Corpus Christi

Today is the Solemnity of Corpus Christi.

As a feast and day of devotion it is one of the high points in the Catholic calendar and in the Church year.

  

Image: Catholic Diocese of Little Rock

 

The Worship of the Lamb

The Ghent altarpiece 

Jan and Hubert van Eyck

Mid-1420s  - 1432

The feast originated two centuries earlier in the same region

Image: Catholic Diocese of Little Rock

Corpus Christi originated as a liturgical celebration in what is now Belgium and was officially established by Pope Urban IV on August 11 1264 in the bull Transiturus. However the Pope died a few weeks later on October 2, and for all that he had commissioned St Thomas Aquinas to compose the propers, the new feast languished. Only a few places observed it. It was not until 1317 when Pope John XXII published a compilation of new papal decrees assembled by his predecessor Pope Clement V in the Clementines that the celebration became widely known and made part of regular liturgical observance. The fact that this was the first feast mandated by the Papacy may have meant that its novelty meant that many thought it only applied in Rome. 

One the 1317 text reached its audience the new feast became not only widely observed but also very popular. So in England the day was marked with processions, religious con fraternities or guilds of the great and the good, as well as more humble members, and the staging of Mystery Plays by the trade guilds.  

Corpus Christi is a quintessentially later medieval feast, a living link to the piety of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries created in the solid foundation of that of the thirteenth century.

Alas, in England the events of the mid-sixteenth century swept that all away, despaired some attempts to continue or revive the plays in the Elizabethan era.

One of the longest established Corpus Christi processions is in the historic city of Toledo, the ecclesiastical capital of Spain. Here one can see, and if you are fortunate enough to be there, no doubt sense the religious milieu not just of late medieval Castile but of late medieval Christendom. Church, city and State combine to celebrate, with the astonishing early sixteenth century shrine for the monstrance being borne through the streets.

That is how religious worship should be confident, devout, traditional.

There is an online introduction to the celebration, linked to promoting visits to this great artistic and cultural centre, at Corpus Christi (Toledo, Spain) 2026

    

The beginning of the Procession 

Image: pillarcatholic.com

 

The Corpus Christi procession in Toledo

 

Image: Corpus Christi on X

There is a quite detailed history of the origins and development of the feast available on Wikipedia at Feast_of_Corpus_Christi

I wish a solemn, holy and joyful feast of Corpus Christi to all my readers