06/24/01

Corpus Christi: the parish, the feast and the doctrine

On June 17, the feast of Corpus Christi, I was part of the 100th anniversary celebrations of Corpus Christi parish, whose buildings fill the block at 4900 South Martin Luther King Drive. They are beautiful buildings, put up by the Irish Catholics who first peopled the neighborhood and then finally paid for by the African-American Catholics who began to live in the neighborhood about 70 years ago. The Franciscan friars and sisters have ministered to the parish for many decades.

When I was a small boy in the late 1940s, my mother took me to Corpus Christi to see the living Stations of the Cross during Lent. She said they were the most beautiful stations I would ever see anywhere, and they were. It was a long way, in distance and time, from the Northwest Side to Corpus Christi; but it was a longer way culturally and racially. We went because we knew our faith was the same faith, and that was enough.

It should still be enough to bring us together, especially as we celebrate the Feast of the Body and Blood of the Lord. The Eucharist is the sacrament of our unity in Christ. The words that transform bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ are ordinary words with extraordinary, miraculous effect. The words of the sacrament transform, unite, heal. But words can also destroy, divide, kill.

Because the words explaining the Eucharist as sacrifice, sacrament and banquet are central to our faith, the U.S. bishops at our annual Spring meeting June 13-15 debated and approved a statement on the real presence of Jesus Christ in the Sacrament of the Eucharist. I hope it will be widely used as a teaching document in the Archdiocese. The bishops also approved a document governing the receiving of Holy Communion under the forms of both bread and wine and passed our country’s adaptation of the introduction to the Roman Missal. The revised translation of the Roman Missal, which will include this introduction, has not yet been approved by the Holy See. In the next year, the Archdiocesan Office for Divine Worship will help us work our way through all these matters so that, as an Archdiocese, our celebration of the Eucharist and other sacraments will be consistent with the directions of the Church. In fact, the new directions are not greatly different from the instructions in the present introduction to the Roman Missal.

At the end of the centennial Mass at Corpus Christi parish, we took the Blessed Sacrament in procession down Martin Luther King Drive and back to the front of the Church for benediction. Because Christ, who is made present in the liturgical action, remains present in the Eucharist under the form of bread, He is adored in the Blessed Sacrament even outside of Mass. Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament is one form of such adoration, as are visits to the Blessed Sacrament. A growing number of churches in the Archdiocese have arranged access to chapels where the Blessed Sacrament is exposed on particular days or at special times or even perpetually. The Church encourages such devotion, because it helps to make us a holy people, one in Christ. The Pope John Paul II Eucharistic Adoration Society (7030 W. 63rd St., Chicago, IL 60638; 773-586-7809) distributes a book which covers all the practical difficulties which arise in establishing Eucharistic adoration in a parish.

During my visit to Poland last month, when I thanked those bishops and families who have sent priests to serve in the Archdiocese of Chicago in recent years, each bishop showed me his cathedral. In a Poland once again free, cathedrals and other churches are being rebuilt and refurbished, and the bishops are rightly proud of this work. In the Cathedral of Wroclaw, there is a particularly beautiful Blessed Sacrament chapel which presents in sculpture, painting and architecture what we believe about the presence of Christ through this sacrament. The Blessed Sacrament is reserved in a cask modeled after the description of the Ark of the Covenant, which contained the presence of God among his chosen people on the journey to the promised land and was finally brought by King David into Jerusalem (II Samuel 6). On each side of the tabernacle, fashioned as an Ark, are statues of Moses and Aaron. Moses governed the people, and Aaron offered sacrifice for them as their priest. The intent of the arrangement is clear: God has dwelt with His people, has been present to them, in the first covenant; and He has found a unique way to be present to them, through Christ, shepherd and priest, in the new covenant.

On the side walls of the chapel in the Wroclaw Cathedral, two paintings face each other. One depicts Jesus at the Last Supper; the other shows Melchizedek, King of Salem, offering bread and wine before Abraham (Genesis 14: 18-20). Again, the meaning is clear: the priesthood instituted at the Last Supper reaches back behind Aaron to Abraham and, further back, to the covenant with Noah. It is not a continuation of the Levitical priesthood but is more universal in its antecedents and origin.

Finally, the chapel contains four doors. Above each is a sculpture of one of the four last things: death, judgment, heaven and hell. Through the doors of death and judgement we pass, if we have not deliberately destroyed our relationship to Christ by mortal sin, to the eternal banquet which begins here in the Eucharistic banquet, the sacrifice of the Mass.

A picture is worth a thousand words, they say. For those who will read neither current statements from the bishops nor the introduction to the Roman Missal, a visit to such a chapel teaches what we believe about the Sacrament of the Altar. The Eucharist is the sacrament of unity. If we are divided, we are not truly a Eucharistic people. Whenever we work for unity, our faith in our Eucharistic Lord is strengthened. God bless you.

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