The feast of Corpus Christi began in the 1200s as a result of two miracles, two interventions of the Lord. The first occurred in the early part of the century, when the Lord Jesus began to appear to a contemplative nun in Belgium, Blessed Juliana of Mont Cornillon (1193-1258).
He was traveling in a group of returning pilgrims, because there was safety in numbers in warding off bandits who would wait in hiding to ambush individual travelers. When it came to be Sunday, members of the group asked Fr. Peter if he might celebrate Mass for them. More out of courtesy than faith, he assented. They stopped at a small church dedicated to St. Christina in Bolsena, Italy, and celebrated Mass on a side altar. Right before the “Lamb of God,” when Father Peter broke the host, as a priest always does to put a particle into the chalice, the host in his hands began to bleed profusely. It bled over his hands. It bled on the corporal and on the altar cloths. It started to pour down the altar onto the steps. The people, beholding the miracle in front of their eyes, started to shriek. The priest of St. Christina’s came to see what all the commotion was about and beheld the miracle with his own eyes. They had to decide what to do with the miracle.
The local priest knew that Pope Urban IV was at that time in Orvieto, a papal city only about 10 miles uphill from where they were, and they decided to take the miracle to Orvieto to see what the pope would instruct them to do. When they arrived, Father Peter told his story, about how he had lost his faith in the Eucharist, made a pilgrimage to Rome, thought that the Lord hadn’t heard his prayer, but then He had made His real presence incontrovertibly present during the celebration of the Mass in Bolsena. Father Peter punctuated the truth of the Lord’s presence in the Eucharist by saying, “Holy Father, bread can’t bleed.” That particular Holy Father, Urban IV, was the former archdeacon of Liège, Jacques Pantaleon, and he took that miracle as a sign that Christ wanted a feast to His Body and Blood celebrated not just in his home diocese in Belgium, but throughout the whole Church. The first one was celebrated in 1264 and it has been celebrated ever since. The Lord worked both of those miracles so that we might fittingly celebrate His Body and Blood to this day, in our own parishes.
Father Roger J. Landry is a priest of the Diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts, ordained in 1999. After receiving a biology degree from Harvard College, Fr. Landry studied for the priesthood in Maryland, Toronto, and for several years in Rome. He speaks widely on the thought of Pope John Paul II and on apologetics, and is currently parochial administrator of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and executive editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River. An archive of his homilies and articles can be found at catholicpreaching.com
This article is adapted from one of Father Landry’s recent homilies.
Beginning from the time she was 16, a moon would appear to her throughout the day with a black band in it. She wondered what it meant and the Lord Jesus appeared to her in a dream and mentioned that the moon referred to the liturgical year and the black band to the fact that the liturgical year lacked one thing, a day in honor of His Body and Blood in the Eucharist.
Up until that point, the Church had marked the institution of the Eucharist each year on Holy Thursday, when the Lord gave the Apostles His Body and Blood for the first time and instituted the priesthood so that through His priests, that Body and Blood might be multiplied to every land in every age. But on Holy Thursday, the focus of most Christians is on the imminent betrayal that will occur after the Last Supper. Even the Gospel of the Mass of the Last Supper does not focus on the Eucharist, but rather on the Lord washing His Apostles’ feet and commissioning them to do the same in loving, humble service of others.
Missing from the liturgical calendar was a feast specifically dedicated to rejoicing in the incredible gift of the Eucharist and thanking God for it. Blessed Juliana went to the local bishop, Bishop Robert of Liège, and asked him to institute a feast in their diocese in Belgium, which he did beginning in 1246. The Archdeacon of the Bishop of Liège, who presented her to the bishop, was a man by the name of Jacques Pantaleon, whom we will encounter again soon. That was the first intervention of the Lord to bring about this feast.
