Celebrating the Universal Church: Corpus Christi and the Creed

This week we are in our third week of our homily series based on the Nicene Creed. As we mentioned, this year we are celebrating the 1700th anniversary of the start of the Council that produced the Creed we recite each Sunday, on other Solemnities (like Christmas, the Immaculate Conception, All Saints Day, etc.), and at Baptisms. As it is something we recite so often, this is a great opportunity to reflect more deeply on the 224 words of the Creed. 

This Sunday, in addition to our homily series, we celebrate the fourth of five Sundays that have specific designations. We began with acknowledging the Ascension of Our Lord Jesus, then celebrated Pentecost or the coming of the Holy Spirit and the birth of the Church, last week was Trinity Sunday, and this week we celebrate the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Jesus or what is traditionally known as the Feast of Corpus Christi. In regard to the Nicene Creed we are appropriately looking at the third Mark of the Catholic Church that we profess in the Creed, the notion that the Church is Catholic.

Bishop Robert Barron in his book, What Christians Believe, writes about the idea of the Church being Catholic. He begins by reminding the reader that in referring to the Church as Catholic is a statement about the sense of universality that is a charism of the Church. That the Church cannot be limited to just one nation, ethnic group, language of people, or socio-economic group. For this would be opposed to everything Jesus stood for and was the very reason Saint Paul allowed himself to be imprisoned. He goes on to beautifully write, “it (the Church) is most especially the place where the tensions produced by these divisions are actively overcome.”

But the universal nature of the Church is not only in reference to the people who make up the Church, but also what is found within the Church, i.e. the Sacraments, liturgy, Scripture, good works, Mary and the Saints, Traditions, Papal authority, etc. Bishop Barron makes reference to a mentor of his, who he states would say, “we never throw anything away.”

And it is such that we celebrate this Sunday with the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Jesus. We honor what makes us distinctly Catholic, our fundamental belief in the true presence of Jesus’ Body and Blood in the Eucharist. This is one of the only teachings that is clearly identified in all four of the Gospels (including Saint Luke’s telling of the feeding of 5000 which we hear in this week’s Gospel) and written about by Saint Paul, in his letter to the Corinthians which we also heard this week in the second reading. It is what members of the early church believed and preached. It is a doctrine that the Catholic Church has never disputed and defended vigorously, even as other Christian denominations have swayed from this teaching. We are universal in the sense that we have held tightly to this belief. 

And there are traditions that while the Church may have not always emphasized, they were not done away with. So we enjoy a Eucharistic procession after the 10:30 Mass this Sunday. The procession includes incense, altar servers, a large canopy, prayers like the Rosary, Chaplet of Divine Mercy and Divine Praises, hymns in English and Latin, and of course priests and deacons carrying a monstrance that holds the Body of Christ. All of this is after celebrating the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, as it has been done for hundreds of years. For this is the principle liturgy of the universal Church in which we profess our faith and believe in.

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