De Omnibus Dubitandum Est.

This blog is subtitled: “It is written,  ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer’; but you are making it a den of robbers.” We had a beautiful Corpus Christi procession on Sunday in Leigh-on-Sea, Deo gratias! The Church was fairly full, but really one would hope that the whole Parish family would turn out to this event. Indeed, Father Kevin has expressed his own sadness that this is not the case in his homilies leading up to the feast. As my wife expressed it, a large part of the congregation is made up of the First Holy Communion families as the children take part in the procession, the rest are the stalwart parishioners. So why is this? The institution of Corpus Christi as a feast resulted from approximately forty years of work on the part of Juliana of Liège, a 13th-century Norbertine canoness, also known as Juliana de Cornillon, born in 1191 or 1192 in Liège, Belgium, a city where there were groups of women d...

The Church was born of the Paschal mystery and thus the Eucharist, the Sacrament of the Paschal mystery, stands at the centre of the Church’s life. ( Ecclesia De Eucharistia , n. 3) For St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274),   The source and summit of the whole Christian life is Christ. So this Sacrament [the Eucharist] perfects the others by joining us to Christ. ( In Sent   IV d.8 q.1 art.1.) The Second Vatican Council reiterates what St. Thomas says: that the Eucharist constitutes “the source and summit of the Christian life”. ( LG 11, c.f . Ecclesia De Eucharistia , n. 1. ) The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, explained four ways in which we encounter Christ in His Church; through the actions of the priest, “His minister”, through the proclamation of His Word and when the Church prays and sings ( c.f. Matt 18:20), but special emphasis is placed on the fact that Christ is present “especially under the Eucharistic species.” ( SC 7, CCC 1373 )...