Corpus Christi: The Original Eucharistic Revival

At the height of his power and prestige in 1215, Pope Innocent III called the Fourth Lateran Council to put forth reforms to root out the weaknesses and wickedness of the clergy.¹ The Council’s canons capture the depth of corruption: they commanded priests and bishops to abstain from gluttony and drunkenness (including not participating in drinking games), avoid taverns (and watching mimes), and refrain from hiring hitmen. Additionally, clergy should not take bribes, wear ostentatious clothing, or decorate churches like a private residence.²

Canon 17 is especially important when considering the cultural context out of which the Feast of Corpus Christi arose. Approximately 50 years before the founding of the Feast in 1264, dissolute prelates:

pass almost half the night in unnecessary feasting and forbidden conversation, not to mention other things, and leaving what is left of the night for sleep, they are barely roused at the dawn chorus of the birds and pass away the entire morning in a continuous state of stupor. There are others who celebrate mass barely four times a year and, what is worse, do not bother to attend; if they happen to be present when it is being celebrated, they flee the silence of the choir and pay attention to conversations of the laity outside and so while they attend to talk that is unnecessary for them, they do not give an attentive ear to the things of God.³

Acts of debauchery and the chronic neglect of the faith meant that bishops were despised for their worldliness, drunken and ignorant clergy were indifferent to the Gospel, and people had little encounter with Jesus in the Eucharist.

To stem the tide, Canon 21 established minimalistic, legalistic, and punitive rules regarding eucharistic participation. If individuals did not go to confession and receive the Eucharist at least once a year at Easter, they would be “barred from entering a church during their lifetime” and “be denied a Christian burial at death.” These coercive measures were part of a strategy to confront Thomas Merton’s simple observation from the biography of St. Lutgarde (1182–1246) that “the fundamental dogmas of the faith were not known.”⁴ It never occurred to the faithful that Christ was “really, physically entering into the very depths of their being.” Jesus “was not real to them — or, if He was, the reality was clouded with confusion and embarrassment and fear. Instead of loving the Holy Communion, they kept away.”⁵

The spiritual vacuum created by clerical corruption was increasingly filled by an oddly persuasive heresy. Merton explains:

There was left a large undefined group of half-educated men gathering in the communes, men with active and curious minds, and souls avid for religious experience, who were ready to fall prey to anyone who appealed to them with new and convincing arguments. In this intellectual half-world were many charlatans, and many sincere but misguided men as well: and the combination of ignorance, desire of truth, intellectual dishonesty, and erroneous consciences bred several great heresies, the worst of which was the Cathari.⁶

Catharism spread rapidly because it was led by uncompromising zealots who influenced others as much by example as by word.

The Cathari (the “pure ones”) were a sect of neo-Manichees who believed there were two supreme beings at the origin of creation, and one of these was Evil. The evil principle created the material world, including the body. The main duty of the believer was to avoid all possible contact with matter, including the bread and wine of the Eucharist.⁷ The Catharist’s spiritual life held a morbid horror of sex and the flesh. Consequently, Cathars did not eat meat or eggs or drink milk because they were defiled by animal generation. According to the Cathari, Christ, the greatest creation, came in appearance only and could never have taken on the flesh because the flesh was filthy. Marriage was a device of the devil; and the elect were free to liberate their souls through a ritual suicide by starvation called Endura that alone could bring man into union with the great spiritual principle of all goodness and truth and light. They were successful in propagating this lunatic way of life because it offered the Cathar a rigorous spirituality that served as an alternative to Catholic corruption. Innocent III was aware of this dynamic and sought to violently eliminate the Cathari.⁸

Re-introducing Jesus in material form was necessary, but difficult, because the Church was otherwise engaged in temporal affairs. All might have been lost had God not inspired the movements of evangelical poverty, led by St. Francis and St. Dominic, who both founded their orders within a few years of the Fourth Lateran Council. But for this story, we turn to a lesser known saint and young Flemish nun who, in 1210, had a vision of the moon with a piece missing.

St. Juliana of Mont Cornillon

St. Juliana of Mont Cornillon grew to be a religious woman in Liège (modern day Belgium) at a time of dislocation and rapid change. The power of the papacy was rapidly running out of steam, and the Church “faced increasingly vociferous challenges to its religious authority and symbolic capital.”⁹ New urban wealth created bitter rivalries between a rising class of urban merchants who began to encroach on privileges once enjoyed only by the nobility. Incessant warfare, including the Crusades, had created a shortage of men of marrying age. The imbalance in the general population created a historically unique rise of religious women in the Low Countries of the thirteenth century. In a country as small as the state of Maine, the Cistercians had fifteen communities of men, but sixty-six communities of religious women.¹⁰

In addition to large numbers of women religious, Liège also contained a large number of béguines, or lay single women who chose to live religious lives of spiritual piety and hard work. The béguines actively served the world through charity, manual labor, teaching, and leading public worship and private devotion. Their initiatives of educating the poor led to remarkable gains in literacy among urban children, and they often “stepped into the breach filled by the shortage of priests.”¹¹ Robert Grosseteste (an English statesman and scholastic philosopher who also served as the Bishop of Lincoln) extolled the virtues of the béguines, proclaiming they occupied a higher rung on the spiritual ladder than Franciscans because they earned their own living rather than begging.

