows and loves Jesus in the Holy Eucharist should have a ravenous hunger to want to receive him each day. The beautiful thing about daily Mass is that no one is there out of obligation. Everyone is there out of love. That’s the adequate response to the astonishing gift of Jesus in loving us so much that he has become the food for our soul and whole Christian life.
• Lastly, especially on Corpus Christi, our gratitude for Jesus in the Eucharist spurs us to want to do something extravagant for him. Throughout the centuries, Christians have had Eucharistic processions on this feast, taking Jesus out into the streets, showing our love for him and letting our faith overflow. We tried to do something extra today, with Eucharistic adoration before Mass. There will be the 40 Hours Devotion and Enthronement of the Sacred Heart of Jesus from Friday through Sunday. I would urge you to try to come to as much of it as you can. In the Sequence hymn he wrote for the first Corpus Christi celebration in 1264, which we heard before the Gospel, St. Thomas Aquinas wrote, “Quantum potes, tantum aude,” a beautiful phrase that means, “Dare to do all you can!” He was summoning us to pull out all the stops in showing our appreciation to Jesus for this great gift. Let’s not put any limits to our loving response to Jesus in the Eucharist, because his Eucharistic love for us is limitless.
• Today on this Feast of Corpus Christi, this Eucharistic celebration willed by the Lord, we ask for the grace to celebrate it with great devotion. The great gift of Jesus in Holy Communion was taught to us all by St. Isaac Jogues after he had gone 17 months without receiving Jesus during his first missionary journey here. He was unable at the time to celebrate Mass because his thumb and index fingers had been cut off as part of the torture making it impossible for him to celebrate Mass and there were no other priests while he was in captivity and before the Dutch rescued him and brought him back to France. When he disembarked and was able to receive the Lord, he said, “It was then that I began to live again.” Through the Eucharist, Christ wants to bring us to be spiritually alive. The Church draws its life from the Eucharist. And Jesus says to each of us, “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!” Jesus wants us all to have that life in abundance!
• Today, on this celebration of the feast of Corpus Christi, we focus with gratitude on that gift of life through communion with Jesus in the Holy Eucharist. “Blessed are those,” we will pray later, “who are called to the Supper of the Lamb!” Blessed indeed are we to be here. As we poor and humble servants prepare to eat the Lord, we ask for the grace to live truly Eucharistic lives so that, through the new and eternal Covenant into which we enter at Mass, we may pass over with Jesus to its fulfillment in the heavenly liturgy.

These were the readings for today’s Mass:

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