This trip is going to take some explaining so please bear with some important, preliminary details that will help you understand what it was all about…
Thursday 15th was the feast of Corpus Christi in the Vatican City but most other places it is celebrated on the Sunday following the feast of the Trinity (which is celebrated the Sunday following Pentecost).
The feast of Corpus Christi celebrates the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist (Jesus Christ present in Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity under the appearances of bread and wine). This doctrine is difficult to believe in our scientific times but this teaching of the Eucharist is not based on science but rather faith. There are however Eucharistic miracles that have occurred throughout history and the world, investigated through scientific means, in which the consecrated hosts (small pieces of unleavened ‘bread’) have taken on the characteristics of actual flesh and the ‘wine’ has become actual blood.
Bolsena is a place where a Eucharistic miracle took place in 1263. The local legend says that the priest doubted the presence of Christ in the consecrated host and the host bled staining the corporal (a small cloth on the altar) and spilt onto the pavement staining it too. The corporal is kept in Orvieto, a nearby town where the bishop of the diocese lives, and the pavement is kept in Bolsena.
About 20 of us from the North American College were able to celebrate Mass followed by some incredibly impressive processions in both cities of Orvieto and Bolsena. In Orvieto there must have been over two hundred people dressed in Medieval clothing with banners, flags, medieval weapons, long trumpets, and drums that went before us. I have never seen more people, at one time, in ‘tights’ in my life (please see the pictures). At the end of the procession was a priest carrying a monstrance (a vessel used for holding a consecrated host during times of adoration of our Lord in the Eucharist).
In Bolsena the procession was smaller, because it is a smaller city, but they went “all out” by decorating the streets with elaborate designs all made with flowers! It makes sense that they would make this procession through the city something reverent and special since it was for Jesus, not just some piece of bread.
The Church began the feast of Corpus Christi in 1264 but the teaching of the Real Presence began with Jesus. We read in the Gospel of John ch. 6 “Let me solemnly assure you, if you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you…for my flesh is real food and my blood real drink…From this time on, many of his disciples broke away and would not remain in his company any longer”.
Not all his disciples left. Jesus asked the 12 apostles “Do you want to leave me too?” Peter stepped up and replied on their behalf “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe; we are convinced that you are God’s holy one.”
If we believe that Jesus really died and rose from the dead, appearing to the Apostles and other disciples in flesh (remember doubting Thomas and his finger in Christ’s side) but still able to transcend space and time by doing things such as walking through walls, then how is it beyond Him to give Himself to us as food, spiritual food, because we are not cannibals?
Although we find the teaching in Scripture we also believe through Tradition, the handing down of our Faith from the Apostles. One of the first examples can be found by St. Ignatius of Antioch (the 2nd successor of St. Peter the Apostle in Antioch). He wrote to the Church in Smyrna around the year 100 A.D. while he was on his way to Rome as a prisoner to be killed, martyred.
The subject of the letter was in regards to Docetism, a group who believed that Christ only appeared or seemed to have a body, they believed him to be only spiritual. They were trying to influence the Christians in Smyrna, leading them astray from the teaching handed on by St. Peter himself.
St. Ignatius of Antioch wrote to the community: “They (Docetists) refrain from the Eucharist and from prayer because they do not confess that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ”.
|  | 
|
