4 JUNE – SAINT FRANCIS CARACCIOLO (Confessor)

Ascanio Caracciolo was born in the town of Santa Maria della Villa in the Abruzzi in 1563. From his earliest years he showed great marks of piety. When he was a young man, he had a severe illness and on his recovery determined to serve God and give himself up to the service of his neighbour. He went to himself to Naples where he was ordained priest, enrolled himself in a devout confraternity, and gave himself up to contemplation and the gaining of souls to God, in which work he showed himself an unwearied comforter to such persons as were condemned to death.

It came to pass that those two great servants of God, John Augustine Adomo and Fabricius Caracciolo wrote a letter to a certain person in which they exhorted him to found a new religious Institute. But by mistake it was delivered to Francis Caracciolo. The newness of the idea, and the strange ways of God’s Providence took possession of his mind, and he joyfully added himself to their company. They withdrew themselves to the wilderness of the Camaldolese, and there concerted the rules of the new Order. Then they went to Rome and obtained the confirmation of their work from Pope Sixtus V, who wished that they should be called Minor Clerks Regular, since they added to the three accustomed vows a fourth binding themselves not to seek preferment in the Church.

Having made his solemn profession, Ascanio, moved by the special love and devotion he had to the holy Francis of Assisi, took the name of Francis. After two years John Adorno died and Francis was made the head of the Order against his will. In this office he gave a brilliant example of all virtues. Devoted to the prosperity of the Institute, he earnestly sought the blessing of God on it by assiduous prayer, tears and constant maceration of his body. In this work he travelled to Spain in the guise of a pilgrim and begging his bread from door to door. In these journeys he suffered very great hardships and was helped by God. He had to work hard to attain his wishes, but through the generosity of the Catholic Kings Philip II and Philip III, he overcame with his fortitude of soul the opposition of all that withstood him and founded several houses of his Order, which he eventually did in Italy also.

He so excelled in humility that when he came to Rome he went to an almshouse and there chose to be associated to a leper: moreover he firmly refused all ecclesiastical dignities offered to him by Pope Paul V. He preserved his virginity unspotted, and when certain women attacked his chastity, he gained over their souls to Christ. Towards the most divine Mystery of the Eucharist he was drawn with burning tenderness of love, and would pass almost entire nights without sleep in adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. This holy custom he established in his Order, to be kept up as its peculiar mark. He was a zealous propagator of the cult of the Mother of God. He was all aflame with the love of his neighbours. He was gifted with prophecy and the discerning of spirits.

At the age of 44, while he was continuing long at prayer in the Holy House of Loreto, it was made known to him that the end of his earthly life was at hand. He immediately took the road to the Abruzzi and was seized with a mortal fever at the house of the disciples of Saint Philip Neri in the town of Agnone. He received with great devotion the Sacraments of the Church, and on the day preceding the Nones of June, in 1608, it being the eve of the Feast of Corpus Christi, he fell asleep in the Lord. His sacred body was carried to Naples, and there interred in the Church of Saint Mary the Greater. He was beatified by Pope Clement XIV in 1769 and was canonised by Pope Pius VII in 1807.

Dom Prosper Gueranger:

The good things brought to this world by the Divine Spirit continue to be revealed in the holy Liturgy. Francis Caracciolo is given to us this day as another type of the sublime fecundity produced on Earth by Christianity. Now, Faith is the principle of this supernatural fecundity in the saints, just as it was in Abraham, the Father of all believers. It brings forth to the Church isolated members or entire nations alike: from it too proceed the multitudinous families of Religious Orders who, in their fidelity in following the divers tracks traced out for them by their founders, are the chief portion of that royal and varied adornment with which the Bride is resplendently bedecked at the right hand of her Divine Spouse. This is the very thought expressed by the Sovereign Pontiff Pius VII on the day of the canonisation of our saint, wishing, as he said, “to right the judgement of such as may, perhaps, have appreciated the religious life at a low rate, according to the vain deceits of a worldly point of view, and not according to the just measure of the knowledge of Jesus Christ.”

That century of universal ruin in which the voice of Christ’s Vicar was raised addressing the whole world on this solemn occasion, resembled, but in still darker hue, the calamitous age of the pretended Reform in which Francis, like so many others, had proved by his works and by his life, the indefectibility of the Church’s holiness. Let us listen once more to the words of the same Pontiff:

“The Bride of Christ, the Church, is now become accustomed to pursue her pilgrim career amid persecutions from men and consolations from God. Through the saints raised up in all ages by His almighty Hand, God fulfils His promise to the end, making her ever to be a City seated on a mountain, a beacon, the clear light of which must needs reach the eyes of all who do not, through prejudice, voluntarily shut their eyes not to see. The while her enemies band together, vainly plotting her destruction, saying: When will she die? When will her name perish? Crowned with ever increasing splendour by the new warriors she sends as victors to Heaven, the Church remains ever glorious, ever declaring to all coming generations the might of the Lord’s strong arm.”

The sixteenth century heard at its birth the most terrific blasphemy ever uttered against the Bride of the Son of God: that by which she was named the harlot of Babylon. Yet did she, all spotless Queen — in the very teeth of heresy impotent to produce one real virtue on Earth — prove herself to be the legitimate Bride by reason of her admirable efflorescence in new Orders sprung from her bosom in but a few years’ space, and ready to meet the exigencies of the novel situation created by Luther’s revolt. The return of ancient Orders to their primitive fervour, the establishment of the Society of Jesus, of the Theatines, of the Brothers of Saint John of God, of the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri, of the Clerks Regular of Saint Jerome Emilian, and those of Saint Camillus de Lellis — sufficed not to the Divine Spirit. As though on purpose to mark the superabundant fruitfulness of the Bride, He raised up at the close of the same century another religious family, the special characteristic of which was to be the organisation of mortification and continual prayer among its members by the incessant use of Christian penance and by the perpetual adoration of the Most Holy Sacrament.

Sixtus V received with joy these new recruits for the great campaign. To distinguish them from all other Orders of Clerks Regular, and as a proof of his specially paternal affection, the illustrious Pontiff, himself a Friar Minor, embodied a title so dear to his own heart in that which he assigned to these newcomers, calling them: The Minor Clerks Regular. With a like view of approximation to the Seraphic Order, our Saint of today, the first General of this Institute, changed his name Ascanius for that of Francis. It seemed as though Heaven too would weld together the Patriarch of Assisi and Francis Caraeciolo by giving to each the same span of life, namely, forty-four years. The founder of the Minor Clerks Regular (like his glorious predecessor and patron), was one of those men of whom Holy Scripture says that, having lived a short space, they fulfilled a long time (Wisdom iv. 13). Numerous prodigies revealed during his lifetime the virtues which his humility would fain have concealed. Scarce had his soul left this Earth and his body been interred, than crowds flocked to the tomb where the constant voice of miracles bore witness to the high favour with God enjoyed by him whose mortal remains there reposed.

To the sovereign authority constituted by Jesus Christ in the Church, solely is it reserved, however, to pronounce authentically on the sanctity of any, even the most illustrious, of her dead. As long as the judgement of the Supreme Pontiff has formulated nothing, private devotion is quite free to testify gratitude or confidence in regard of the departed worthy of it. But all such demonstrations as, more or less, resemble public cultus, are prohibited by a rigorous and wise law of the Church. Unfortunately, certain imprudences contrary to this law formulated in the celebrated Decrees of Urban VIII drew down twenty years after the death of our saint all the severity of the Inquisition on some of his spiritual children, and retarded by a whole century the introduction of his cause to the tribunal of the Sacred Congregation of Rites. It was necessary that the witnesses of the abuses which had incurred the law should first disappear from the scene. But consequently the witnesses of the holy life of Francis had likewise disappeared. Being, therefore, obliged to recur to mere auricular testimony in her pronouncing of judgement on the heroic virtues practised by him, Rome now exacted from ocular witnesses the proof of four, instead of the usual two, miracles required in a process of Beatification.

WELL was your love for the Divine Sacrament of the Altar rewarded, Francis. You had the glory of being called to the Banquet of our Eternal Home at the very hour when the Church on Earth was chanting the praises of the Sacred Victim at the first Vespers of the great Festival that year-by-year hails this Mystery of mysteries. Your own feast day occurring, as it ever does, close to this Solemnity of Corpus Christi, continues still to invite us men, as you were wont to do in life, to come and peer in adoration into the depths of this Mystery of Love. The mysterious harmony of the Cycle is all disposed by Divine Wisdom, seeing that His sweet Providence fixes the season at which each Saint is summoned to receive the crown of bliss. Thus the post of honour earned by you is in the Sanctuary itself close to the Divine Host on our altars.

“The zeal of your house has eaten me up” (Psalms lxviii. 10): this was your heart’s cry on Earth. These words, less those of David, than of the Man-God Himself (John ii. 17), did indeed fill your heart to overflowing so that after your death they were found engraved on the lifeless flesh of your heart, proving, as it were, what had been the one impetus of its every pulsation and of your desires. Hence resulted the need you had of continual prayer, as well as that ever correlative ardour of yours for penance, the two-fold characteristic of your religious family, and which you would fain have seen in the hearts of all. Prayer and penance: yes, these two alone fix man in his right position before God. Vouchsafe to preserve this precious deposit amid your spiritual Sons, Francis, so that by their zeal in propagating the spirit of their Father they may make it become the treasure also of the entire world.

Also on this day according to the ROMAN MARTYOLOGY:

At Rome, the holy martyrs Aretius and Dacian.

