Thursday was the 71st anniversary of my First Holy Communion. While I can’t claim to remember everything about that day, I do remember some of the highlights. First of all, I remember all the rehearsals we had beforehand. The Dominican Sisters were perfectionists when it came to such things, and everything was going to go just so!
Finally, the big day dawned. Dressed up in the prescribed outfit, I was up and out early - to the safety of the school (where there was no danger of anyone inadvertently drinking some water and thus breaking the fast). Finally, we all lined up, and all those rehearsals paid off as we walked in absolutely perfect formation into the church at exactly 8:00 a.m. It was a solemn Mass, with deacon and subdeacon. When the big moment came, we walked two by two up the marble sanctuary to kneel before the main altar, before returning to my pew by the Epistle side, as rehearsed.
Of course, what most of us remember best about our First Communion Day, is all the frills: the outfits, the photos, the presents. As for the actual act of Communion itself, it may perhaps stand out less because it merges in memory with so many other subsequent trips to the altar.
And that may be as it should be! When I was a pastor, I used to tell First Communicants on their big day that the key word to remember was first – it was the first time they would do what (hopefully) they were going to do many more times, over and over again, all the rest of their lives.
Today the Church celebrates the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, the feast commonly called Corpus Christi. The meaning and spirit of this festival is succinctly summarized in the familiar collect, composed for the occasion by the great 13th-century Dominican Doctor of the Church Saint Thomas Aquinas.: O God, who in this wonderful Sacrament have left us a memorial of your Passion, grant us, we pray, so to revere the sacred mysteries of your Body and Blood that we always experience in ourselves the fruits of your redemption.
The prayer reminds us that the sacrament of the Eucharist is intimately connected with Jesus’ Passion, Death, and Resurrection. and calls on us to remember, revere, and venerate the sacred mysteries of Christ’s Body and Blood. Hence, the special traditions of Eucharistic veneration associated with today – the traditional outdoor procession, for example, which elaborately marks this occasion in many places, such as the procession led by Pope Leo in Madrid, Spain, this weekend. One particular tradition in some countries is for the procession to stop at four altars erected along the way, at each of which is read the beginning of one of the four gospels before Benediction is given. It is a symbolic way of suggesting that the entire story can be summed up in some sense in the sacrament of the Eucharist.
This annual festival and our devotion to the Eucharist invite us to a fuller, more conscious, and more active participation in the body of Christ, the Church, by believing firmly, celebrating devoutly, and living intensely Christ’s Eucharistic Presence given us for the life of the world.
In the famous words of Saint Thomas Aquinas, which the Church recites this evening at Vespers: How holy this feast, in which Christ is our food; his Passion is recalled; grace fills our hearts, and we receive a pledge of the glory to come.
Homily for the Solemnity of Corpus Christi, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, June 7, 2026.
