Corpus Christi - That's what we used to call today's solemnity, now known as the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ. It's the Catholic Church's celebration of one of the seminal doctrines of our faith, known as Transubstantiation. This scholastic word, "transubstantiation," captures a core belief we have that at the Eucharist the bread and wine become the very body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ. In Chapter 6 of John's Gospel Jesus says, "Amen, Amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life in you, . . for my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink." (John 6: 53, 55) Many of those who were following Jesus found this doctrine too difficult to accept and stopped following him. He didn't stop them to tell them that they must have misunderstood him. If they would not accept this teaching, he just let them go.
About a hundred and twenty years after the death and resurrection of Jesus, St. Justin Martyr lays out the very same belief that we have today. In describing what happens at the Eucharist in his day, he says, "We do not consume the Eucharistic bread and wine as if it were ordinary food and drink, for we have been taught that as Jesus Christ our Savior became a man of flesh and blood by the power of the Word of God, so also the food that our flesh and blood assimilates for its nourishment becomes the flesh and blood of the incarnate Jesus by the power of his own words contained in the prayer of thanksgiving [i.e. the Eucharistic Prayer].
About 800 years ago St. Thomas Aquinas gave the terminology for understanding this belief of ours, a belief we have held from the very "get-go" of the Church's history. He also wrote a hymn that has been a favorite ever since then. It's the Pange Lingua. Here is a different rendition than the more common one many are familiar with. This one was composed by the Spaniard, Tomás Luis de Victoria (1548-1611). Enjoy.
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