At Sisseck in Illyria, in the time of the governor Galerius, St. Quirinus, bishop. Prudentius relates that for the faith of Christ he was precipitated into a river, with a millstone tied to his neck, but as the stone floated on the water, he exhorted for a long time the Christians who were present not to be terrified by his punishment, nor to waver in the faith, and then God heard his prayers to be drowned, that he might attain to the glory of martyrdom.

At Brescia, St. Clateus, bishop and martyr, under the emperor Nero.

In Pannonia, the holy martyrs Rutilus and his companions.

At Arras, St. Saturnina, virgin and martyr.

At Tivoli, St. Quirinus, martyr.

At Constantinople, St. Metrophanes, bishop and renowned confessor.

At Milevis in Numidia, St. Optatus, bishop, celebrated for learning and holiness.

At Verona, St. Alexander, bishop.

And in other places, many other holy martyrs, confessors and virgins.

Thanks be to God.

4 JUNE – SOLEMNITY OF CORPUS CHRISTI

Dom Prosper Guéranger:

A great solemnity has this day risen upon our Earth: a Feast both to God and men, for it is the Feast of Christ the Mediator who is present in the sacred Host that God may be given to man, and man to God. Divine union — yes, such is the dignity to which man is permitted to aspire, and to this aspiration, God has responded, even here below, by an invention which is all of Heaven.

It is today that man celebrates this marvel of God’s goodness. And yet, against both the Feast and its divine object there has been made the old fashioned objection: “How can these things be done?” (John iii. 9; vi. 53). It really does seem as though reason has a right to find fault with what looks like senseless pretensions of man’s heart. Every living being thirsts after happiness, and yet and because of that it only aspires after the good of which it is capable, for it is the necessary condition of happiness that in order to its existence there must be the full contentment of the creature’s desire. Hence, in that great act of creation which the Scripture so sublimely calls “His playing in the world” (Proverbs viii. 30, 31), when with His almighty power, He prepared the heavens and enclosed the depths, and balanced the foundations of the earth (Proverbs viii. 27, 29), we are told that Divine Wisdom secured the harmony of the universe by giving to each creature, according to its degree in the scale of being, an end adequate to its powers. He thus measured the wants, the instinct, the appetite (that is, the desire) of each creature, according to its respective nature so that it would never have cravings, which its faculties were insufficient to satisfy.

In obedience, then, to this law, was not man, too, obliged to confine, within the limits of his finite nature, his desires for the good and the beautiful, that is, his searching after God, which is a necessity with every intelligent and free being? Otherwise, would it not be that, for certain beings, their happiness would have to be in objects, which must ever be out of the reach of their natural faculties? Great as the anomaly would appear, yet does it exist. True psychology, that is, the true science of the human mind, bears testimony to this desire for the infinite. Like every living creature around him, man thirsts for happiness. And yet, he is the only creature on earth that feels within itself longings for what is immensely beyond its capacity. While docile to the lord placed over them by the Creator, the irrational creatures are quite satisfied with what they find in this world. They render to man their several services, and their own desires are all fully gratified by what is within their reach: it is not so with Man. He can find nothing in this his earthly dwelling which can satiate his irresistible longings for a something which this Earth cannot give, and which time cannot produce: for that something is the infinite.

God Himself, when revealing Himself to man through the works He has created, that is, when showing Himself to man in a way which His natural powers can take in: God, when giving man to know Him as the First Cause, as Last End of all creatures, as unlimited perfection, as infinite beauty, as sovereign goodness, as the object which can content both our understanding and our will — no, not even God Himself, thus known and thus enjoyed, could satisfy man. This being, made out of nothing, wishes to possess the Infinite in his own substance. He longs after the sight of the face, he ambitions to enjoy the life, of his Lord and God. The Earth seems to him but a trackless desert where he can find no water that can quench his thirst. From early dawn of each wearisome day, his soul is at once on the watch, pining for that God who alone can quell his desires. Yes, his very flesh too has its thrilling expectations for that beautiful Infinite One (Psalms lxii.) Let us listen to the Psalmist, who speaks for us all: “As the hart pants after the fountains of water, so my soul pants after you, God! My soul has thirsted after the strong, living, God: when will I come and appear before the face of God? My tears have been my bread, day and night, while it is said to me daily:Where is your God? These things I remembered, and poured out my soul in me, for I will go over into the place of the wonderful tabernacle, even to the house of God. With the voice of joy and praise, the noise of one that is feasting. Why are you sad, my soul? and why do you trouble me? Hope in God, for I will still give praise to Him: the salvation of my countenance, and my God” (Psalms xli.)

If reason is to be the judge of such sentiments as these, they are but wild enthusiasm and silly pretensions. Why talk of the sight of God, of the life of God, of a banquet in which God Himself is to be the repast? Surely, these are things far too sublime for man, or any created nature, to reach. Between the wisher and the object longed for, there is an abyss— the abyss of disproportion, which exists between nothingness and being. Creation, all powerful as it is, does not in itself imply the filling up of that abyss. If the disproportion could ever cease to be an obstacle to the union aspired to, it would be by God Himself going that whole length, and then imparting something of His own divine energies to the creature that had once been nothing. But, what is there in man to induce the Infinite Being, whose magnificence is above the heavens, to stoop so low as that? This is the language of reason.

But, on the other hand, who was it that made the heart of man so great and so ambitious that no creature can fill it. How comes it that while the heavens show forth the glory of God, and the firmament declares how full of wisdom and power is every work of His hands (Psalm xviiii. 2), how comes it, we ask, that in man alone there is no proportion, no order? Could it be that the great Creator has ordered all things, excepting man alone, with measure, and number, and weight? (Wisdom xi. 21) That one creature who is the masterpiece of the whole creation, that creature for whom all the rest was intended as for its king, is he to be the only one that is a failure, and to live as a perpetual proclaimer that his Maker could not, or would not, be wise, when he made Man? Far from us be such a blasphemy! God is love, says Saint John (1 John iv. 8), and love is the knot which mere human philosophy can never loosen, and therefore must ever leave unsolved the problem of man’s desire for the Infinite.

Yes, God is charity. God is love. The wonder in all this question is not our loving and longing for God, but that He should have first loved us (1 John iv. 10). God is love, and love must have union. And union makes the united like one another. Oh the riches of the Divine Nature in which are infinite Power, and Wisdom, and Love! These three constitute, by their divine relations, that blessed Trinity which has been the light and joy of our souls ever since that bright Sunday’s Feast, which we kept in its honour! Oh the depth of the divine counsels in which that which is willed by boundless Love finds, in infinite Wisdom, how to fulfil in work what will be to the glory of Omnipotence!

Glory be to you, Holy Spirit! Your reign over the Church has but just begun this year of grace, and you are giving us light by which to understand the divine decrees. The day of your Pentecost brought us a new Law, a Law where all is brightness. And it was given to us in place of that Old one of shadows and types. The pedagogue, who schooled the infant world for the knowledge of truth, has been dismissed. Light has shone on us through the preaching of the Apostles, and the children of light, set free, knowing God and known by Him, are daily leaving behind them the weak and needy elements of early childhood (Galatians iii. 5, 24, 25; iv. 9). Scarcely, divine Spirit, was completed the triumphant Octave in which the Church celebrated your Coming and her own birth which that Coming brought, when all eager for the fulfilment of your mission of bringing to the Bride’s mind the things taught her by her Spouse (John xiv. 26), you showed her the divine and radiant mystery of the Trinity, that not only her Faith might acknowledge, but that her adoration and her praise might also worship it. And she and her children find their happiness in its contemplation and love. But, that first of the great mysteries of our faith, the unsearchable dogma of the Trinity, does not represent the whole richness of Christian revelation. You, O blessed Spirit, hasten to complete our instruction, and widen the horizon of our faith.

The knowledge you have given us of the essence and the life of the Godhead, was to be followed and completed by that of His external works, and the relations which this God has vouchsafed to establish between Himself and us. In this very week when we begin under your direction, to contemplate the precious gifts left us by our Jesus when He ascended on high (Psalms lxvii. 19), on this first Thursday, which reminds us of that holiest of all Thursdays — our Lord’s Supper — you, O divine Spirit, bring before our delighted vision the admirable Sacrament which is the compendium of the works of God, one in Essence and three in Persons; the adorable Eucharist, which is the divine memorial (Psalms cx. 4) of the wonderful things achieved by the united operation of Omnipotence, Wisdom and Love. The Most Holy Eucharist contains within itself the whole plan of God with reference to this world of ours. It shows how all previous ages have been gradually developing the divine intentions which were formed by infinite love and, by that same love, carried out to the end (John xiii. 1), yes, to the furthest extremity here below, that is, to Itself. For the Eucharist is the crowning of all the antecedent acts done by God in favour of His creatures. The Eucharist implies them all, it explains all.

