Today’s celebration of Corpus Christ, the Body of Christ, is the feast of the very center and heart of our church, the center and heart of our faith, and the center and heart of our parish, the center and heart of the lives of each of us, Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. In the year 1263 a priest from Prague was on route to Rome making a pilgrimage asking God for help to strengthen his faith since he was having doubts about his vocation. Along the way he stopped in Bolsena 70 miles north of Rome. While celebrating Mass there, as he raised the host during the consecration, the bread turned into flesh and began to bleed. The drops of blood fell onto the small white cloth on the altar, called the corporal. The following year, 1264, Pope Urban IV instituted the feast of the Body and Blood of Jesus, today’s feast, Corpus Christi. The Pope asked St Thomas Aquinas, living at that time, to write hymns for the feast and he wrote two, better known to the older members of our congregation, the Tantum Ergo and O Salutaris. That blood-stained corporal may still be seen in the Basilica of Orvieto north of Rome. Sweetest Jesus, Body and Blood most Holy, be the delight and pleasure of my soul, my strength and salvation in all temptations, my joy and peace in every trial, my light and guide in every word and deed, and my final protection in death. Amen. These beautiful words, a prayer after communion written by St. Thomas Aquinas, are especially fitting on this Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, Corpus Christi, because what we celebrate today, and every Sunday, is not a doctrine, not a ritual, but a Person who is present here with us. Pope St. John Paul II, in his great encyclical on the Eucharist, writes: When the Church celebrates the Eucharist, the memorial of her Lord’s death and resurrection, this central event of salvation [the Lord’s death and resurrection] becomes really present and “the work of our redemption is carried out”. This sacrifice [the Lord’s death] is so decisive for the salvation of the human race that Jesus Christ offered it and returned to the Father only after he had left us a means of sharing in it as if we had been present there — just like St. John was present there, and our Lady, and Mary Magdalene, among others. That is what happens when we come to Mass: We join St. John and Our Lady and the others at Calvary, at the foot of the cross, just as if we had been there ourselves. If we ponder the mystery of the Church, one of the things the Bible tells us about the Church is that we are the Body of Christ, and we are the family of God. Those are the two images in the Bible that I think are the most beautiful descriptions of what the Church is. We are the Body of Christ in the world, and we are also children of God, the family of God, sons and daughters of the Father. Christ’s gift of his Body and Blood in this sacrament, the Eucharist, is a gift beyond gifts, because when we receive Him—His Body and Blood, His Soul and Divinity, the whole Christ— we mysteriously are enabled to become what we receive. In this gift, Christ is fully present, and, in this Presence, He gives Himself to transform us, and to make Himself present in us. As St. Paul says, he is the Head, and we are the members. We are all part of one Body, a mystical Body, and this is what the Eucharist brings about. The Eucharist is the place where God’s power flows into our lives—it is the summit of the Christian life, the high point of our lives as Christians. This is the center and source of our life as Christians, because the Eucharist is Christ, Our Lord and Our Savior, broken and given for all of us for the life of the world.Make the Eucharist the center of your life. This is our food for the journey—the Bread come down from Heaven to help us get to Heaven.