By JAMES MONTI
Several weeks ago, after attending the Easter Vigil at a nearby seminary, and the emptied chapel had fallen silent, I began to hear the sound of the sacring bell being rung in the sacristy. Puzzled by this, I wondered whether the seminarians were perhaps trying to repair the bell.
But then from the doorway of the sacristy three seminarians emerged, the first vested in a cassock and surplice repeatedly ringing the bell as a second seminarian similarly vested followed behind him carrying a lit candlestick. The two were leading the way for the third seminarian, a transitional deacon just weeks away from his priestly Ordination, carrying the Holy Eucharist in a ciborium wrapped in a humeral veil. They continued down the center aisle and out into the hall outside the chapel.
As the sound of the bell gradually faded away I realized that these seminarians were returning the Blessed Sacrament to the tabernacle of one of the seminary’s other chapels, now that the Easter Triduum had concluded. A few minutes later, I heard the bell once more, again coming from the sacristy, and the same three seminarians emerged, again in a solemn eucharistic procession, simply this time to transfer a ciborium from the sacristy to the tabernacle on the high altar.
Clearly for these young men preparing for the priesthood, the Blessed Sacrament wasn’t just a “thing” in the sacristy to be put back in its place. And acting reverently in the presence of the Most Holy Sacrament wasn’t just a “performance” to be carried out when the church was filled with people — it has become for them a way of life.
There is a very beautiful and simple logic in how a believing Catholic responds to the Real Presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist: We profess, “It is the Lord!” (John 21:7), and act accordingly. In a 2004 letter to the world’s priests, Pope St. John Paul II observed:
“Before this extraordinary reality we find ourselves amazed and overwhelmed, so deep is the humility by which God ‘stoops’ in order to unite himself with man! If we feel moved before the Christmas crib, when we contemplate the Incarnation of the Word, what must we feel before the altar where, by the poor hands of the priest, Christ makes his Sacrifice present in time? We can only fall to our knees and silently adore this supreme mystery of faith” (Letter to Priests for Holy Thursday 2004, March 28, 2004, n. 2).
This falling to our knees before Christ in the Holy Eucharist can take place in the utmost intimacy of a deserted church, as it did for St. John Vianney when as the newly appointed Curé of Ars he would rise in the dead of night to go before the tabernacle and pray for the people entrusted to his spiritual care.
But it can also take place under the midday brilliance of a summer sky in the company of hundreds when our Lord goes forth from His sanctuary and takes to the streets in that extraordinary rite we call a Corpus Christi procession. This ceremonial passage of the Blessed Sacrament through the city and countryside of our daily lives is a public testament to our Lord’s dominion over all of creation.
The earliest recorded Corpus Christi procession, that of St. Gereon Church in Cologne, Germany (c. 1270), was conducted for the stated purpose “that the Lord, because of the commemoration and reverencing of his most holy Body, may vouchsafe to turn away every evil both from us and from our church” (Latin text in Fr. Peter Browe, SJ, Textus antiqui de festo Corporis Christi, Aschendorff, 1934, pp. 45-46). During the 14th century the custom of the Corpus Christi procession spread across Western Europe.
In the procession’s birthplace, Germany, as well as in neighboring Poland, beginning in the 15th century, the format of the procession assumed a fourfold arrangement, with four stations along the route, where the procession would pause for prayers, a Gospel reading, and in many cases benediction. While this innovation in the rite had the practical advantage of giving the priest a much-needed rest in the course of carrying a heavy monstrance along a sometimes lengthy route on a hot summer’s day, the four stations were first and foremost a richly symbolic expression of the advancement of the Kingdom of God to the ends of the Earth.
As the Polish Cardinal Stanislaus Hosius (Stanislaw Hozjusz; +1579) explains in his work Confessio Catholicae fidei Christiana (chapter 8), “…the four beginnings of the Gospels are sung toward the four corners of the world, that this Gospel of the Cross and death of Christ might be represented as having been preached openly in all quarters of the world by the Apostles and their successors” (Opera omnia, 1584, vol. 1, p. 10).