Man’s aspirations for union with God —aspirations which are above his own nature, and yet so interwoven with it as to form one inseparable life — these strange longings can have but one possible cause, and it is God Himself — God who is the author of that being called Man. None but God has formed the immense capaciousness of man’s heart, and none but God is willing or able to fill it. Every act of the divine will, whether outside Himself or in, is pure love, and is referred to that Person of the Blessed Trinity who is the Third and who, by the mode of His Procession, is substantial and infinite love. Just as the Almighty Father sees all things before they exist in themselves in His only Word, who is the term of the divine intelligence, so likewise that those same things may exist in themselves, the same Almighty Father wishes them, in the Holy Ghost, who is to the divine will what the Word is to the infinite intelligence. The Spirit of Love, who is the final term to the fecundity of Persons in the divine essence, is, in God, the first beginning of the exterior works produced by God. In their execution, those exterior works are common to the Three Persons, but they are attributed to the Holy Ghost inasmuch as He, being the Spirit of Love, solicits the Godhead to act outside Itself. He is the Love who, with its divine weight and influence of love, sways the Blessed Trinity to the external act of creation: infinite Being leans, as it were, towards the deep abyss of nothingness, and out of that abyss, creates. The Holy Spirit opens the divine counsel, and says: “Let us make man to our image and likeness!” (Genesis i. 26) Then God creates man to His own image. He creates him to the image of God (Genesis i. 27) taking His own Word as the model to which He worked, for that Word is the sovereign archetype according to which is formed the more or less perfect essence of each created being. Like Him then, to whose image he was made, Man was endowed with understanding and free-will. As such, he would govern the whole inferior creation and make it serve the purposes of its Creator, that is, he would turn it into a homage of praise and glory to its God. And though that homage would be finite, yet would it be the best of which it was capable.

This is what is called the natural order. It is an immense world of perfect harmonies and, had it ever existed without any further perfection than its own natural one, it would have been a masterpiece of God’s goodness. And yet, it would have been far from realising the designs of the Spirit of Love.

With all the spontaneity of a will which was free not to act, and was as infinite as any other of the divine perfections, the Holy Spirit wills that Man should after this present life be a partaker of the very life of God by the face-to-face vision of the divine essence. Nay, the present life of the children of Adam here on this Earth is to put on, by anticipation, the dignity of that higher life, and this so literally, that the future one in Heaven is to be but the direct sequel, the consequent outgrowth, of the one led here below. And how is man, so poor a creature in himself, to maintain so high a standing? How is he to satisfy the cravings thus created within his heart? Fear not: the Holy Ghost has a work of His own, and He does it simultaneously with the act of creation, for the Three Persons infuse into their creature, Man, the image of their own divine attributes and, upon his finite and limited powers, graft, so to say, the powers of the divine nature. This being made for an end which is above created nature: these energies superadded to man’s natural powers, transforming, yet not destroying, them, and enabling the possessor to attain the end to which God calls him — is called the supernatural order, in contradistinction to that lower one, which would have been the order of nature, had not God, in His infinite goodness, thus elevated man above his own mere state as man, and that from the very first of his coming into existence.

Man will retain all those elements of the natural order which are essentials to his human nature. And with those essential elements, the functions proper to each: but there is a principle that, in every series, that should give the specific character to the aggregate which was the end proposed by the ruling mind. Now, the last end of Man was never other in the mind of his Creator than a supernatural one, and consequently the natural order, properly so called, never existed independently of, or separate from, the supernatural. There has been a proud school of philosophy, called “free and independent,” which professed to admit no truths except natural ones, and practise no other virtues than such as were merely human: but, such theories cannot hold. The disciples of godless and secular education, by the errors and crimes into which their unaided nature periodically leads them, demonstrate, almost as forcibly as the eminent sanctity of souls which have been faithful to grace, that mere nature, or mere natural goodness, never was and never can be, a permanent and normal state for man to live in. And even granting that he could so live, yet man has no right to reduce himself to a less exalted position, than the one intended for him by his Maker.

“By assigning us a supernatural vocation, God testified the love He bore us. But at the same time He acted as Lord, and evinced His authority over us. The favour He bestowed on us has created a duty corresponding. Men have a saying, and a true one: ‘He that has nobility, has obligations,’ and the principle holds with regard to the supernatural nobility, which it has pleased God to confer on us” (Mgr. Pie, Bishop of Poitiers, First Synodical Instruction on the Chief Errors of our times, viii.). It is a nobility which surpasses every other. It makes man not only an image of God, but like Him! (Genesis i. 26). Between God — the Infinite, the Eternal — and Man, who but a while back was nothing, and ever must be a creature — friendship and love are henceforth to be possible: such is the purpose of the capabilities, and powers, and the life, bestowed on the human creature by the Spirit of Love. So, then, those longings for His God, those thrillings of his very flesh, of which we were just now reading the inspired description by the Psalmist (Psalms lxii.) — they are not the outpourings of foolish enthusiasm! That thirsting after God, the strong, the living God; that hungering for the feast of divine union — no, they are not empty ravings (Psalms xli.). Made “partaker of the divine nature” (1 Peter i. 4), as Saint Peter so strongly words the mystery, is it to be wondered at if man be conscious of it, and lets himself be drawn by the uncreated flame, into the very central Fire, it came from to him? The Holy Spirit, too is present in his creature, and is witness of what Himself has produced there. He joins His own testimonies to that of our own conscience, and tells our spirit that we are truly what we feel ourselves to be — the sons of God (Romans viii. 16).

It is the same Holy Spirit who, secreting Himself in the innermost centre of our being, that He may foster and complete His work of love — yes, it is that same Spirit who at one time opens to our soul’s eye, by some sudden flash of light, the future glory that awaits us, and then inspires us with a sentiment of anticipated triumph (Ephesians i. 17, 18; Romans v. 2), and then, at another time, He breathes into us those unspeakable moanings (Romans viii. 26), those songs of the exile, whose voice is choked with the hot tears of love, for that his union with his God seems so long deferred. There are too certain delicious hymns, which coming from the very depths of souls wounded with divine love, make their way up to the throne of God. And the music is so sweet to Him that it almost looks as though it had been victorious, and had won the union! Such music of such souls does really win: if not the eternal union — for that could not be during this life of pilgrimage, and trials, and tears — still it wins wonderful unions here below, which human language has not the power to describe.

In this mysterious song between the Divine Spirit and man’s soul, we are told by the Apostle, that “ He, who searches hearts, knows what the Spirit desires, because he asks for the saints according to God” (Romans viii. 27). What a desire must not that be which the Holy Spirit desires! It is as powerful as the God who desires it. It is a desire, new, indeed, inasmuch as it is in the heart of man, but eternal, inasmuch as it is the desire of the Holy Spirit, whose Procession is before all ages. In response to this desire of the Spirit, the great God, from the infinite depths of His eternity, resolved to manifest Himself in time and unite Himself to man while yet a wayfarer, He resolved thus to manifest and unite Himself, not in His own Person, but in His Son, who is the brightness of His own glory, and the true figure of His own substance (Hebrews i. 3) God so loved the world (John iii. 16) as to give it His own Word —that divine Wisdom, who, from the bosom of His Father, had devoted Himself to our human nature. That bosom of the Father was imaged by what the Scripture calls Abraham’s bosom, where, under the ancient covenant, were assembled all the souls of the just, as in the place where they were to rest till the way into the Holy of Holies should be opened for the elect (Hebrews ix. 8). Now, it was from this bosom of His eternal Father, which the Psalmist calls the bride-chamber (Psalms xviii. 6), that the Bridegroom came forth at the appointed time, leaving His heavenly abode and coming down into this poor Earth to seek His Bride that, when He had made her His own, He might lead her back with Himself into His kingdom where He would celebrate the eternal nuptials. This is the triumphant procession of the Bridegroom in all His beauty (Psalms xliv. 5), a procession of which the Prophet Micheas, when speaking of his passing through Bethlehem, says that his going forth is from the days of eternity (Michaes v. 2). Yes, truly from the days of eternity, for as we are taught by the sublime principles of Catholic theology, the connection between the eternal procession of the divine Persons and the temporal mission is so intimate that one same eternity unites the two together in God: eternally, the Trinity has beheld the ineffable birth of the Only Begotten Son in the bosom of the Father. Eternally, with the same look, it has beheld Him coming as Spouse from that same Father’s bosom.

If we now come to compare the eternal decrees of God one with the other, it is not difficult to recognise which of them holds the chief place and, as such, comes first in the divine intention of creation. God the Father has made all things with a view to this union of human nature with His Son — union so close, that, for one individual member of that nature, it was to go so far as a personal identification with the Only Begotten of the Father. So universal, too, was the union to be, that all the members were to partake of it, in a greater or less degree. Not one single individual of the race was to be excluded, except through his own fault, from the divine nuptials with eternal Wisdom which was made visible in a Man, the most beautiful above all the children of men (Psalms lxiv. 2). For as the Apostle says, “God, who heretofore commanded the light to shine out of darkness, has Himself shined in our hearts, giving them the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in and by the face of Christ Jesus (2 Corinthians iv. 6). So that the mystery of the Marriage-Feast is, in all truth, the mystery of the world and the kingdom of Heaven is well likened to a King who made a Marriage for his Son (Matthew xxii. 1-14).

But where is the meeting between the King’s Son and his Betrothed to take place? Where is this mysterious union to be completed? Who is there to tell us what is the dowry of the Bride, the pledge of the alliance? Is it known who is the Master who provides the nuptial banquet, and what sorts of food will be served to the guests? The answer to these questions is given this very day throughout the Earth. It is given with loud triumphant joy. There can be no mistake. It is evident from the sublime message which Earth and Heaven re-echo, that He who is come is the Divine Word. He is adorable Wisdom, and is come forth from His royal abode to utter His voice in our very streets, and cry out at the head of multitudes, and speak His words in the entrance of city gates (Proverbs i. 20, 21). He stands on the top of the highest places by the way, in the midst of the paths, and makes Himself heard by the sons of men (Proverbs viii. 1-4). He bids His servants go to the tower and the city walls, with this His message: “Come! Eat my Bread, and drink the Wine which I have mingled for you; for Wisdom has built herself a House, supported on seven pillars; there she has slain her victims, mingled her wine, and set forth her table (Proverbs ix. 1-5): all things are ready; come to the marriage!” (Matthew xxii. 4).

