by Bishop Thomas Gumbleton
Pax Christi USA Teacher of Peace
Later this afternoon, as Father [Don] Walker announced last Sunday, this parish, together with Our Lady of Grace will have a procession with the Blessed Sacrament and celebrate Benediction at the end of that procession. Many of us, I’m sure, remember days long ago when this was very common: Corpus Christi, the Peace of the Body and Blood of Jesus, where we have outdoor procession and we walked around in the streets, publicly acclaiming our belief that that piece of bread was really and truly the body and blood of the Son of God.
That, of course, is a very good thing — that we acknowledge our belief in what we call the “real presence.” But if we listen to the Scriptures today, and even the eucharistic prayer that we use to spring back and remember ways that happened at the Last Supper, we discover that the Blessed Sacrament, what we celebrate today, is not just a sacrament in which we focus on the presence of Jesus in our midst under the form of bread. It’s much more than that.
If we really listen to the Scriptures and to our eucharistic prayer, we discover that the Blessed Sacrament is something you do: “Do this in memory of me,” Jesus said at the Last Supper; “do this.” So it isn’t just a matter of worshipping Jesus, the Son of God, under the Eucharistic form of bread and wine, no, it’s taking seriously his words, “Do this in memory of me.”…