Whatever heaven might consist of, I’m hoping for some to some exciting and informative theological conversations.
At the top of my list is a chat with St John over why he chose to make the last supper a platform for the washing of the disciples’ feet and not about the Eucharist?
And that’s not the only conversation. There is another pressing one.
I want to ask St Jerome, who translated the Greek text into the Latin Vulgate, why on earth he translated <em>epiousios arton</em> in the Lord’s Prayer into <em>panis quotidianum</em>?
“Bread for the whole of our contingent being” (<em>epiousios</em> is a made up word used just to describe the mind blowing message of Jesus) and is not the same as “daily food”.
The two conversations are connected because by doing so St Jerome reduces the Eucharistic overtones the Lord intended to comprise the central hinge of the Lord’s Prayer.
And the miracle of the Mass down the centuries has been the nuclear energy that fed, inspired, haled and empowered the Church as through it, Christians fed on Christ, and were themselves transformed.
Guiding the Church down the centuries seems to be a business not unlike adjusting the help of a sailing ship; constant corrections and adjustments. Some are to compensate for a change in the weather, and others for human error.
One of the great shocks of our own culture is the discovery from Pew research that about 69 per cent of Catholics in American don’t in fact believe in the miracle of the Mass. They have become <em>de facto</em> Protestant or secularised in their incapacity to believe with their heart what their rationally propagandised minds tell them is impossible.
Given the importance, significance and power of the sacrifice of the Mass it seems to be not unreasonable that our Lord would want to speak to a medieval mystic about creating a feast to rebalance of the life of the church.
The Feast of Corpus Christi found its origin in the prayer life of St Julianna of Liege in the 13th century.
St Julianna was a woman trying to live as a regular canoness at the abbey of Mont-Cornillon, where she had been brought as a child after the death of her parents.
Beginning in 1208 she had a vision which repeated for 20 years, taken first to her spiritual director and then to her bishop.
She saw a full moon with a small gap in it. After trying to stop this recurrence to no avail, she thought she might instead see whether the vision had any greater significance.
In a mystical encounter, Christ is reported to have told her that the moon represented the Church while the gap signified the lack of a feast day that he desired. He commissioned St Juliana with the task of effecting the institution of a feast of his body and blood, a focus of Holy Thursday that was overshadowed by the washing of the feet and the remembrance of the Lord’s Passion.
In the apparitions, Christ wished that the Eucharist, in addition to its daily celebration, would receive special focus with its own feast, as the honour due to it could regularly be tepid or even absent.
Tepid or absent certainly describes the response of much of the Church today.
Having been brought up Anglican and educated with a thorough 20th century education, it was not clear to me how much both my intellectual and religious instincts have been formed by the enlightenment .
I had an interest in the supernatural but one always guarded by a deep empirical scepticism and a fear of being tricked or manipulated.
I used to laugh with everyone else at the realisation that “hocus pocus” the magician’s catchphrase, had its origins in the perversion of the words of the liturgy of the Mass.
I assumed that the miracles of Eucharist liquefaction were some combination of folk religion, superstitious instinct and the probable manipulation by authorities interested in increasing the pilgrim footstep with the associated profits .
I read widely about the Eucharistic miracles in history. But I assumed that it was impossible to distinguish facts from fiction in what appeared to be the overwriting of hagiography, and so remained a sceptic.
What stopped me and my tracks was the Eucharistic miracle of Buenos Aires in 1994.
Every time I explain what the laboratory tests uncovered as they analysed hosts that have started to bleed, I see the same disbelieving incredulous astonishment in the eyes of the people I’m talking to.
The discovery that the Eucharistic hosts that bled contain white blood cells and living heart tissue has such extraordinary ramifications that is difficult to find language pitched as an appropriate level.
It completely changes the relationship between religion and science as people have inherited an educational manipulation steeped and enlightenment presuppositions.
So many of the most eminent scientists, the forefront of discovery were Catholic intellectuals, priests and religious.
The rigorous testing of the medical claims for the miraculous at Lourdes are part of this counter factual narrative of the congruity of science and the Catholic faith.
Blessed Carlo Acutis found his attention drawn and his heart captivated by the Eucharistic miracles which he did all he could to publicise as part of his apostolate to capture the attention and imagination of his own generation (and beyond.)
The Corpus Christi processions that we have just celebrated, as we see them in processions around the world, offer a challenge and a counter weight to the public adoption of the ubiquitous “Pride” marches.
Pride culture encapsulates transgression, hyper-sexuality, hedonism, and rebellion; a refusal to be engage on any other terms that lascivious excess. Corpus Christi processions present the world with the demonstration of one miracle which promises to set off a chain of the miraculous in each human being, rippling through the whole of society.
Corpus Christi is the celebration of the <em>arton ex-ousia</em> - the “bread of total existence” - the bread which nourishes and feeds our whole being; which nourishes our capacity to receive and celebrate the gift of life and share in the life of the Godhead.
Corpus Christi challenges the preoccupation with trans issues, the cult of self-mutilation and sterilisation, and offers a different trans dimension.
Corpus Christi presents the miracle of transubstantiation for the surrounding world, promising a further miracle of the transformation of the human heart; a heart rescued from the weight of failure, guilt and self-suffocation, given new life in forgiveness and true freedom. “When anyone is in Christ, they are a new creation. Behold the old has gone and the new has come,” (2 Cor 5.17)
The darker side of the Reformation found expression in its rage against the Mass, setting out to strip it of the promise of miracle and the Holy Spirit’s capacity to change both bread and the human heart.
Disguised as intellectual reserve, its scepticism over “holy communion” masked another if different celebration of pride; a profound rebellion repudiating the words of Jesus that “this is my body”.
The feast of Corpus Christi is a reminder to the Protestant churches that they allowed themselves to be deceived by the spirit of the age, by pride and hardness of heart, by a kind of rebellion against both the charisms Christ endued his Church with.
Corpus Christi confronts both the pride which has deformed Protestantism and also 20th century hedonistic pride taken to the streets, which celebrates disordered sexuality; and is the antidote to both.
Corpus Christi is the older and better “trans” movement. One that offers life, healing and transformation.
The Catholic processions seen on the streets are the antidote to pride, self-sufficiency, hedonism and anarchic excess.
Perhaps as well as the procession we ought to design and display a flag to go with it.
<em>(Mazur/catholicnews.org.uk)</em>