Epistle – 1 Corinthians xi. 23‒29

Brethren, for I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus, the same night in which He was betrayed, took bread, and giving thanks, broke it and said: “Take and eat: this is my body which will be delivered for you: do this in commemoration of me.” In like manner, also, the chalice, after He had supped, saying: “This chalice is the new testament in my blood: do this, as often as you will drink, in commemoration of me. For as often as you will eat this bread and drink the chalice, you will show the death of the Lord until he comes.” Therefore, whoever eats this bread or drinks the chalice of the Lord unworthily, will be guilty of the body and of the blood of the Lord. But, let a man prove himself: and so let him eat of that bread, and drink of the chalice. For he who eats and drinks unworthily, eats and drinks judgment to himself, not discerning the body of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

Dom Prosper Gueranger:

The Holy Eucharist, both as Sacrifice and Sacrament, is the very centre of the Christian religion, and therefore our Lord would have a fourfold testimony to be given in the inspired writings to its Institution. Besides the account given by Saints Matthew, Mark and Luke, we have also that of Saint Paul, which has just been read to us, and which he received from the lips of Jesus Himself, who vouchsafed to appear to him after his conversion, and instruct him.

Saint Paul lays particular stress on the power given by our Lord to His disciples of renewing the act which He Himself had just been doing. He tells us what the Evangelists had not explicitly mentioned that as often as a Priest consecrates the Body and Blood of Christ, he show (he announces) the Death of the Lord. And by that expression tells us that the Sacrifice of the Cross, and that of our Altars, is one and the same. It is likewise by the immolation of our Redeemer on the Cross, that the Flesh of this Lamb of God is truly meat, and His Blood truly drink, as we will be told in a few moments by the Gospel. Let not the Christian, therefore, forget it, not even on this day of festive triumph. The Church insists on the same truth in her Collect of this Feast: it is the teaching which she keeps repeating, through this formula, throughout the entire Octave: and her object in this is to impress vividly on the minds of her children this, the last and earnest injunction of our Jesus: “As often as you will drink of this cup of the new Testament, do it for the commemoration of me.” The selection she makes of this passage of Saint Paul for the Epistle should impress the Christian with this truth — that the divine Flesh which feeds his soul, was prepared on Calvary and that, although the Lamb of God is now living and impassible, He became our food, our nourishment, by the cruel death which He endured. The sinner who has made his peace with God will partake of this sacred Body with deep compunction, reproaching himself for having shed its Blood by his sins: the just man will approach the holy Table with humility, remembering how he too has had but too great a share in causing the innocent Lamb to suffer and that if he be at present in the state of grace, he owes it to the Blood of the Victim, whose Flesh is about to be given to him for his nourishment.

But let us dread, and dread above all things, the sacrilegious daring spoken against in such strong language by our Apostle — and which, by a monstrous contradiction, would attempt to put again to death Him who is the Author of Life. And this attempt to be made in the very banquet which was procured for us men by the Precious Blood of this Saviour! “Let a man prove himself,” says the Apostle, “and so let him eat of that bread, and drink of the chalice.” This proving one’s self is sacramental confession, which must be made by him who feels himself guilty of a grievous sin which has never before been confessed. However sorry he may be for it, were he even reconciled to God by an act of perfect contrition, the injunction of the Apostle, interpreted by the custom of the Church and the decisions of her Councils, forbids his approaching the holy Table until he has submitted his sin to the power of the Keys.

Sequence of Corpus Christi

Praise your Saviour, O Sion! Praise your Guide and Shepherd, in hymns and canticles. As much as you have power, so also dare; for He is above all praise, nor can you praise Him enough.

This day, there is given to us a special theme of praise—the living and life-giving Bread, which, as our faith assures us, was given to the Twelve brethren, as they sat at the Table of the holy Supper.

Let our praise be full, let it be sweet; let our soul’s jubilee be joyous, let it be beautiful; for we are celebrating that great day, on which is commemorated the first institution of this Table.

In this Table of the new King, the new Pasch of the new Law puts an end to the old Passover. Newness puts the old to flight, and so does truth the shadow; the light drives night away.

What Christ did at that Supper, that He said was to be done in remembrance of Him. Taught by His sacred institutions, we consecrate the Bread and Wine into the Victim of Salvation.

This is the dogma given to Christians — that bread passes into flesh, and wine into blood. What you understand not, what you see not — that let a generous faith confirm you in, beyond nature’s course.

Under the different species — which are signs not things — there hidden lie things of infinite worth. The Flesh is food, the Blood is drink; yet Christ is whole, under each species.

He is not cut by the receiver, nor broken, nor divided: He is taken whole. He is received by one, He is received by a thousand; the one receives as much as all; nor is He consumed, who is received.

The good receive, the bad receive — but with the difference of life or death. ’Tis death to the bad, ’tis life to the good: lo! how unlike is the effect of the one like receiving.

And when the Sacrament is broken, waver not! but remember, that there is as much under each fragment, as is hid under the whole.

Of the substance that is there, there is no division; it is but the sign that is broken and He who is the Signified, is not thereby diminished, either as to state or stature.

Lo! the Bread of Angels is made the food of pilgrims; verily, it is the Bread of the children, not to be cast to dogs.

It is foreshown in figures—when Isaac is slain, when the Paschal Lamb is prescribed, when Manna is given to our fathers.

O good Shepherd! True Bread! Jesus! have mercy on us: feed us, defend us: give us to see good things in the land of the living.

O You, who know and can do all things, who feeds us mortals here below, make us your companions in the banquet yonder above, and your joint-heirs, and fellow-citizens with the Saints! Amen. Alleluia.

Gospel – John vi. 56‒59

At that time Jesus said to the multitude of the Jews, “My flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. As the living Father has sent me, and I live by the Father; so, he who eats me, the same, also, will live by me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Not as your fathers did eat manna and are dead. He who eats this bread will live forever.”

Praise be to you, O Christ.

Dom Prosper Gueranger:

The beloved Disciple could not remain silent on the Mystery of Love. But, at the time when he wrote his Gospel, the institution of the Eucharist had been sufficiently recorded by the three Evangelists who had preceded him, as also by the Apostle of the Gentiles. Instead, therefore, of repeating what these had written, he completed it by relating the solemn promise made by Jesus on the banks of Lake Tiberias a year before the Last Supper. He was surrounded by the thousands who were in admiration at his having miraculously multiplied the loaves and fishes: Jesus takes the opportunity of telling them that He Himself is the true bread come down from Heaven, and which, unlike the manna given to their fathers by Moses, could preserve man from death. Life is the best of all gifts, as death is the worst of evils. Life exists in God as in its source (Psalms xxxv. 10). He alone can give it to whom He pleases, and restore it to him who has lost it. Man, who was created in grace, lost his life when he sinned, and incurred death. But God so loved the world, as to send it, lost as it was, His Son (John iii. 16) with the mission of restoring man to life. True God of true God, Light of Light, the Only Begotten Son is, likewise, true Life of true Life, by nature: and, as the Father enlightens them that are in darkness, by this Son, who is His Light, so, likewise, He gives life to them that are dead, and He gives it to them in this same Son of His, who is His living Image.

The Word of God, then, came among men, that they might have life, and abundant life (John x. 10). And whereas it is the property of food to increase and maintain life, therefore did He become our Food, our living and life-giving Food, which has come down from Heaven. Partaking of the life eternal which He has in His Father’s bosom, the Flesh of the Word communicates this same life to them that eat It. That, (as Saint Cyril of Alexandria observes) which, of its own nature, is corruptible, cannot be brought to life in any other way, than by its corporal union with the body of Him who is life by nature: now, just as two pieces of wax melted together by the fire make but one, so are we and Christ made one by our partaking of His Body and Blood. This life, therefore, which resides in the Flesh of the Word, made ours within us, will be no more overcome by death. On the day appointed, this life will throw off the chains of the old enemy and will triumph over corruption in these our bodies, making them immortal. Hence it is, that the Church, with her delicate feelings both as Bride and Mother, selects from this same passage of Saint John, her Gospel for the daily Mass of the Dead, thus drying up the tears of the living who are mourning over their departed friends, and consoling them by bringing them into the presence of the holy Host, which is the source of true life, and the centre of all our hopes. Thus was it to be, that not only the soul was to be renewed by her contact with the Word, but even the body, earthly and material as it is, was to share, in its way, of what our Saviour called the Spirit that quickens (John vi. 64).

“They,” as Saint Gregory of Nyssa has so beautifully said, “who have been led by an enemy’s craft to take poison, neutralise, by some other potion, the power which would cause death. And as was the deadly, so likewise the curative must be taken into the very bowels of the sufferer, that so the efficacy of that which brings relief may permeate through the whole body. Thus we, having tasted that which ruined our nature, require a something which will restore and put to right that which was disordered and that, when this salutary medicine will be within us, it may, as an antidote, drive out the mischief of the poison, which had previously been taken into the body. And what is this (salutary medicine)? No other than that Body, which had both been shown to be stronger than death, and was the beginning of our life. For, says the Apostle, as a little leaven makes the whole paste to be like itself, so, likewise, that Body, which God had willed should be put to death, when it is within ours, transmutes and transfers it wholly to Itself... Now, the only way by which a substance may be thus got into the body, is by its being taken as food and drink.”