St. Juliana is a child of her time, born near Liège in 1192–93 to wealthy but non-aristocratic parents. She was an extremely bright child who mastered French and Latin at an early age, and by her adolescence had memorized the Psalms, the Song of Songs, and twenty of St. Bernard of Clairvaux’s sermons. In 1210, when Juliana was eighteen and a Norbertine nun, God granted her a vision of a full moon with a fraction missing, which she interpreted through prayer to mean that the moon symbolized the Church, and the missing element symbolized an absence of a feast day for the Eucharist that Christ wanted the faithful to celebrate. Juliana believed Christ had revealed to her the need for a feast that solemnly celebrated the Institution of the Eucharist because during the Last Supper, the Church’s focus was on the washing of the feet and the remembrance of his Passion. The central importance of the Eucharist in the life of faith was being overlooked.

In 1230, Juliana became prioress and communicated this vision to local ecclesiastical leaders, who explained the vision (without disclosing Juliana’s identity) to Jacques of Troyes, archbishop of Liége, who would later become Pope Urban IV.¹² The enthusiasm for the feast was not universal, and Juliana faced bitter opposition, some of which was liturgical. There were those who thought a feast for the Eucharist was redundant and ridiculous because Mass was celebrated every day. These opponents “spared no mercy in their attacks on Juliana.”¹³ Juliana also faced political opposition from a prior who received his office through the simony that the Fourth Lateran Council worked to stamp out. Finally, there were those who opposed Juliana’s strict enforcement of the religious rule of her order. For her efforts, Juliana faced verbal abuse and physical violence; the townspeople of Liège assaulted Juliana’s monastery and destroyed her oratory (twice), trying to destroy the charters of the Feast of Corpus Christi.

God inspired the clever nuns to protect both Juliana’s mission and Juliana herself, and in 1246, Bishop Robert of Thourette, on his deathbed, established the feast for the diocese of Liége on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday to counteract the madness of heretics, specifically the Cathari heresy.¹⁴ On August 11, 1264, Urban IV promulgated the bull Transiturus de hoc mundo establishing the feast for the universal Church on the Thursday after Pentecost.

The Feast of Corpus Christi failed to gain widespread acceptance until the various chapters of the Dominican order began to adopt the feast early in the fourteenth century, and it is fitting that the Dominicans would be responsible for popularizing the feast because it was one of their own, St. Thomas Aquinas, who composed major parts of the feast’s liturgy and provided an explanation of a word the Fourth Lateran Council had used but failed to define: transubstantiation.

Transubstantiation

St. Thomas Aquinas is the name most typically associated with the Feast of Corpus Christi because he provided what the Church of the thirteenth century most desperately needed — a systematic explanation of transubstantiation that would resonate with the intellectual sensibilities of the period. The Eucharist has always been controversial. When Jesus first said, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you,” many disciples rejected these words (John 6:51–60). St. Ignatius of Antioch provides further evidence that the inability to accept the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist persisted in the period of the early Church:

Take note of those who hold heterodox opinions on the grace of Jesus Christ which has come to us, and see how contrary their opinions are to the mind of God. . . . They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer because they do not confess that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ, flesh which suffered for our sins and which that Father, in his goodness, raised up again.¹⁵

The Cathars’ strident rejection of the Eucharist was therefore nothing new, but the thirteenth century needed a new response to emerging questions that were now pressing for answers. Was the Body and Blood of Christ subject to mold? How could Jesus’s entire Body be present? Did biting down on the Eucharist hurt Jesus?

