Body and Blood of Christ 2025
Genesis 14:18-20; 1Cor 11:23-26; Luke 9:11-17
Sister Michaela remembers everything. Among other things, Sister remembers a homily which I delivered on this Feast in Our Lady’s High School, Lancaster, forty years ago, when she was a member of Sixth Form.
I remember it too. At the time, the Assembly Hall, where Mass was taking place, was so arranged that, as I stood at the lectern, I was looking up in the direction of Lancaster Castle where fifteen men, both priests and laypeople, had been tried and imprisoned before being dragged on hurdles through the streets to the Low Moor, where they were hanged, drawn, and quartered. I think that I am correct in saying that Lancaster can count more martyrs than anywhere else in England, outside London.
Why were they martyred? Purely and simply, they were martyred for the Mass. The case of the Elizabethan and Jacobean martyrs was, to a degree, different from that of their predecessors such as Thomas More and John Fisher, who suffered under Henry VIII. For the Henrician martyrs, the principal issue was the authority of the Pope: for their successors, it was the survival of the Mass on the island of Great Britain.
All of this, I brought into my homily. I began by noting that some people complained that Mass was “boring”. After pointing out the suffering and horrendous deaths which the Lancaster martyrs and others throughout the country had been prepared to suffer to keep the Mass in existence, I asked, somewhat more dramatically than is my wont, “How the hang can that be boring (pun intended)?”
Yes of course we have all sat through sloppily prepared liturgies, tedious homilies, and the self-advertisement of over chatty or outwardly pious priests. But in the last analysis, so what? There is an old adage: “You don’t go to Mass for the priest”. Conversely, you don’t stay away from Mass for the priest. You go to Mass—I go to Mass—to encounter the living God.
Whatever the quality or the style of the liturgy, Jesus is there in the gathering of His people, in the word proclaimed, in the person of the priest—not in himself but in his standing in the place of Christ—and above all in the sacrament and sacrifice of the Lamb of God, who makes present in every Mass his once and perfect sacrifice offered on Calvary. That is true whether it be a coffee table Mass in a student room, solemn High Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica, or anything between.
Some time ago, I read a letter in the Tablet from a gentleman who claimed that he had followed Mass on line during the pandemic, and that he would continue to do so, even though public Mass had been restored, because the homilies and the liturgy were better than in his home parish. I had to check the date to make sure that this wasn’t 1st April.
What on earth (or in heaven) did this man consider the Mass to be—the Royal Variety Performance, or what? Did the presence of Christ in the gathered community—together, not on the other side of a television screen—mean nothing to him? Or did he consider himself superior to the great grey unwashed collection of plebs who formed the Body of Christ in his parish?
Above all, how was he to receive the Body and Blood of Christ, the focus of today’s Feast, through a TV screen? Seemingly, that Body and Blood, which his ancestors and ours had risked their lives to offer and receive as they crept secretly to Mass “in silent farm, on lonely hill” (Ronald Knox) were less important than his own intellectual and aesthetic superiority. Apparently, he cared nothing for Jesus’ words “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and of earth, for hiding these things from the learned and the clever, and revealing them to mere children”. He was one of the “learned and the clever”, and the anawim , the Poor of the Lord, with their second rate liturgy, could go hang. Arrogance of that sort really takes some beating.
I was once asked whether, if I had been alive at the time of the English Reformation, I would have conformed to the new order of things. Making all due allowance for my innate cowardice and fear of pain and hardship, I replied that I hoped not, as I could not live without the Body and Blood of Christ, which the “reformed” order could not offer me. I actually suspect that sheer bloody mindedness might have supplied what courage lacked, and that I would have refused conformity because I am by nature downright contrary, and ever since my schooldays have resented unjust and arbitrary authority.
Nevertheless, I do hope that my motivation might have risen higher, that I would always have been driven, that I always will be driven, by hunger and thirst for the Body and Blood of Christ, which are vital, beyond our liturgical preferences and our intellectual or aesthetic sensibilities.