3 JUNE – SAINT CLOTILDE (Queen)

Clotilde, the daughter of Cilperic, king of Burgundy, was born in Lyons in 474. After the murder of her parents she was brought up by her uncle Gondebaud, king of Burgundy, who gave her in marriage to Clovis I, the first Christian king of the Franks who was then a pagan. Having given birth to their first son, she had him baptised and was given the name of Ingomer. He died while still wearing the white robe of baptism, and Clovis bitterly complained to Clotilde that the death of his son was due to the vengeance of the gods of his fathers, irritated at this contempt offered to their divinity. But Clotilde said. “I give thanks to the Almighty Creator of all things, that He has not "judged me unworthy to give birth to a son whom He has deigned to admit to share His kingdom.”

Having given birth to a second son, she wished that he also should be baptised, and the name of Clodomir was given to him. The child having fallen ill, the king declared that the fate of the brother was to befall this son also, but he was cured by the prayers of Clotilde who persevered in exhorting Clovis to reject idolatry and adore the One God in three Persons. Clovis persisted in his paganism until, being on an expedition against the Alamani at Soissons, and one day seeing his army waver, he remembered the counsels of Clotilde and implored the help of Christ, who granted him victory. At her request Saint Remigius instructed Clovis in the Christian faith, and baptised him, anointing him likewise with the sacred chrism.

After the death of Clovis, Clotilde settled at Tours where she passed the rest of her life at the tomb of Saint Martin, giving herself up to watching, alms and other works of piety, exercising her munificence on churches and monasteries. Clodomir having been killed in the war of Burgundy, she brought up her grandchildren Theobald, Gontaire and Clodoald. Clotilde died in 545 and was buried alongside her husband in Paris in the Basilica of Saint Peter, later renamed in honour of Saint Genevieve. Whenever Paris suffered any calamity it was the custom to carry her body in procession with every demonstration of piety. During the French Revolution the relics of the saints were profaned, but the bones of Saint Clotilde were hidden by pious persons. When peace was restored to the Church her holy relics were placed in a new shrine and deposited in the Church of Saints Leu-et-Gilles in Paris.

Dom Prosper Gueranger:

At this Season in which the Office of the Time is leading us to consider the early developments of Holy Church, Eternal Wisdom so arranges, now as ever, that the feasts of the Saints should complete the teachings of the moveable Cycle. The Paraclete, who has but just come down on us, is to fill the whole Earth (Wisdom i. 7). The Man-God has sent Him expressly to win over the whole Earth and to secure all time to His Church. Now, it is by subjecting kingdoms to the faith that He is to form Christ’s Empire. It is by working so that the Church may assimilate all nations to herself that He gives growth and continuance to the Bride. See, therefore, how at this season in which He has but just taken possession of the world anew. His co-operators in this His work of conquest shine out on every side in the heavens of the holy Liturgy. But the West, more than all the rest, concurs in forming the magnificent constellation that is mingling its radiant splendour with the Pentecostal fires. Indeed, what could better show the Omnipotence of the Spirit of Christ than the establishment of this Latin Christendom in these distant lands of the West? Let us then fix our delighted gaze on those two incomparable luminaries, the Princes of the Apostles, directing their rapid course from the East, speeding on our horizon up to the glorious zenith which, in a month’s time, they will attain. Yesterday, John the Beloved Disciple shed on Gaul his last and long enduring rays. Some few days previously, it was a Pope Eleutherius or a Monk Augustine who with joint action, though parted by centuries, bore the light of salvation to the far West — to the home of the Britons and of the Anglo-Saxons. The day after tomorrow Boniface will shed his luminous beams on Germany.

But today what star is this rising in such silvery beauty on the land of the Franks? The city of Lyons, prepared by the blood of martyrs for this her second glory, saw this new light make growth in her midst. Across a distance of three centuries these rays are blended with those of Blandina. Like Blandina too, Clotilde is a mother, and the maternity of a slave giving birth in her spotless virginity to Gaulish martyrs had already prepared the birth of the Franks to Christ. Clotilde had not, like Blandina, to shed her blood, but other pangs cruelly wrung her breast while she was yet so young, and served to mature her soul for the grand destinies reserved by God for the privileged children of sorrow. The violent death of her father, Chilperic, dethroned by a fratricide usurper, the sight of her brothers massacred and of her mother drowned in the Rhone, her long captivity in the Arian court of the murderer who brought heresy with him to the throne of the Burgundians, developed in her the same heroism that had upheld Blandina in the amphitheatre amid the anguish of her spiritual childbirth — a heroism that would make this niece of Gondebaud become likewise the mother of a whole nation to Christ. Let us then unite these two names in one common homage, and prostrate at the feet of the Eternal Father from Whom descends all paternity on Earth and in Heaven (Ephesians iii. 15), let us adore these ways of His all filled with tenderness and love in our regard.

God drew the visible universe out of nothingness, solely to manifest His goodness. So in like manner has He willed that man, coming from His Hands, without power as yet to recognise his Creator, should recognise at least a mother’s tender love, the first sensible ray, as it were, of Infinite Love. Irresistible is this ray, sublime in its gentleness, exquisite in its purity, giving to the mother a facility belonging only to her to complete in the soul of her child, the entire reproduction of the Divine Ideal that is to be impressed on Him. Now this she does by education. Today’s feast reveals how yet more sublime, more potent, more extensive, is maternity in the order of grace, than it is in that of nature. For when God, coming down among us, was pleased to take Flesh of a Daughter of Adam, maternity was raised in Her to the extreme limit that separates the endowments of a simple creature from the Divine Attributes.

Thus rising above the heavens, maternity at the same time embraced the world, bringing all mankind together into close union, without distinction of nation or family, in the one filiation of that Virgin-Mother. The New Adam, the perfect model of our race and our first-born (Matthew i. 26; Hebrews i. 6), willed to have us for His brethren in all fullness, brethren in Mary as in God (Romans viii. 29; Hebrews ii. 11-12). The Mother of God was then proclaimed Mother of men on Calvary. From the summit of the Cross the Man-God replaced on the brow of Mary that diadem of Eve broken by the fall beside the fatal tree. Constituted sole Mother of the living by this noble investiture (Genesis iii; John xix. 26-27), our Lady entered once again into communication with the privileges of the Father, our Father who is in Heaven. Not only was she by nature like Him, Mother of His Son, but just as all paternity flows down here below from the Eternal Father, and borrows thence super-eminent dignity, so too all maternity was nothing from that moment but an out-flow of Mary’s, and that in the truest sense — yes, a delegation of Her love, and a communication of Her august privilege by which she brings forth men to God, whose sons they are to be.

Good reason, therefore, have Christian mothers to glory in their maternity, for in that does their greatness consist. Their dignity has increased to a degree through Mary that nature could never have dreamed of. But, at the same time, under the aegis of Mary, not less real is the maternity of holy Virgins, not only in God’s eyes, but often manifested to their own: the wife too, prepared by a special call from God and by suffering is sometimes like Clotilde, endowed with a fecundity of a spiritual order a thousand times more prolific than that of Earth. Happy the fruits of this supernatural maternity which under the favour of Mary is fraught with so much greatness! Happy the nations on whom by divine munificence a mother has been bestowed! History tells how the founders of Empires have ever had the terrible prerogative of impressing on nations the distinctive character, disastrous or beneficial, which through length of ages continues to be theirs. How often does not that want of counterpoise to the preponderance of power make itself only too evident in the impetus given rather to destroy than to build up! And wherefore? Because ancient Empires never had a mother: for this noble title cannot be applied to those women who, under the name of heroines, have transmitted their names to posterity merely inasmuch as they rivalled the ambition and pomp of conquerors. To Christian times was it reserved to behold introduced into a people’s life this element of Maternity, more salutary, more efficacious in its humble gentleness than that which springs from the talents or vices, from the power or genius of their first Princes.

Even among Christians the sanctity demanded by this sublime maternity in the creature who is invested with it, makes it the exclusive property of the Catholic Church, alone holy, and of the nations that are in this Church: Empires originating in schism or heresy can have no claim to it. Brought down to a level with pagan nations in this respect, they may indeed, like them, excel in riches or in might, yes, even be called from on High to the sinister honour of being the Scourge used by God against His disobedient children. But an immense void must necessarily remain and be felt in their whole social formation and life, springing directly from Earth — sons of their own works, as is boasted nowadays, never have they benefited of the prayers, of the tears of a mother. Never has her smile lighted their first steps, soothed their childhood. Therefore, according to our Latin Poet, never will they be admitted to the divine table, nor to the intimacy of a true alliance with Heaven (Virgil). Never will true civilisation, true culture, make progress in their hands.

On the other side, believing nations are to the Church God’s kingdom, exactly what are to them the several families that, by being brought together under one social bond of unity, make up each nation. Their vocation (essentially of a supernatural order) requires in them a plenitude of life, for the development of which are exerted Divine Omnipotence, Wisdom and Love. But although nature has here the honour of furnishing us with the requisite terms and points of comparison, her process and power are so immensely surpassed at these divine heights that she can here no longer present but a feeble image, almost faulty, because so incomplete. Among baptised nations, baptised, that is, in fidelity to Christ and submission to His Vicar, France may more particularly make this cry of the royal Psalmist her own: “Lord, you have foreseen all my ways, and, long beforehand, have fixed my destiny. Your knowledge, in the work of my formation, is become wonderful to me! You have possessed my reins, my whole being with all its aspirations, all its thoughts, belongs wholly to you. For you have received me in your arms as your own work, even from my mother’s womb. My bone is not hidden from you, which you have made in secret in the womb of my mother. You who know the imperfection of my first origin” (Psalms cxxxviii.).

