Corpus Christi & the Jubilee

THERE ARE THREE special Thursdays in the Church’s liturgical year: Holy Thursday, Ascension Thursday (forty days after Easter Sunday), and Corpus Christi (the Thursday ten days after Pentecost). Corpus Christi (June 22 this year) will take on added significance during the Great Jubilee, as it will be celebrated during the International Eucharistic Congress, to be held in Rome from June 18-25.
Holy Thursday has, in a sense, too much significance to be contained in a single feast. Holy Thursday marks the beginning the Lord’s Passion, the institution of the Eucharist and also the institution of the priesthood. The liturgical year ‘spreads out’ these momentous mysteries by remembering the priesthood in a special way ahead of time at the Chrism Mass, also celebrated during Holy Week, and by devoting the feast of Corpus Christi to a more focused meditation on the Eucharist.

With you always

A Eucharistic Congress, whether on the local, national or international level, can be thought of as a particularly intense celebration of the feast of Corpus Christi. An International Eucharistic Congress brings together tens of thousands of pilgrims from all parts of the Church for several days of prayer, testimonies, conferences, catechesis and, above all, participation in the Eucharistic Sacrifice of the Mass and Eucharistic Adoration. The Eucharistic Congress in Rome will be the 47th such international congress, the last of which was held in 1997 in Wroclaw, Poland. It will open with solemn Vespers on Sunday, June 18, at Rome’s cathedral, St. John Lateran, and conclude the following Sunday, June 25, with a papal Mass in St. Peter’s Square that is expected to draw half-a-million pilgrims. The traditional Corpus Christi procession will be on June 22 itself, from St. John Lateran to St. Mary Major, according to the Pope’s annual custom.
During the week of the Congress in Rome, pilgrims will make their way to Rome’s countless churches and chapels for Eucharistic Adoration and Benediction. It will be, in a certain sense, a continuation of the Holy Thursday custom in Rome and around the world of visiting the Altars of Repose after the evening Mass of the Lord’s Supper.
On the last Holy Thursday in Rome, thousands of pilgrims, in groups large and small, went from church to church in the historic centre of the city to keep vigil for a few hours with Jesus. They encountered Him at Santa Maria in Trastevere, where the ambiance of Gethsemane was evoked by real olive trees around the main altar. Or they encountered Him amongst the constantly burning incense in front of the tabernacle at Sant’Agnese in Agone in the Piazza Navona, which was jammed with young people. They encountered Him at the Jesuit church, Il Gesù, where the baroque splendour of the tomb of St. Ignatius provided a golden throne for the tabernacle. And they encountered Him at San Crisogono in Trastevere, in the midst of a spectacularly garish display, complete with a makeshift table set with twelve places and silhouette cut-outs of Jesus at table with John, and in the garden with Judas. The inscription over the altar at San Crisogono explained it all: Ego vobiscum sum omnibus diebus (I am with you always).
These words from the gospel of Ascension Thursday (Matthew 28:20) link together Holy Thursday with Corpus Christi, and also the Thursday night vigils of Holy Week with the procession of the Eucharistic Congress. The promise given at the Ascension – I am with you always – is fulfilled in the Eucharist, instituted in the Cenacle on Holy Thursday, and now worshipped from one end of the world to the other on the great feast day of the Eucharist, Corpus Christi.

