THE CORPUS CHRISTI PROCESSION: The Most Holy Body and Blood of Jesus, or Corpus Christi, will be celebrated next weekend, June 6-7. All of you are invited to participate in a combined Eucharistic procession joining forces with all the Catholic parishes in our deanery (all across Jackson County). This is a pious practice that stretches back nearly 800 years in our history. 762 to be precise!
Join us at 2:30pm on Sunday June 7th. The Corpus Christi Procession starts inside St. John Church at 711 N. MLK. Then we will process on foot down MLK (Francis St.) with a police escort toward St. Mary Star of the Sea where the event will conclude with benediction. A Lumen Christi bus will take people back to their cars at St. John so you don’t have to walk both ways. Those who made their First Communion this spring are invited to help lead the procession wearing their special dresses and suits one last time.
Here is what I wrote about the Eucharist to honor Corpus Christi in this weekend’s bulletin if you didn;’t already see it:
Corpus Christi was established by Pope Urban IV in 1264 following a Eucharistic miracle the previous year where the consecrated host bled in the hands of a priest who doubted the Real Presence of Jesus in the Most Blessed Sacrament of the altar. The Pew Research Study of 2019 found that only three in ten of Catholics who attend Mass in the United States either know or believe the Church’s teaching about the Eucharist. I fear those numbers worsened during the Covid Pandemic when the churches were shuttered and the whole world was turned upside down. It is time for us to reclaim this treasure of our spiritual heritage.
Every verifiable Eucharistic miracle has shown that bleeding hosts all have the same blood type AB, displaying the traits of tissue from the myocardium or striated heart muscle in the left ventricle. The studied samples display evidence of trauma and inflammation as well as a high concentration of white blood cells indicating that the heart was alive and in distress, experiencing extreme physical trauma.
On Pentecost, I preached about the Eucharist being carried by Catholic astronauts on the space shuttle and the International Space Station, and that a Catholic Mass was celebrated on the peak of Mt. Everest in Nepal on Easter 2023. These represent the closest the Eucharist has ever made it toward Heaven, and yet in every Catholic Mass, Heaven comes down to Earth upon the altar and into the bodies of those who worthily and reverently receive Jesus.
In Holy Communion, Jesus lives up to the name given him by the Prophet Isaiah, ‘his name shall be called Emmanuel, God is with us’ (Is. 7:14). In Holy Communion, Jesus keeps his promise from his Ascension Day, spoken in the last verse of Matthew’s Gospel, ‘Behold, I will be with you always, even to the end of the age’ (Matthew 28:20). By our Eucharistic faith, we can be with Him who is always with us, we can be one with Him who promises to be with us always.
The mode of Christ’s presence under the Eucharistic species is unique. It raises the Eucharist above all the sacraments as “the perfection of the spiritual life and the end to which all the sacraments tend.” In the most blessed sacrament of the Eucharist “the body and blood, together with the soul and divinity, of our Lord Jesus Christ and, therefore, the whole Christ is truly, really, and substantially contained.” “This presence is called ‘real’ – by which is not intended to exclude the other types of presence as if they could not be ‘real’ too, but because it is presence in the fullest sense: that is to say, it is a substantial presence by which Christ, God and man, makes himself wholly and entirely present” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, par. 1374).
“Every time you visit the Church for the love of Christ, His heart draws us in an embrace of sheer delight. The tabernacle is like Mary’s womb wherein dwells the same Christ who reigns above, adored by angels, He who enters our bodies and souls.” -St. Margaret Mary Alacoque
“He said: This is my Body; therefore the Eucharist is not the figure of his Body and Blood, as some have said, talking nonsense in their stupid minds, but it is in very truth the Blood and Body of Christ.” -St. Macarius the Great
“If Christ did not want to dismiss the Jews without food in the desert for fear that they would collapse on the way, it was to teach us that it is dangerous to try to get to heaven without the Bread of Heaven. -St. Jerome