Time was needed to subdue the savage instincts of the warriors of Clovis, and to fit his sword to the noble destiny that awaited it in the hand of a Charlemagne, or of a Saint Louis. With good reason has it been said that the honour of this labour is due to the bishops and the monks. But to be more accurate and to prove a deeper insight of the ways used by Divine Providence, it were well, perhaps, to pass less lightly over the woman’s part, for such indeed there was in the work of conversion, and of education, which made the Frankish nation become the eldest son of the Church. Clotilde it was who led the Franks to the Baptistery of Rheims and presented to Remigius, the proud Sicambrian transformed, far less by the exhortations of the holy bishop, than by the force of prayer, the prayer of that strong woman elected by God to bear away this rich spoil from the camp of Hell. What manly energy, what devotedness to God, are displayed in every measure taken by this noble daughter of the Burgundians’ dethroned King, who while held beneath the suspicious eye of the usurper, the murderer of her family, awaits in the silence of prayer and in the exercise of charity! Heaven’s appointed hour: and when, at last, the moment comes, taking counsel of none save the Holy Ghost and her own heart, how nobly does she dart forward to conquer to Christ her betrothed, though yet a stranger to her, outdoing in valour in this instance all the warriors of her escort! Strength and beauty (Proverbs xxxi.) were indeed her covering, her adornment on her bridal day, and the heart of Clovis soon learnt that the conquests reserved to his bride far out-stripped in importance the booty he had until then seized by force of arms.

Clotilde, on the other hand, found her work already prepared on the banks of the Seine. For fifty years space had Genevieve been busy defending Paris against the pagan hordes, and only awaiting the baptism of the King of the Franks in order to open to him the city gates. Still, when on that Christmas night Clotilde gave birth to the eldest son of Holy Church in Mary’s name, the great work was far from being completed. This new-born people had yet by the slow process of a laborious education to be fashioned into the most Christian nation. This chosen one of God and Our Lady does not fall short of the maternal task. But still what anguish of heart to be endured, what tears yet to be shed over these sons of hers, whose violence, peculiar to the race, seems simply indomitable, and the very exuberance of whose rich nature yields them up to the fury of passions, urging them blindly on to crimes the most atrocious! Her grandchildren inveigled from her side and caught in the perfidious trap laid for them by their faithless uncles, are massacred. Fratricidal wars carry devastation over the whole of that territory of ancient Gaul, purged by her from paganism and heresy. Finally, another pang, but one of a more glorious kind, seems given as a compensation for the bitterness of intestine strife — her cherished daughter, Clotilde the younger, dies worn out by ill usage endured for her faith at the hand of her Arian husband. Surely all this must have shown clearly enough to the Queen of the Franks that if she was chosen by Heaven to be their mother, she was to have all the pangs, as well as the honour that title involves. Thus does Christ ever deal with His own when they have earned His confidence.

Clotilde well understood this: already a widow and deprived by death of the aid of Genevieve likewise, she had long ago retired to Tours, near to the sepulchre of the Thaumaturgus of the Gauls. There, in the secret of prayer and in the heroism of her childhood’s faith, she continued, aided by Saint Martin, the preparation of this new people for its mighty destinies. An immense work was this, and one to which no single lifetime could suffice! But though Clotilde was not to witness the desired transformation accomplished, her life was not to close until she had pressed to her heart, at Tours, her illustrious daughter-in-law Radegonde, and having by this last embrace invested her with her own sublime maternity, she sent her to Poitiers, there to continue, at the tomb of Saint Hilary, this great work of intercession. Then when at length, Radegonde herself having ended her task of suffering and love, must likewise quit this Earth, Bathilde will presently come forward, consummating the work in that remarkable seventh century, the period when the Frank, at last ready for his mission, is betrothed to Holy Church and dubbed a Knight of God!

Clotilde, Radegonde, Bathilde, all three of them, Mothers of France, bear a striking resemblance to one another. All three are prepared from the early dawn of life to the devotedness their grand mission would require by the like trials, captivity, slavery and massacre or loss of their own relatives: all three bring to the throne nothing but a dauntless love of Christ, the King, and a desire of seeing Him rule the people. All three set aside the queenly diadem as soon as may be in order to be able, prostrate before God in retirement and penitence, to attain more surely the one object of their maternal and royal ambition. Heiresses of Abraham in very deed, they found in his faith (Romans iv. 18; Hebrews xi. 11) the fecundity which made them to be mothers of those countless multitudes which the soil, watered by their tears, produced for Heaven. Even in these weakened times of ours, there is still a goodly throng ever passing from the land of the Franks to their true Home yonder, there to join the happy bands of the combatants of better days. At the sight of this ever increasing group of sons joyously pressing round their thrones, the hearts of Clotilde, Radegonde, and Bathilde, overflowing with love, give utterance in one united cry to this word of the Prophet: “Who has begotten these? I was barren and brought not forth, led away, and captive: and who has brought up these? I was destitute and alone: and these where were they?” Then the Lord answering, said: “As I live, you will be clothed with all these as with an ornament, and as a bride you will put them about you. For your deserts, and your desolate places, and the land of your destruction will now be too narrow by reason of the inhabitants. The children of your barrenness will still say in your ear: “the place is too strait for me, make me more room to dwell in.” And Kings will be your nursing fathers, and Queens your nurses. And you will know that I am the Lord, for they will not be confounded that wait for Him” (Isaias xlix. 18-23).

GREAT is your glory on Earth and in Heaven, Clotilde, Mother of nations! Not only have you given to Holy Church that people of France, surnamed the most Christian, but England and Spain also claim their descent from you (in the pedigree of Faith, that is) by Bertha and Ingonda, your noble grand-daughters. Ingonda, more fortunate than your daughter Clotilde, succeeded, by the help of Saint Leander of Seville, in bringing back to the true faith her husband Hermenegilde, and even leading him to the crown of martyrdom. Bertha, Queen of Kent, welcomed Augustine to Saxon shores and through her influence was Ethelbert brought from the darkness of paganism to Baptism and the aureola of sanctity: realising thus that word of the Apostle, that the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the believing wife (1 Corinthians vii. 14).

Since those early days, in how many other parts of Europe, and on how many other more distant shores, have not the sons of your own nation, that nation of which you was Mother, propagated that light of faith which they received of you: whether brandishing the sword in defence of the right which belongs to Holy Church, the Bride of the Man-God, to teach freely and everywhere the Word of Truth: or whether, becoming themselves Missionaries and Apostles, carrying the same to infidel nations, far beyond reach of any possible protection, and at the expense of their sweat and of their blood? Happy you to be first in bringing forth to Christ the King a nation pure from every stain of heresy and vowed to holy Church from the first moment of her new birth! Rightly indeed the Church of Sainte-Marie at Rheims was the one selected on that Christmas Day 496 for this birth to God of the Frankish nation in which Our Lady, in a proportionate manner, gave you to share her own Motherhood of our race.

There especially lies our motive of confidence in recurring to you, Clotilde, in our intercessory prayer this day. Alas, how many of your sons are far from being what they should be, having such a Mother as you! But when Our Lady gave you a share in her own maternal rights, she necessarily at the same moment communicated to you also her own tender compassion for beguiled children deaf to their Mother’s voice. Take pity on these unfortunate sons, led so very far astray by strange doctrines (Hebrews viii. 9). The Christian monarchy founded by you is no more. You built it on the recognised rights of God in His Christ and in the Vicar of His Christ. Princes with short-sighted views of self interest, traitors to the mission they had received to maintain your work, imagined they were performing marvels when they allowed maxims to be spread in your France proclaiming the independence of civil power in respect of that of Holy Church. And now, by a just retribution, society has proclaimed its independence in respect of Princes! But at the same time, the infatuated populace has really no other idea but that of being its own Sovereign, and intoxicated by this false liberty which it dreams to have acquired, it goes so far as to contemn even the supreme dominion of the Creator Himself. The rights of man have usurped the rights of God as the basis of social compact, a newfangled gospel that France, now in misled proselytism, is fain to carry over the whole world in place of the true Gospel so loved of yore!

In that unhappy country poisoned by a lying philosophy, such is the excess of delirium that many who deplore the apostasy of the mass of the population and wish to remain themselves Christians, imagine they can do so, while at the same time maintaining the destructive principle of Liberalism, the very essence of revolution: let Christ have Heaven and souls, say they, but let man have Earth, together with full right of governing it as he thinks best, or as suits him best. While they fall on their adoring knees before the Divinity of our Lord Jesus in the sanctuary of their own conscience, they search the Scriptures and are too blind to see there expressed how the Man-God is and must be King of the whole Earth. In learned theses they inform us that they have probed the very depths of history and find in it nothing that can contradict their arguments. If indeed they must admit that the government of a Clovis or a Charlemagne, or a Saint Louis, do not correspond in everything to their political axioms, we must, they say, make allowances for those primitive ages: a nation cannot be expected to come in a day to the perfect age attained at last by the law of progress! Alas! Have pity, dear Mother of France, on the ravings of these poor sons of yours! Arouse once more in that noble land the faith of the Franks! Oh may the God of Clotilde, the Lord of hosts, the King of nations, show Himself once more leading on your sons to victory in the name that won for Clovis the field of Tolbiac: JESUS CHRIST!

