This week the Church celebrates the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ - Corpus Christi - the feast in which faith contemplates “Jesus, bread broken and given for each one of us”, as the Holy Father recalled last Wednesday. It is a solemnity that does not remain within the recollection of the altar, but has always sought the streets: because its proper gesture, the one that distinguishes it from every other feast, is the procession with the Blessed Sacrament.
The procession is the liturgy leaving its walls. The consecrated Host, raised in the monstrance beneath the canopy, passes through the streets of the city while the people sing and pray: no longer the faithful entering the church, but the temple - the Body of Christ - entering homes, squares, workplaces and the daily lives of men and women. It is, in the fullest sense, a public profession of faith: to declare openly, before everyone, that this bread is not an empty symbol but a Real Presence.
The origins
It began in the thirteenth century through the insistence of a mystic, Juliana of Liège, and was extended to the universal Church by Urban IV with the bull Transiturus de hoc mundo of 11 August 1264 - according to tradition, in the wake of the Eucharistic miracle of Bolsena the previous year, whose relics are still kept in Orvieto Cathedral. For the new solemnity, Thomas Aquinas composed the office and the hymns that still resound in our churches today: the Pange lingua, with its Tantum ergo, and the sequence Lauda Sion Salvatorem.
The procession, however, was not envisaged at the outset. It spread spontaneously between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, until it became one of the most imposing public manifestations of medieval Christendom. And when, at the height of the Protestant rupture, the Real Presence was called into question, the Council of Trent wanted that very procession to become the public “triumph” of Eucharistic truth: to carry the Host through the streets meant professing, before everyone, what others rejected. From then on, the gesture shaped both landscape and culture: the small street altars decorated at doorways, and - in Italy - the infiorate, which turn paving stones into carpets of petals, from Genzano to Spello.
The Pontiff’s invitation
It is to this heritage that Leo XIV wished to recall the faithful. At this Wednesday’s General Audience, greeting the Italian pilgrims, the Pope recalled that “an expression of popular Eucharistic piety are the processions with the Blessed Sacrament that take place in the streets of so many towns and villages”, and added an encouragement that sounds almost like a mandate: “to keep alive this beautiful manifestation of public witness to the faith”. Simple words, yet far from self-evident at a time when not a few - even among pastors - look upon the procession as a relic of the past, something to be tolerated rather than promoted.
This is not the first time the Pontiff has spoken in support of this gesture. Already at the Angelus for the Solemnity of Corpus Christi, on 22 June, he had recalled that in the Eucharist “God unites himself to us” and invites us to unite ourselves to him, and had pointed to the celebration as a “luminous sign” of the commitment to be “bearers of communion and peace for one another”. The procession, then, not as spectacle, but as a path of charity.
Here, perhaps, lies the deepest reason for the Pope’s invitation. To carry the Body of Christ through the streets is not an act of nostalgia, but of courage: it is to say, today as eight centuries ago, that faith has no need to hide. In a distracted and hurried age, to rediscover the beauty of the procession - the chant, the incense, the petals, the silence of adoration - means fully receiving what Leo XIV is asking: that this “beautiful manifestation” should not be allowed to fade away, but be safeguarded, valued and restored to the faithful for what it is: the oldest and most living way of accompanying God in the midst of men and women.
Fr. V.B.
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