The second intervention happened in the life of a Czech priest, Father Peter of Prague, who had lost his faith in the reality of Christ’s Body and Blood in the Eucharist. It might surprise some people to think that a priest could lose his faith in the Eucharist, but sometimes it does occur. A priest can begin to question whether what starts out as mere bread and wine in his hands can change, after a few sacred words, into the Body and Blood of the God-man, Jesus, even though all the appearances of the bread and wine remain.
Father Peter felt like a hypocrite celebrating the Eucharist while having some doubts about whether the Lord Jesus was truly there. But he hadn’t yet lost his faith in God and, hence, decided to give God the opportunity to give him that faith by doing something quite drastic. In 1263, he decided to make a pilgrimage to Rome, to pray at the tomb of his patron, St. Peter, for the gift of renewed faith in the Eucharist. This was a drastic move, because to make a pilgrimage to Rome was quite an undertaking then. Today we can hop on a plane at Logan airport and arrive in Rome several hours later. To make a pilgrimage from Prague to Rome in 1263, however, would have meant walking 851 miles — at twenty miles a day, it would have taken a month and a half, one way. Despite the hardship and sacrifice, however, Peter went, desperate to save his priesthood and save his faith.
Why did he make the pilgrimage to St. Peter in Rome? There were tombs of saints and pilgrimage destinations much closer to Prague, but Father Peter did not choose any of them. He went to the tomb of his patron because St. Peter has always been an example to the whole Church of faith in the Eucharist. You very likely remember the scene when Jesus talked about the reality of the Eucharist the first time, in a synagogue in Capernaum, one year before His death. He told his listeners that unless they ate His flesh and drank His blood, they would have no life in them, and the one who ate His flesh and drank His blood would have eternal life (cf. John 6:53ff). St. John tells us that many of the disciples, those for whom the Lord had worked so hard for the previous two years to bring to the truth, walked away, thinking that Jesus was mentally ill, teaching them the necessity of cannibalism. They complained, saying, “This teaching is hard! Who can accept it?” And many of those disciples turned their backs on Jesus and walked away.
Jesus knew that they had heard Him appropriately but were not willing to accept the truth about the Eucharist. He then turned to His closest followers, the Twelve, and asked them, “Do you also wish to go away?” They fell silent. None of them could have understood what Jesus was talking about any better than those who had just abandoned Jesus. A Jew couldn’t even touch blood without becoming ritually impure. Yet Jesus was asking them to drink His blood and eat His flesh. It would take a year before what Jesus was saying would make any sense, when Jesus, during the Last Supper, took bread and wine into His hands and changed them into His body and blood, saying. “This is my body”; “This is the cup of my blood.” Nevertheless, even though they didn’t understand truly what Jesus was saying and why He was saying it, St. Peter stood up after the Lord’s question of whether they, too, would leave the Lord over His teaching on the Eucharist, and said, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that You are the Holy One of God.”
St. Peter believed in the Eucharist because he believed in Christ, which meant believing in what he said. St. Thomas Aquinas, who wrote so many beautiful hymns for the first celebration of Corpus Christi, wrote in the Adoro te Devote, “I believe whatever the Son of God has said; Nothing is truer than the Word of Truth.” Jesus, the Word of God, the Truth incarnate, said that we had to eat His flesh and drink His blood, and therefore St. Peter believed.
That’s the reason why Father Peter of Prague made the pilgrimage to Rome, to ask for faith in Christ’s words like his patron had. He finally arrived after a long and lengthy journey. He prayed for a few weeks in front of the tomb of his patron, but after all of that, it seemed as if nothing had happened. Thus Fr. Peter started to question his entire faith in God. Hadn’t Jesus said that whoever knocked would have the door opened, whoever asked would receive, whoever sought would find? Hadn’t He said that the Father knows how to give good things to His children? Yet when Father Peter, a priest, had asked for something so important for him to be a disciple and apostle of the Lord — faith in the Lord’s presence in the Eucharist — it seemed like he had come up empty. So, crestfallen, he began his journey north, now with very little faith at all.