Also on this day according to the ROMAN MARTYROLOGY:

At Arezzo in Tuscany, during the persecution of Decius under the governor Tiburtius, the holy martyrs Pergentinus and Laurentinus, brothers who, while yet children, were put to the sword after they had endured cruel torments and performed many miracles.

At Constantinople, the holy martyrs Lucillian and four boys, Claudius, Hypatius, Paul and Denis. Lucillian, formerly a pagan priest, but now a Christian, was cast into a furnace with them after undergoing many torments, but the flames being extinguished by the rain, all escaped uninjured. Finally, under the governor Silvanus they terminated their career. Lucillian by crucifixion, the children by decapitation.

In the same city, St. Paula, virgin and martyr, who was arrested while gathering the blood of the martyrs just mentioned, beaten with rods, and thrown into the fire from which she was delivered. Finally, when St. Lucillian had been crucified, she was decapitated.

At Cordova in Spain, blessed Isaac, a monk, who died by the sword for the faith of Christ.

At Carthage, St. Caecilius, the priest who converted St. Cyprian to the faith of Christ.

In the diocese of Orleans, St. Lifard, priest and confessor.

At Lucca in Tuscany, St. Davinus, confessor.

At Anagni, St. Oliva, virgin.

And in other places, many other holy martyrs, confessors and virgins. 

Thanks be to God.

3 JUNE – WEDNESDAY AFTER TRINITY SUNDAY

Dom Prosper Guéranger:

We have not as yet reached the Feast of the divine Memorial, not until tomorrow will we have it in all its splendour. But this evening at first Vespers the Church will begin her acclamations to the Eternal Priest. And, although the Sovereign Pontiffs have not ordained that a Vigil, properly so called, will precede the Feast of Corpus Christi, yet have they granted indulgences to a voluntary fast practised on this its eve. Let us now resume the history of the Church’s worship of the great mystery.

We have already seen how the unity of the Church is based on the Eucharist. Our Lord Jesus Christ in that Sacrament is the corner-stone on which rises, in the harmony of its several parts, the temple of living stones built to the glory of God (Ephesians ii. 21). Jesus is the High Priest (Hebrews v. 1), ordained for men, Himself being Man, that He may present to God the homage of His brethren by offering to His and their Father a Sacrifice in the name of all. And, although this homage of regenerate mankind — this Sacrifice which is the highest expression of that homage — owes its whole worth to the infinite dignity of Him who is the Head of the Church — yet the Sacrifice is only complete when there is the union of the Members with the Head. The Head must have the Body. The Church is, as the Apostle tells us, the fullness, the completion, of Him who is filled in all (Ephesians i. 22, 23). The Church perfects the Sacrifice as an integral portion of the Victim who is offered on the altar. What is true of the Church is true, likewise, of each one of us who are Members of Christ. And we are really His Members, provided we be united in the great Action of the Sacrifice by that intimate union which makes one Body of many Members.

In this consists the social influence of the Eucharist. The human family had been broken up by sin. It regains its lost unity by the Blood of the Lamb and the original intention which God had in creating the world is fulfilled. After all other beings, there came forth, out of nothing, the creature Man. He was to give a voice of praise to the whole of creation for, his own twofold nature, material and spiritual, made him the compendium of all other creatures. When he was restored by redemption he regained his position in the glorious choir of beings. The Eucharist, the Thanksgiving, the praise by excellence, is the sweet produce of the human race. The Eucharist — that grand hymn of divine Wisdom sung to the King of ages — ascends from this Earth of ours, blending the two harmonies into one: the ineffable harmony of the eternal Canticle, that is, the Word in the Father’s bosom— and the harmony of the new Canticle which is repeated by the choir of creatures to the glory of their Creator.

The Ages of Faith lived on this grand truth. They thoroughly understood the priceless worth of the gift bestowed by the Man-God upon His Church. Appreciating the honour thence accruing to our Earth, they felt themselves bound to respond to it, in the name of all creatures, by giving to the celebration of the sacred Mystery everything that ritual could impart of grandeur and solemnity. The Liturgy for the Christians of those times was exactly what is implied by the word: it was the public function, the social act, by excellence. And as such it claimed every sort of external pomp, and the presence of the whole people round the altar was looked upon as a matter of course. As to the lawfulness of what are called Private Masses, it would be easy to prove by most authentic facts of history that what the Catholic Church teaches regarding them was her teaching from the very commencement. And yet, practically, and as a general rule, the richness of ceremonial, the enthusiasm of sacred chant, the magnificence of sacred rites, were, for a long period, regarded as inseparable from the offering up of the Holy Sacrifice.

The solemnities of divine service as celebrated in any Catholic Cathedral on the greatest Feast in the Year are but a feeble image of the magnificent forms of the ancient Liturgies, such as we described them yesterday. The Church herself, whose desires for what is most perfect never vary, ever evinces a marked predilection for the remnants she has been able to keep up of her ancient forms of worship. But as far as the generality of her people is concerned, there can be no doubt of the existence of a growing feeling of indifference for the external pomp with which the Holy Sacrifice is so deservedly accompanied. Whatever demonstrations of Christian piety still exist are directed elsewhere. The cultus of the divine Presence in the Eucharist as developed in these our own times, is certainly a blow to the heresy which denies that Presence. It is, too, a joy to every Catholic who loves God. But care must be taken, lest a movement which is so profitable to individual souls, and so redounding to the glory of the Holy Sacrament, should be turned by the craft of the enemy against the Eucharist itself. Now, this might easily be the case if, in consequence of such devotion being ill-regulated, the very primary object of the Eucharistic dogma, which is Sacrifice, were permitted to lose its place, either in the appreciation, or in the practical religion, of the Faithful.

In the admirable connection existing throughout the whole body of Christian revelation, there can be no such thing as one dogma becoming a danger to another. Every new truth, or every truth presented under a new aspect, is a progress in the Church, and an acquisition for her children. But the progress is then only a true one when in its application, the new truth, or its new aspect, is not treated with such prominence as to throw a more important truth into the shade. Surely no family would ever count that gain of new property to be a boon, which would jeopardise or lessen the rich patrimony which past ages had secured. The principle is a self-evident one and must be borne in mind when studying the different phases of the history of any human society, and especially when the History of the Church is in question. If the Holy Spirit, who is ever urging the Church to what is best, incessantly adorning her for the eternal nuptial, and is decking her brow with a gradual increase of light, yet is it but too often the case that the human element of which she partakes through her members, her children, makes its weight tell upon the Bride of Christ. When that happens, she redoubles her maternal solicitude for these her children. They are too delicate to live on the summits and bear the bracing atmosphere to which their fore-fathers were accustomed. She herself continues her aspirations after what is most perfect, and approaches gradually nearer to heaven. But for the sake of her weakly children she quits the mountain paths she loved to tread in better times, for those paths kept her closer to her divine Spouse. She comes lower down, she is content to lose something of her external charms, she stoops that she may the better reach the children she has to save. This her condescension is admirable, but it certainly gives no right to the children who live in these less healthy times to think themselves better than their forefathers. Is a sick man better than the one who is in health, because the food which is indispensable for keeping up the little strength he has is given to him under new forms, and such as will suit his debilitated frame?

Because, in these our days, a certain increase of devotion towards the divine Host who dwells in our tabernacles has been observed in some souls, and the external demonstration of this devotion is under a new form, it has been asserted, that “no age ever equalled our own in the cultus of the Most Holy Sacrament!” And because of this holy enthusiasm [the nineteenth] century, which, with its restless activity, has opened out so many new methods of devotion, has been called by a certain writer, “the great age of the Eucharist!” Would to God these assertions were correct, for it is quite true, and history is rich in bearing testimony to the fact “that an age is more or less glorious according to its devotion towards the adorable Eucharist.” But it is no less true that if the different centuries be compared with each other for devotion towards the Sacrament of Love — which, at all times, is the very life of the Church — there can be no doubt but that that ought to be counted as the golden age in which our Lord’s intentions in instituting the divine Mystery were the best understood and carried out, and not that in which individual devotion was busiest.

Now leaving aside for the present all principles connected with dogma, and which will find their place more appropriately a few days later, we have history to bear witness to this fact that, so long as the western nations kept up their faith and fervour, the Church, who is the faithful and sure interpreter of her Jesus’ intentions, maintained the discipline observed in the worship practised towards the Eucharist during the early ages. After her two-fold victory over the pagan persecutions and the obstinate dogmatism of the Emperors of Byzantium, the Church, the noble depository of the New Testament, was in possession of a freedom greater than she has had at any other period. Her children, too, made it their perfection to follow her every wish. Thus free to act as she knew was best and sure to be obeyed, she kept to the way of Eucharistic worship which her Martyrs had followed and her Doctors had so enthusiastically developed in their writings: that is, she took the energies of the new children she had received by the conversion of barbarian nations, and centred them in the Sacrifice, that is, in the holy fatigues of solemn Mass, and the Canonical Hours, which are but a natural irradiation of the Sacrifice.

