The Holy Eucharist - Corpus Christi

We just celebrated the Feast of Corpus Christi, a great celebration of the Supreme Sacrament -- the Sacrament of Our Lord and Savior.   The Holy Eucharist – that most incomprehensible gift of love from Jesus – is vitally important to salvation.  As events bring us closer to the End of the End Times, the Holy Eucharist is essential to surviving the tribulations and persecutions and to our journey towards Eternity with the Thrice Holy God.    

St. John Bosco had a dream in which he saw the great persecution of the Church represented as a ship beset by storms and enemy warships.  The ship / Church endured because the Pope secured the ship to twin columns representing the Holy Eucharist and the Blessed Mother.  We do well to do likewise.  Embrace the Eucharist and our Blessed Mother in the storms of these Last Days.

In his encyclical Ecclesia de Eucharistia,  St. Pope John Paul II writes, “In the humble signs of bread and wine, changed into his body and blood, Christ walks beside us as our strength and our food for the journey, and he enables us to become, for everyone, witnesses of hope.”  (See http://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_20030417_eccl-de-euch.html

At the Mass concluding World Youth Day 1997 in Paris, France, St. Pope John Paul II expounded on the importance of the Eucharist.  He said, 

"Rabbi, where are you staying?". Each day the Church responds: Christ is present in the Eucharist [emphasis in original], in the sacrament of his death and resurrection. In and through the Eucharist, you acknowledge the dwelling-place of the living God in human history. For the Eucharist is the sacrament of the love which conquers death; it is the sacrament of the Covenant, pure gift of love for the reconciliation of all humanity. It is the gift of the real presence of Jesus the Redeemer, in the bread which is his body given up for us, in the wine which is his blood poured out for all.

(See http://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/homilies/1997/documents/hf_jp-ii_hom_19970824_youth-paris.html )

In his first Homily celebrating the Feast of Corpus Christi, our new Supreme Pontiff Pope Leo XIV said:

By offering himself completely, the crucified and risen Lord delivers himself into our hands, and we realize that we were made to partake of God. Our hungry nature bears the mark of a need that is satisfied by the grace of the Eucharist. As Saint     Augustine writes, Christ is truly “panis qui reficit, et non deficit; panis qui sumi potest, consumi non potest” (Serm. 130, 2): he is bread that restores and does not run short; bread that can be eaten but not exhausted. The Eucharist, in fact, is the true, real, and substantial presence of the Saviour (cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1413), who transforms bread into himself in order to transform us into himself. Living and life-giving, the Corpus Domini makes us, the Church herself, the Body of the Lord.

(See https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/homilies/2025/documents/20250622-omelia-corpus-domini.html )

In his book Calvary and the Mass, the Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen wrote: 

Communion then is first of all the receiving of Divine Life, a life to which we are no 

more entitled than marble is entitled to blooming.  It is a pure gift of an all-merciful

God who so loved us that He willed to be united with us, not in the bonds of flesh, 

But in the ineffable bonds of the Spirit where love knows no satiety, but only rapture and joy. (68).

We ought to avail ourselves of this great gift from Heaven, this gift of Christ Himself, as often as possible.  In the Eucharist, Christ holds nothing back from us.  We should hold nothing back from him.