Fr. Kurt Belsole, O.S.B.
May 29, 2013
Today with Evening Prayer I, we begin the celebration of the Solemnity of Corpus Christi, in its full title the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of the Lord; and in a sense we are transported back to Holy Thursday as the Church celebrates once again the solemn commemoration of the institution of the sacrament of the Body and Blood of the Lord.
“Why,” one might ask, “do we have a second feast observing the Lord giving us the Eucharist?” Fundamentally, I believe that the answer lies in the fact that what we commemorate on Holy Thursday is just too much for one day. In a sense, Holy Thursday overflows with grace and blessing too abundant for a single day of celebration. On Holy Thursday, in order of importance, the Church celebrates the giving of the Eucharist, the gift of priesthood, and fraternal service in the washing of the feet. Consequently, the Church today celebrates another feast which focuses specifically on the gift of the Eucharist.
The connection with Holy Thursday is perhaps most evident in the hymn which the Church assigns to Evening Prayer, for both Evening Prayer I and Evening Prayer II, the Pange Lingua including the two final verses that we are most familiar with as the Tantum Ergo sung at Benediction. But as we sing that hymn at Evening Prayer on Corpus Christi, it would be most helpful to recall that we also sing that hymn on Holy Thursday as we process in the transfer of the Holy Eucharist—so closely are these two feasts bound together.
Most likely the Pange Lingua is from the pen of Saint Thomas Aquinas since Pope Urban IV asked him to compose the Office of Corpus Christi when he instituted it in the year 1264. The Pange Lingua is one of the gems of Christian Latin hymnody and remarkable for both the beauty of its melody and the clarity of its dogmatic teaching. Father Matthew Britt, in his book The Hymns of the Breviary, termed it the most beautiful of the great Eucharistic hymns of Saint Thomas, and Father Anselmo Lentini, in his book Te Decet Laus, which provides the text and notes on the hymns of the Liturgy of the Hours as revised after Vatican II, comments that the Pange Lingua made its way into not just several breviaries, but into all of them.
Also as this feast is so characterized by a focus on the Blessed Sacrament and the devotions which accompany it, e.g., Eucharistic Exposition, that it has also appropriately been termed a feast of devotion, and the devotion can be understood in a certain sense in the compositio loci (composition of place). Other devotional practices throughout the liturgical year employ the compositio loci: the Christmas Crib fosters our meditation on the Nativity of the Lord, the Stations of the Cross foster our meditation on the Lord’s Passion, but Eucharistic Exposition on Corpus Christi, in a sense, completes and transcends these. It sets before us not the Nativity nor the Passion, but the very Kingdom of God. With the Lord himself before us in the Blessed Sacrament, the composition of place is of the Kingdom where the Lord reigns triumphant and his People are joined in adoration. Quite properly, the gifts of the Magi are present as well: the gold for the King and the incense for our God, only the myrrh is missing because Christ is risen and dies no more.
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