Nothing in those times was more Catholic, nothing less individual and private, than the Eucharistic worship thus based on the social character which pertains to the Sacrifice. It was the uppermost idea even in such of the Faithful as, through sickness or other personal reasons, were obliged to communicate, of the universal Victim, separate from the rest of the people. It was the one leading thought which made them turn their hearts and their adorations towards the gilded dove, or the ivory tower, in which were conserved, under the mysterious integrity of the Sacrament, the precious remnants of the Sacrifice. Faith in the Real Presence, a faith quite as animated and deep as any that can be witnessed in our own times, was the soul of the whole Liturgy. It was the basis of the entire system of the Church’s rites and ceremonies, all of which are unmeaning if you take away the Catholic dogma of the Eucharist. This dogma was admitted by all the children of the Church as a principle beyond discussion. It was their dearest treasure. It was a truth which was both foundation stone and roofing of the House built among men by Eternal Wisdom. To a superficial observer it might seem as though the Faithful of those early ages were less intent upon it than we now are: but is it not always the case that the rock which supports the edifice, and the timber which roofs it, call for less solicitude when the building is under no risk, either from the indifference of its inmates, or from the attacks of enemies outside?

The Church herself cannot grow decrepit, but it is a law in history that, even within her fold, and in spite of the vitality she imparts to nations, no society ever maintains itself long at its highest pitch of perfection. Men are like stars in this, that their apogee marks the period of their decline. They only seem to mount on high that they may speedily descend: and, after the fullest vigour of age, we gradually approach the impotency of the old man. So was it to be with Christendom itself, with that grand confederation which had been established by the Church in the strong unity of unfeigned charity, and of faith unalloyed by error. The Crusades were for a second time rousing the world to holy enterprise. The preaching of Saint Bernard was stirring mankind to zeal for the cause of God. The impulse was so immense that it seemed as though the event marked the culminating point of Christ’s reign on Earth, and secured perpetuity to the power of the Church. And yet, that was the very period when old signs of decay returned, and with fresh intensity. The heroic Pontiff Saint Gregory VII had stemmed the evil for a considerable time, but at the period we speak of, a relapse set in and advanced with its work of ravage till it brought about the great revolt of the fifteenth century and the general apostasy of nations.

The celebrated prophetess of the Middle Ages, Saint Hildegard, was then scanning with her eagle eye the miseries of her own day, and the still more sombre threats of the future. She that was used to write the messages of God to Pontiffs and Kings, penned these words in a Letter to Werner and his brother Priests of Kircheim. They had written to Hildegard and solicited her reply:

“It was while lying for a long time on a bed of sickness in the year of the Lord’s Incarnation one thousand one hundred and seventy, that I saw, wakeful both in body and mind, a most beautiful image having a woman’s appearance: she was all perfect in her suavity, and most dear in the charms of her beauty which was such as that the human mind could in no wise comprehend it. Her stature was so great that it reached from earth even up to Heaven. Her face, too, beamed with exceeding brightness, and her eye was fixed on Heaven. She was clad in a spotless garment, made of white silk. The mantle which covered her was adorned with most precious stones, of emerald, sapphire and likewise of beads and pearls. The shoes on her feet were of onyx. But her face was covered with dust, and her garment was rent on the right side, and her mantle had lost its elegant beauty, and her shoes were dimmed. And she, with a loud and plaintive voice, cried out towards the high heavens: ‘Hearken, Heaven, that my face is defiled! And wail, Earth, that my garment is rent! And you, abyss, tremble, because my shoes are dimmed. Foxes have holes and birds of the air nests (Matthew viii. 20), but I have not helper or comforter, nor staff on which to lean, and by which to have support... They that should have adorned me in every way have in all these things, abandoned me. For it is they that besmear my face by dragging the Body and Blood of my Spouse into the great uncleanness of the impurity of their living, and the great filth of their fornications and adulteries; and by buying and selling holy things, defiling them, as a child would be, were he put down in mire before swine... The wounds of Christ my Spouse are contaminated... Princes and a headlong people will rush on you, priests! They will cast you forth, and put you to flight, and will take your riches away from you...They will say: Let us cast out from the Church these adulterers, and extortioners, and men that are full of all wickedness! And in doing this, they will have it that they do a service to God because they say that it is by you that the Church is defiled.... By God’s permission, many nations will begin to rage against you in their judgements, and many people will devise vain things concerning you, for they will count as nothing your priestly office and your consecration. Kings of the earth will assist these in your overthrow, and they will thirst after the earthly things you possess; and the Princes in whose dominions you live will make a convention in this one plan — that they may drive you out of their territories, because you, by your most wicked deeds, have driven away the innocent Lamb from your midst. And I heard a voice from heaven, saying: This image is the Church!’”

What a fearful description of the evils brought on the Church in the twelfth century! What a prophecy of its far off results! These miseries were in keeping with the way in which the august Mystery of the Altar was treated. It has always been so. The disorders of the sanctuary necessarily brought about relaxation in the people. They grew wearied of receiving the heavenly food from hands that were but too often unworthy ones. The guests at the banquet of divine Wisdom became rare, so rare indeed that in 1215 a General Council, the Fourth of Lateran, passed the well-known law which obliges, under the severest penalties, the Faithful of both sexes to receive Communion at least once in the year. The evil became so great that the legislation of Councils and the genius of Innocent III, the last of the great Popes of the Middle Ages, would not have sufficed to arrest it, had not God given to His Church the two Saints, Dominic and Francis: they reclaimed the Priesthood and for a time brought back the people to the practice of Christian piety.

But the ancient forms of the Liturgy had perished during the interval of the crisis. The oblation in common which supposed that all communicated in the divine Victim, had given place to private foundations, and to honoraries or stipendium. In themselves they were quite lawful, but they had been so considerably increased by the introduction of the mendicant Orders that a change in the Liturgy was the consequence. Private Masses for special intentions were multiplied in order to satisfy obligations which had been contracted with individual donors, and by a necessary consequence the imposing rite of con-celebration maintained in Rome till the thirteenth century entirely disappeared in the Western Church. The Sacrifice of the Mass was no longer brought before the Faithful with the majestic ceremonial which in former times had secured to it a preponderance over the whole religion and life of the Christian people. The Holy Eucharist soon began to be given out of the time of Mass, and for reasons which were not always serious ones. More than one scholastic theologian encouraged the practice. If this scholastic had not true learning on his side, he had his sharp definitions and categorical divisions, and Communion seemed to become, in the minds of some men, a something distinct by itself in the institution of the Eucharist. This was a forerunner of what we so often find practised in our own times: Communions made isolated and furtively on principle, that is, in accordance with an ideal of spirituality which has a dread of a crowd, and a repugnance to the excitement of the Church’s ceremonies!

The notion, then, of the Sacrifice which includes the chief motive of the Presence of the Incarnate Word in the Eucharist was no longer brought before the people with the emphatic pre-eminence of former ages. As a counter result of this, the truth of this Presence of our God under the Eucharistic species gained an ascendancy over the soul in a more exclusive, and therefore, in a more impressive and direct way. It was at this period that, out of a spirit of holy fear, and from a feeling of respect, a feeling which can never be too great, several ancient usages began to be discontinued. Usages which were established at first with a view the better to realise or express the application of the Sacrifice, were afterwards suppressed as exposing the sacred species to involuntary irreverence. It was thus that the custom of giving the chalice to the laity, and communion to infants, fell into desuetude.

An immense ritual change then was brought about. The Church accepted it, although she was aware of its being, in more than one point, a degeneracy as compared with former ages. The time had come when the grand social forms of the Liturgy requiring, as they did, the strong union of Christian nations for the basis, would be but unrealities. The jealous mistrust of States against the Church, that is, against the power which was the sole bond of mutual union between the several nations, was ever on the increase and only waited for an occasion to break out into open hostility. Diplomacy became a system of rupture between one country and another, just as the Church had been the framer and maintainer of their union.

If the evil from within was thus great, still greater were the dangers to which the Faithful were exposed by the onslaughts of heresy. And yet, it is precisely in such a time as this, that is most manifested the superhuman prudence of the Church. In defence of that which is the essential element of her existence here below — in defence, that is, of Faith — she formed a rampart out of the very ruins caused by the liturgical revolution he had been compelled to accept. She sanctioned with her authority what was worthy of sanction, and thereby controlled the movement. She took advantage of the increase of devotion to the Real Presence which the movement had excited. She gave a fresh direction to her Liturgy by substituting a ceaseless expression of the dogma for the less precise, though not less complete and far grander, forms of the earlier period. It was a reply to heresy, all the stronger because of its being more direct. We have already seen how, in consequence of the covert attacks of false doctrine, there was an evident reason felt in the thirteenth century for instituting a special Feast in honour of the Eucharist as the Mystery of Faith. That reason became sheer necessity at the approach, foreseen by God alone, of the bold triumph of the sacramentarian heresy. It was necessary to forestall the attack, and by so doing to render the coming assault less hurtful to the Christian world, and less injurious to that Lord who is present in the Sacrament of His Love. The means for efficaciously realising these two ends was the development of exterior devotion to the Real Presence. The Church would thus proclaim her unshaken faith in the dogma, and the adorable Sacrament would receive, by the renewed fervour of faithful souls, a compensation for the indifference and insults of others.

Established throughout the world by the authority of the Roman Pontiffs, the Feast of Corpus Christi was therefore both in itself and in its developments, as we were observing yesterday, the commencement of a new phase in the Catholic worship of the holy Eucharist. Once the Feast was instituted, there followed Processions, Benedictions, Forty-Hours, Expositions, Watchings in adoration, each of which was an additional affirmation of the Church’s belief in the Real Presence. The piety of her children was rekindled, and to that Lord who, for our sakes, dwells under the sacramental species, there was offered that tribute of homage which is so justly His due.