The catastrophic splintering of Western Christianity wrought by the Protestant Reformation put a tragic end to the Corpus Christi procession across much of 16th-century Germany. Yet it was in the cities of a re-emerging German Catholicism in the late 1500s that a new and more vigorous form of the procession took shape. These processions arose as a militant reaffirmation of the Real Presence of God Incarnate in the Eucharist to counter Protestant denials of the very nature of the sacrament and obscene acts of desecration committed by fanatics seeking to impose their false theology upon Catholics.
These were to be first-class civic events, for which “all ranks of men might be assembled, who would demonstrate and prove their true and Catholic faith even by an external rite” (Rituum ecclesiasticorum Bambergensium, part 2, 1578, p. 645).
Almost simultaneously the rudiments of this more highly developed rite appeared for the first time in the German liturgical books of Bamburg (1578) and Augsburg (1580). It was also during this period that liturgical books began to supply specific and varied Collects to be recited at the four stations of the procession, beginning with a 1575 ritual of Salzburg, Austria (Libri Agendorum, part 2, pp. 492-494).
By 1609 the ceremonies of Corpus Christi in the Tirolian Diocese of Brixen (now Bressanone, Italy) had grown into an effusion of meticulously directed rites that began with vespers on the eve of the great feast day, recited before the Blessed Sacrament exposed in a monstrance on the high altar of a church adorned with foliage, flowers, and candles. The priest would impart benediction three times, before, during and after vespers respectively, with multiple incensations of the Holy Eucharist interspersed.
For the procession on the day of Corpus Christi, the route was to be adorned lavishly:
“(1.) All the ways and streets, through which the Venerable Sacrament shall be carried, should be cleaned and adorned with trees, foliage, flowers, grass, hangings, and other ornaments. (2.) In four distinct places, toward the four zones of the world, facing East, West, South, and North, should be erected four altars from wood, with canopies or roofs beautifully adorned, upon which can be placed the monstrance, while the beginnings of the four Gospels are sung” (Sacerdotale Brixinensis, 1609, p. 147).
The order of procession is described to the last detail:
“(1.) The standard is carried with the cross, between two candlesticks with lit candles. (2.) A line of girls follows, two by two. (3.) Another standard with its cross. (4.) A line of boys with rose wreaths, two by two. (5.) Confraternities of laymen, with their insignia, standards, a cross, lights. (6.) Religious according to the order of their antiquity, with their cross and ecclesiastical vestments. (7.) The choir with its cross. (8.) The clergy clothed in sacred vestments, with their cross, and lights. (9.) Boys clothed in the likeness of angels, with cymbals, the mysteries and arms of the Lord’s Passion, baskets of roses, two by two. (10.) Four deacons two by two.
“(11.) A thurifer continually incensing the Venerable Sacrament with his companion carrying incense in a little boat. (12.) The canopy, under which is the priest with the Venerable Sacrament, led on each side by the principal men of the place. (13.) On each side of the canopy, several men with burning torches. (14.) Behind the canopy the master of ceremonies with his companion, or two clerics vested in surplices, for the need (assistance) of the priest and the running of the procession. (15.) The secular magistrate, noblemen, citizens, people, all two by two. (16.) An assemblage of women, two by two” (ibid., pp. 148-149).
During the procession the master of ceremonies was occasionally to run back and forth along the side, seeing to it that the participants were keeping together and walking at a steady and unhurried pace. Benediction was imparted at each of the four altars, and a fifth and final time when the procession returned to the church.
The extremely rich rubrics of the Brixen Corpus Christi procession quickly spread to nearby dioceses, appearing soon afterward with minimal changes in the German liturgical books of Augsburg (1612) and Freising (1625), and later at Salzburg, Austria (1640, albeit with only two benedictions — at the fourth station and in the church), and at Regensburg, Germany (1662).
In his 1857 painting The Blessing of the Wheat in the Artois, Jules Breton (+1906) depicts the passage of a long eucharistic procession through the wheat fields in the French countryside, as those along the way spontaneously fall to their knees before the Blessed Sacrament carried by the parish priest beneath a gold-cloth canopy.
May we never hesitate to offer God our homage wherever and whenever He comes to us in this truly great Sacrament of Divine Love.
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