The Jubilee Year is one in which the Church keeps her eyes fixed on the mystery of the Incarnation, as the document establishing the Jubilee Year put it (Incarnationis mysterium #1). The Feast of Corpus Christi provides an occasion to meditate upon the desire of God to remain with His people, a desire not exhausted by the Incarnation itself. In the Eucharistic doctrine of the real presence, the Church affirms that Jesus Christ is truly present, Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity, under the appearance of bread and wine. The same Jesus who said in the Cenacle, This is my body, is present in the tabernacles of the world. Corpus Christi is an occasion to recall, at almost the exact mid-point of the Jubilee Year, that while we look back to the coming of Jesus at Bethlehem two thousand years ago, we also look to our own neighbourhood altars to find Jesus coming each day.
Panis Angelicus fit panis hominum (Angelic bread made the bread of men), we sing in a traditional Eucharistic hymn. We know that the angelic choirs filled the vaults of heaven in wonder and awe when Jesus was born (Luke 2:14). What must those angelic choirs think as they look down upon the earth today and see in innumerable tabernacles in every part of the world that same Lord making Himself present? The angels marvel at the grandeur of it all. Men often do not. Life went on as per usual that night in Bethlehem; only a handful of shepherds were aware that something extraordinary had happened. Amongst Catholics, indifference to the mystery of the Eucharistic presence of Jesus Christ is scandalously commonplace. In part, this is but another testimony to the extravagant love of Christ, who chooses to place Himself so much at our disposal that we are inclined to treat Him as just that – disposable. Corpus Christi is the Church’s annual attempt to renew our focus on the great mystery of which we are stewards (cf. 1 Corinthians 4:1). On Corpus Christi the Church does what the angel choirs did over that first tabernacle of wood and straw in the stable at Bethlehem. On Corpus Christi the Church carries her Eucharistic Lord in procession in the streets and proclaims to all who will listen, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men of goodwill!

Since Christ is the only way to the Father, wrote the Holy Father in his 1994 apostolic letter, Tertio Millennio Adveniente (As the Third Millennium Draws Near), in order to highlight His living and saving presence in the Church and the world, the International Eucharistic Congress will take place in Rome, on the occasion of the Great Jubilee. The Year 2000 will be intensely Eucharistic: in the Sacrament of the Eu-charist the Saviour, who first took flesh in Mary’s womb twenty centuries ago, continues to offer Himself to humanity as the source of divine life.
In the Eucharist, God offers Himself to the contemporary world, and offers them, through Himself, the unity of peoples and nations that the world so anxiously seeks. St. Thomas Aquinas wrote of the Mass as a sacrum convivium in quo Christus sumitur – a sacred banquet in which Christ is consumed. That ‘convivial’ dimension will be manifest during the Eucharistic Congress, as people from vastly different cultures will be brought together around the same altar in adoration of the same Lord. While it can be said that the Eucharist is the most important thing that the Church ‘does’, it is also correct to say that the Eucharist is what makes the Church. This is what the Second Vatican Council taught when it said of the Eucharist that it was both the source and summit of Christian life. Christian life is a common life, a life within the Church. The Eucharist is the goal of that common life, but also its source.
The great Jubilee Eucharistic Congress will be a powerful sign to the world that unity amongst peoples is ultimately possible only if they can sit down around the same table, the same banquet, the same convivium. And there is only one convivium that has the power to attract all the peoples of the world. The heart of any Eucharistic Congress is the Statio Orbis, best translated as the point around which the whole world stops. The Statio Orbis in St. Peter’s Square will be both a symbol of, and an invitation to, the unity of which St. Paul writes in his letter to the Galatians: There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Gal 3:28).

A feast for the world

Corpus Christi is a time to reflect again on those words. It is not a matter of all belonging to the same club – like the United Nations – which confers upon all members a similar status. Rather it is matter of believing that if Jesus is really present in the Eucharist, then the same Christ Jesus who is in me is also in the others who received Him. He is the same Christ Jesus who is in all those who ever received Him, going all the way back to the Upper Room on Holy Thursday. Corpus Christi is not, then, just a feast for the Church; it is also a feast for the world, for it offers to the world a unity and fraternity – a conviviality – that the world desires but cannot achieve.
At the midpoint of the Great Jubilee, the Eucharistic Congress can serve, then, as a vivid manifestation of the hope that the Church presents to the world. Because God has chosen to dwell amongst us, and to do so in every corner of the world, it is possible that all corners of the world can be unified in that same God. It is for this reason that the Eucharistic Congress ought to be primarily an evangelical witness; otherwise, it would seem odd to travel thousands of miles to worship the same Eucharistic Lord as can be found in the local parish. The Eucharistic Congress is a Jubilee pilgrimage that points backward, as it were, to the Incarnation, and ahead, to the day in which all nations will worship before the Lamb who was slain (Revelation 5:12). Corpus Christi points us ahead to that day of unity, when every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth (Rev 5:13) shall worship together the Lamb who offered Himself that first Holy Thursday, and who promised always to accompany us on that first Ascension Thursday.