Corpus Christi

The Feast of Corpus Christi, also known as the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, observed on May 30th in 2024, celebrates the institution of the Eucharist. The Corpus Christi procession is a centuries-old tradition of the Catholic faith to process the Real Presence of Jesus — the Eucharist — in public.
      
Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI called the Corpus Christi feast and procession important opportunities for Catholics to reaffirm their faith in the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. “With awareness of being inadequate because of our sins, but needing to be nourished by the love that the Lord offers us in the Eucharistic sacrament … We renew our faith in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist,” he said.
      
In his 2003 encyclical on the Eucharist, “Ecclesia de Eucharistia,” Pope Saint John Paul II wrote that “the worship of the Eucharist outside of the Mass is of inestimable value for the life of the Church. This worship is strictly linked to the celebration of the Eucharistic Sacrifice. The presence of Christ under the sacred species reserved after Mass — a presence which lasts as long as the species of bread and of wine remain — derives from the celebration of the sacrifice and is directed toward communion, both sacramental and spiritual.”
      
The Corpus Christi procession is not a walking to the Lord, to the Eucharistic celebration; it is a walking with the Lord; it is itself an element of the Eucharistic celebration, one dimension of the Eucharistic event. The Lord who has become our bread is showing us the way. He is in fact our way.
He leads us.

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