The Body and Blood of Jesus Christ

Corpus Christi cycle C, 2019

When I was growing up, my church was the Cathedral of Saint Helena, the church of the Diocese of Helena, Montana. It was and still is a magnificent building, deliberately modeled on a famous European church. A gold miner named Thomas Meagher struck it rich and told the powers that be that if they built the Cathedral in Helena, rather than in the town of Anaconda as had been planned, he would pay for it. And in one of his travels in Europe he had fallen in love with the Votivkirche in Vienna, Austria, and arranged for the Cathedral to be modeled after it. So that was where I learned to be an altar server.

We altar servers had a lot of responsibilities. We had to speak the responses to the priest in Latin, and we weren't just parrots; we had to know what the responses meant. We had to know when to kneel and stand and ring bells, all punctuating the mass; because the priest could only speak the latin words and never ad lib and say things like, “please kneel”. And his back was turned to the people, so he couldn't even gesture at them.

But perhaps the biggest job we had was to convey by our actions and demeanor that we knew what the Eucharist was all about. We were told never to touch the sacred vessels; only the priest could do that because his hands had been consecrated. We had to learn a whole protocol regarding the possibility of dropping a sacred host on the ground. It involved putting a little fence around the host, so that after the Mass the priest could properly deal with it. He would never just reach down and pick it up, because after he had washed his hands he held his thumb and index fingers together, opening them only to touch the Sacred Host or the Chalice. And we held patens. They were like little plates with handles, and we held them under the chins of the people receiving communion, which of course was on the tongue. And the laity never touched the sacred blood, because that multiplied the risk of dropping it.

And it was drummed into the core of our souls that we would genuflect when we passed in front of the tabernacle, and never, ever talked in church, except in a whisper when you were going to confession.

I'm glad some of these practices have changed. But one of the things that they did was remind us over and over again that this bread and wine was not ordinary food; this was Jesus Christ himself. And Catholics were conscious of that in other ways; I doubt that my mother or father ever committed a mortal sin, but if they missed their monthly visit to the confessional, they would not receive the Eucharist till they had gone. My grandmother would go to confession weekly, and reverently receive communion the next morning on Sunday. And there were many people who would come to Mass but refrain from receiving the Eucharist. We didn't ask why.

Saint Paul talks about the possibility of receiving the Eucharist unworthily. No one quite knows what he meant, but he did say that you were risking your soul if you did so. Jesus himself pointed out that unless you ate his body and drank his blood, you could not have life everlasting. And he put this in more positive terms; those who ate his body and drank his blood would have eternal life.

We human beings need a sense of reverence. I think that's one of the motives of the people who seek to return to the mass in the Tridentine rite, the old Latin mass. And there a few people around, one of my deacon friends comes to mind, who have switched rites from the casual Novus Ordum rite of the Latin church to a much more solemn rite – in his case, the Maronite rite. And I wonder how many people have left the Church because they have not cultivated a sense of reverence, a sense of the great mystery which is the Eucharist?

Saint John Vianney, the patron saint of parish priests, said, “If God could have given us a greater gift than the Eucharist, he would have.” And yet sometimes we – and I include myself – receive this gift with our minds a mile away, like three year olds ripping through their birthday presents without so much as a thank you. For three year olds, it's understandable; but for us much less so.

The Feast we celebrate today came about because a priest, otherwise pious and hard working, had trouble believing that the bread and wine really became the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ. One day while celebrating Mass, as he said the words of consecration the Host began to bleed. After nearly dying of shock, he reported it to his bishop, who in turn told the pope, who was traveling through the area. The pope witnessed the miracle, and shortly afterwards created the feast of the Body and Blood of Christ, to be celebrated throughout the Church. The stained cloth which contains the blood from the miracle is still exhibited in a chapel in Italy.

We are invited today to think about the great gift we have been given. Jesus gave his body and blood, his whole life, for us, He continues in this sacrament to unite us with the moment so long ago when he redeemed the human race by his death. We Catholics believe in the real presence. Together with other Christians we try to follow Jesus' example, we turn to God in prayer, we worship together – but for us the central fact, the most important thing, is that Jesus is uniquely present to us; Jesus is the Father's gift to us, day after day, week after week, in the Eucharist.