FEAST OF CORPUS CHRISTI PRAYER
Lord Jesus, we faithfully and fervently commemorate
at every Holy Mass held in the Church,
Your mandate to your apostles,
when on the evening before your death
You instituted the Eucharist
and commissioned
Your disciples to do the same,
in remembrance of You.
In doing so, the Church takes literally the words
that You spoke over bread and wine, “This is my body… this is my blood.”
This faith in your literal presence
in the transformed gifts of bread and wine
has become ever stronger in the history of the Church,
so that it is solemnly defined that
in the Most Blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist your body and blood
together with your soul and divinity,
and therefore the whole Christ,
are truly, and substantially contained.
On Corpus Christi, the whole Church publicly confesses your words:
‘I am the living bread that came down from heaven;
whoever eats this bread will live forever;
and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world’.
In the transformed bread, the world sees the beginning
of a transformation that has already begun
and will one day fully encompass all that has been created,
in a new heaven and a new earth.
May this feast day of Corpus Christi help us all to remember
that in the Eucharist in Catholicism,
you are not a symbol, but that you are God and Man,
the Second Person of the Trinity,
the same yesterday, today and forever.
You allowed yourself to be put to death at Calvary
so that we may have Eternal Life with you in Heaven,
by the ongoing process of sanctification here on earth,
that we might grow in grace and holiness,
in your Holy Name.
Amen