Aquinas’s elaboration on transubstantiation affirms that the presence of Christ’s “true body and blood in this sacrament cannot be detected by sense, nor understanding, but by faith alone.”¹⁶ The Eucharist contains Christ himself in very truth, and Aquinas explained how this truth that cannot be detected by the senses happens spiritually. In Aquinas’ explanation of transubstantiation, everything that exists, exists by participation in God’s being. The words of consecration are not a magical incantation, but a sign of the efficacy of the word of God and the power of the Holy Spirit. Aquinas uses Aristotelian terms in a non-Aristotelian way to show that during the consecration, “the bread is changed into Christ’s body at a deeper level of reality than can be affected in a natural change.”¹⁷ The accidents of bread and wine persist — remain unchanged by the consecration — but they are now participating in God’s being as the Body and Blood of Christ. Transubstantiation takes seriously the patristic fathers’ claim that reality is composed of both earthly and heavenly realities. The real presence is a nonphysical (meaning not chemical), nonempirical (meaning unobservable) presence where teeth cannot hurt Christ and Jesus’s Body is not subject to mold. Transubstantiation is hard to grasp because it does not reflect the way people experience reality. As Salkeld (2019) explains, “It is not so much that we cannot see, as it is that there is simply nothing to see” because “faith is the only way in which we can ‘see’ Christ in the sacrament”¹⁸

The charter for the Feast of Corpus Christi (In Festo Euchariste) describes faith as a way of perceiving similar to how Aquinas describes transubstantiation:

It must be believed that the sacraments are produced by the words of Christ, by whose power they are created beforehand, by his word especially they are produced for the better. All the remaining things which the priest says, or which the group of the chorus sings, are nothing other than praises and thanksgivings, or even supplications, or prayers of the faithful. All things that the Lord wished, he did in heaven and on earth. And because he wished it, it was done. Thus, although it seems to be the form of bread and wine, these things, after consecration, must be believed to be nothing other than the flesh of Christ and his blood.¹⁹

Legacy

By the fourteenth century, Aquinas’ fellow Dominicans would popularize a Feast whose only disadvantage was that it happened once a year.²⁰ The Feast of Corpus Christi became one of the most important highlights of the annual Church calendar because it combined a powerful liturgical service with public processions in a season of good weather. The feast expressed community pride, and the custom of reserving the Blessed Sacrament arose from the Feast, housed in the tabernacle and enhanced in churches by ever more magnificent decoration and canopy work. “The Sacrament” became the communal focus of adoration whenever the faithful wished.²¹

In a relatively short period of two hundred years, the work of St. Juliana and St. Thomas Aquinas reversed the neglect of the Eucharist, transcended the Fourth Lateran’s minimal, legalistic, and punitive prescriptions for eucharistic participation. Adoration remains one of the lasting fruits of their efforts. Pope Benedict XVI, when paying tribute to the life and influence of St Juliana, encourages the faithful to have the same zeal for the Eucharist that St. Juliana and St. Thomas both possessed:

Let us pay frequent visits to the Lord present in the Tabernacle! In gazing in adoration at the consecrated Host, we discover the gift of God’s love, we discover Jesus’ Passion and Cross and likewise his Resurrection. It is precisely through our gazing in adoration that the Lord draws us towards him into his mystery in order to transform us as he transforms the bread and the wine. The Saints never failed to find strength, consolation and joy in the Eucharistic encounter. Let us repeat before the Lord present in the Most Blessed Sacrament the words of the Eucharistic hymn “Adoro te devote”: [Devoutly I adore Thee]: Make me believe ever more in you, “Draw me deeply into faith, / Into Your hope, into Your love.”²²

Conclusion

Much has changed since the founding of the Feast of Corpus Christi. The papacy is no longer the center of moral and political life in the West. The contemporary worldview of scientific materialism does not view matter as evil, as the Cathari did, but as dumb stuff. Jesus’s Incarnation could not have happened, not because sex is evil, but because being born of a virgin defies the physical laws of the universe.

Much has also remained the same. Men and women with active and curious minds are desperate for authentic religious experience. They are crying out, having fallen prey to new and convincing arguments that take them away from the Eucharist. No matter the differences in historical epoch, the Eucharist remains the source of renewal and revitalization for Church and society, and St. Juliana and St. Thomas remain beacons of inspiration.

St. Juliana of Cornillon was one of a number of medieval women who exercised considerable religious influence and authority outside of the official power structure of her time. At great risk to herself, she bravely persisted and convinced the Church of the need for a Eucharistic revival. Her intelligence, gift of prophecy, and devotion to the Eucharist created a lasting impact on public prayer and private devotion quite unlike any other in the Church.

St. Thomas Aquinas reminds us that faith fills all defects. In a disenchanted world largely devoid of the sacramental, transubstantiation posits a presence that is more than symbolic. A supernatural presence proclaims there is a deep structure to the universe, and Aquinas had no qualms saying that Jesus in the Eucharist animated every aspect of his life and gave meaning to his death. He called the Eucharist the “delight and pleasure of my soul, my strength and salvation in all my temptations, my joy and peace in every trial, my light and guide in every deed, and my final protection in death.” St. Thomas would pray when he elevated Jesus in the host, “I trust what God’s own Son has said.”²³ Amen.

The fascinating history of the Feast of Corpus Christi provides hope that even in times of rampant corruption and neglect, Jesus can transform the world when he is placed at the center of spiritual life.