THE celebration of the Feast of the Holy Eucharist has undergone an historical development. I got this information from an article I read in the UK magazine The Tablet. According to that article, a Protestant minister had once said: I can never contemplate to become a Roman Catholic because you are Eucharistic “cannibals.” He was sincere.
We must know that in some popular devotions and pious legends there can be too explicit a link in the physicality of the Eucharist. We are not Christian cannibals, feasting on Jesus’ flesh and blood, on his liver, brain and bones. The best traditions in the Church are careful in the language they use about how Jesus is present in the Eucharist. In the Catechism of the Catholic Church, when it speaks of the Eucharistic real presence, it never refers to “Jesus” but to “Christ”. This distinction matters. The Eucharist is a Sacrament of Easter.
As a Catholic we believe that Christ, raised by God from the dead, is fully and truly present to us in the consecrated bread and wine at Mass. In 1 Corinthians 15, St Paul was at pains to rebut two extreme views about the glorified body of Christ: a crude physicalism, where the glorified body of Christ was simply a resuscitation of his corpse; and an over-spiritualization where Christ raised from the dead was a ethereal ghost.
The Catechism puts the issue succinctly: “… the glorious body (is) not limited by space and time but able to be present how and when he wills; for Christ’s humanity can no longer be confined to earth” (CCC 645). The risen body and blood of Christ is found in the experience of Easter, it signifies an encounter that transcends the boundaries of human weakness, but at the same time raises it up and heals all the wounds of the body. The divine presence of Christ lives in and through the redeemed physical world, but is not bound or contained by it.
For the first few centuries, Christians adored Christ as they consumed Communion. The reservation of the Blessed Sacrament was rare and then mainly for the sick. From the fifth century, as Christians believed that they were not worthy to receive the Eucharist, their adoration of the Risen Lord took the place of communing with him. The Feast of Corpus Christi arises in the thirteenth century when a large number of Catholics simply never received Communion but felt close to Christ in the act of adoration. In 1215, the Church had to enact a law – with us today – requiring Catholics to receive Communion at least once a year, at Eastertime.
The Second Vatican Council taught that while the act of adoration is important and consistent with the intensity of our love, receiving the Risen Lord in Holy Communion was the more ancient part of our tradition and a more complete act. Indeed Vatican II also reminded us that while we believe Christ is uniquely and intimately present in the Bread of Life and the Cup of Salvation, we also believe that Christ’s real presence also comes in the Word of God, in the gathered Assembly of God’s people and in person of the ministers.
Understood in these ways, the Body and Blood of Christ moves away from celebrating the static presence of God in the Blessed Sacrament, to the dynamic living out of the feast in our daily lives, Corpus Christi should be the most movable and radical of feasts.
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