Corpus Christi

This weekend is the Feast of Corpus Christi, the Body and Blood of Christ - the feast of the Eucharist itself.  I will be celebrating our live streamed Mass, as usual, at 10.30 on Sunday from St Brigid's.

The origins of the Feast go back to around 1200. A certain Juliana in Belgium was encouraging renewed devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, and a Eucharistic Miracle is said to have taken place at Bolsena, north of Rome. Blood dripped onto the corporal, the altar cloth, which was then taken and enshrined in the local large town of Orvieto.  At around the same time the great St Thomas Aquinas, one of our outstanding theologians was also furthering devotion through his writings and hymns.

In Orvieto this all gave rise to a procession where the Sacred Corporal is paraded through the town amid great festivities and pageantry (picture of the beginning of the procession above, note the reliquary being carried through the cathedral doors). I myself took part in the procession in about 1976, bearing the reliquary with three other seminarians for a couple of hundred yards.  Afterwards we repaired to a convent in the town for lunch and as much of the local sweetish white wine as you wanted.  It was a happy day, and the coach back to Rome was strangely quiet, except for  a few snores.

And so the tradition of Corpus Christi processions came into being. Here in Cardiff, a private celebration of the Marquis of Bute in Cardiff Castle in the late nineteenth century was opened to the public and evolved into a huge event involving all the Catholic schools, which survived in some shape or form until 1995. Here is a picture of me with the late Fr Henneberry, parish priest ofSt Francis, Ely, Cardiff where I was assistant at the time, about 1980.