In 1263 A.D., a German priest named Peter of Prague was afflicted with terrible doubts about Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist. Determined to combat these temptations, he set out on a pilgrimage to Rome. Along the way, in the small town of Bolsena in Italy, as he celebrated Mass, the consecrated Host began to bleed. The elated priest could not finish Mass for his great joy, and wrapped the Host in the bloody corporal cloth. As news spread throughout the town, the townspeople formed a joyous procession to accompany him to neighboring Orvieto, where the Pope resided at the time. Others ran ahead to tell the Pope, who set out to meet the procession with his court and received the Host and Corporal. It was the first Eucharistic procession. The remnants of the miracle are today preserved in the Cathedral of Orvieto and are taken in procession throughout both towns each year. The next year, Pope Urban IV promulgated the Feast of Corpus Christi (the Body of Christ) to the whole Church to celebrate this miracle, and to reinforce belief in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist throughout the Church.

          In many Eucharistic miracles that have happened and been scientifically investigated since, the consecrated Host turned into human flesh is found to be heart muscle. There has always been a strong connection between the Eucharist and the heart of the Lord. This year, we celebrate Corpus Christi as we prepare to consecrate ourselves and our country to our Lord’s Sacred Heart. This devotion to the Sacred Heart began in Eucharistic adoration, during which the Lord appeared to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, asking her to make the devotion to His Sacred Heart known.

In fact, every consecration at every Mass is a Eucharistic miracle, because every time those sacred words are pronounced – “This is my body … this is the chalice of my blood” – the laws of nature are miraculously broken, and one substance is changed into another. Whether we are shown it or not, the Heart of Christ beats in each and every Host – the living Body given to us to adore and receive. It is said that to be a parent is to have your heart walking around out in the world. In the Eucharist, the heart of God, in the sacred humanity of Jesus Christ, is also out in the world, alive.

          The heart is the place of love and friendship. We saw on Holy Thursday this year, that the Eucharist is closely tied to friendship. On the night before He died, on the threshold of the most monumentous events of world history, He emphasized His friendship with His Apostles, with his priests whom he ordained as He consecrated the Eucharist for the first time.

          Friendship necessitates a kind of equality. In a sense, you can only be friends with an equal. Thus, we saw on Trinity Sunday, no pagan deity ever referred to his supplicants as friends. Friendship with God is only possible because of the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, that shared humanity that unites us to the Godhead.

          In the Eucharist, we enter the heart of Christ, and the heart of Christ enters us. So there is no contradiction between the Sacraments and a relationship with God. Any attempt to make one a higher priority than the other is bound to fail. It is the Eucharist that makes friendship with Christ possible, and the Eucharist without friendship with Him is sacrilege. Friendship requires a certain equality. And the friend, the philosophers tell us, is another self.

          Christ pours His heart into the Eucharist. When you eat ordinary food, your body turns it into you, into the muscle fibers and fat deposits that make up your body. But when you consume Christ’s Body and Blood in the Eucharist, It turns you into Him. The Eucharist builds up the Church, because it makes us more deeply what we are by Baptism: members (limbs) of the Body of Christ. The friend is another self.

We can see even more clearly, then, the necessity of the priest for the Eucharist, that there must be someone to stand in the person of Christ, to pour his own heart into the Body of Christ, to give sacrificially his own body in dedication to the Lord. The Eucharist, and the priesthood, are “something given / And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love, / Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.” (T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton V)

There is, in this parish, a beautiful desire in many families to have a son who would be willing to answer the call to the priesthood. A young father told me recently that his family chose to make this their parish because, if their son had a vocation to the priesthood, this is a place that would foster that calling. I can’t think of higher praise for a parish, or a more noble desire for a father.

There is no shortage of vocations, because a “vocation” is a calling, and God has not ceased to call. There is only a shortage of young men who are able and willing to say yes to that call. If you have that same noble desire for your sons, make the Eucharist the center of your family! Come to daily Mass, come to Adoration, come to visit the Lord in the tabernacle, and come to Confession so your children can receive the Lord worthily and truly profit from His Body and Blood. Guard their innocence and make them capable of giving themselves to the Lord and His Church without holding anything back, body and soul.

Brothers and sisters, as I asked you on Holy Thursday, I ask you again: Pray for more priests! Pray for more priests not because we are overworked or spread thin, but because the priesthood is the gateway to Christ’s love present in the Eucharist, and thus through the priesthood, Christ breaks into the world. This is why St. John Vianney could say that the priesthood is the love of the heart of Christ, because the priesthood is inseparable from the Eucharist, from the living, beating Heart of Christ. Pray for more priests because the world is starving for His Heart, for His love. Pray for those whom the Lord is calling, that they will open their hearts to this unique friendship with Him, and be inflamed with desire to lay down their lives to obtain and share with the world the love greater than which no heart contains, present in the Most Holy Eucharist.

The Rev. Royce V. Gregerson

Parish Church of Our Lady of Good Hope, Fort Wayne

Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, A.D. MMXXVI