Today is the great Feast of Corpus Christi. This article, written a long time ago now and slightly revised over the years, is an exhortation to the readers of this site to spend more and more time in adoration before Our Beloved before His Real Presence in the Most Blessed Sacrament if this is at all possible in your area.
Adoration is the first end of prayer, including the perfect prayer that is the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in which Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ becomes Incarnate under the appearances of bread and wine when a men man, uttering mere words over the elements of the earth, calls Him down from Heaven. We must adore God with our whole mind, soul, heart, body and strength. To spend time before the Most Blessed Sacrament in prayer is a foretaste of Heavenly glories.
Our goal in life is to behold the glory of the Beatific Vision of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost for all eternity in the company of Our Lady, Saint Joseph, our Guardian Angels (each of whom beholds the Beatific Vision as he tries to guide us home to Heaven!), our patron saints and all of the members of the Church Triumph, whose ranks we hope and pray will include our dearest and nearest relatives and friends.
We must make time for the foretaste of Heavenly glories by means of profound Eucharistic Adoration in this life is we want to enjoy the glories of Heaven itself for all eternity. There are infused graces that are flooded into the souls of those who spend time in adoration before the Blessed Sacrament, those souls who are conscious of the need to make reparation for their sins as they give thanksgiving to God for all of the favors, both spiritual and temporal, they have received and who recognize the need to petition God for the favors we need, both spiritual temporal, starting with an earnest petition each day that we be given the grace to have a holy and sacramentally-provided-for death.
Our Lord stands ready to send us this infusion of graces through the loving hands of His Most Blessed Mother, who is mystically with us when we pray before her Divine Son’s Real Presence. All we need to do is to arrange our lives in such a way as to make time for prayer before Our Eucharistic King and Lord.
We must, of course, be conscious of our need to get to the Sacrament of Penance on a weekly basis in order that our reception of Our Lord’s Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity in Holy Communion will be worthy and fervent. The frequent, devout and worthy reception of Our Lord in Holy Communion gives strength even to those souls who have been steeped in one sin after another, those souls who have refused to surrender to the devil’s attacks upon them over the years:
And then come, and accuse me, saith the Lord: if your sins be as scarlet, they shall be made as white as snow: and if they be red as crimson, they shall be white as wool. If you be willing, and will hearken to me, you shall eat the good things of the land. (Isaias 1: 18-19.)
We must ask Our Lady on this great feast day of Corpus Christi, which, of course, is celebrated as an Octave in those chapels that use the Missal of Saint Pius V before it was “reformed” by the revolutionary efforts of Annibale Bugnini and Ferdinando Antonelli in the 1950s, to help give us more and more graces to recognize the Most Sacred Heart of her Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, beats for with great love in the Most Blessed Sacrament.
We must ask Our Lady to help us approach the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through her own Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart with such fervor and devotion that we will consider it as a great loss if ever there is a day we are unable to get a true offering of Holy Mass and unable to spend at least some time with her Divine Son, Who is the Prisoner of Love in tabernacles today just as He was the Prisoner of her Virginal and Immaculate Womb from the time of His Incarnation to the day of His Nativity.
We must also thank Our Lord and His Most Blessed Mother for our true bishops and true priests who make it possible for us to have the Sacraments in this time of apostasy and betrayal, remembering to pray that more young men will have the courage to renounce the world and study to become an alter Christus so that he, acting in persona Christi in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, can make Our Lord present in the Most Blessed Sacrament and to bless us with that Most Blessed Sacrament on great feast days such as this one.
Today, May 30, 2024, is also, quite providentially, the sixty-fifth anniversary of making my First Holy Communion at Saint Aloysius Church, Great Neck, New York. I remember the day well. It was sunny spring Saturday in 1959 (it was also Memorial Day as May 30 was this secular observance's fixed date until around 1971) and we were all filled with such great anticipation before Mass and exileration thereafter. Please pray for my fellow first communicants, living and deceased, as well for the souls of the priests (Monsignor Vincent Baldwin, Father James Collins, Father Robert Mason, Father Christopher Huntington) and the Reverend Sisters of Mercy who prepared us for this day of such wonderful joy.
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A blessed Feast of Corpus Christi to you all!
What a mystery of love.
Words fail.
Our Lady of the Most Blessed Sacrament, pray for us.
A new commentary will be published within five to seven minutes.