Friday Adoration at the monastery

Our series on the Liturgy has focused on the Eucharist, in this year in which the American bishops have called for eucharistic renewal. While we include in this issue the homily for Ash Wednesday given to the School community this past week, we also include here an article from an earlier monastery “Newsletter,” written thirty years ago by Father Damian Kearney (June 1993). Dom Damian wrote this later in the liturgical year than our present Lenten season, for the feast of Corpus Christi, which occurs soon after the Easter season. But it provides material that is worthy of Lenten meditation and apropos of our eucharistic renewal in its historical and theological reflections on eucharistic practice.

Dear Oblates and Friends of Portsmouth:

In order to give greater emphasis to the supreme way in which Jesus remains present to us after the completion of his earthly ministry, the Church has established the feast of Corpus Christi directly following the Pascal season, which celebrates the risen Christ. On Maundy Thursday when the Institution of the Blessed Sacrament is commemorated, there is no opportunity to solemnize this mystery, with the liturgy of Good Friday and Easter Sunday changing the focus from the sacramental to the physical reality of Jesus’ humanity.

Eucharistic Procession of the 2023 Humanitas Mass of Corpus Christi (image: Hansen)

It is through this special feast, therefore, that the doctrine of the Eucharist is made manifest to the faithful. Not until the Middle Ages was there a need for such a way of presenting the sacrament, since veneration of the “real presence“ was unknown. The Mass was the means of offering sacrifice to the Father and of uniting the priest and congregation to God and one another through partaking of the Eucharist. As frequent reception of the eucharist became less and less the custom, they developed the alternative of making the Real Presence visible through reservation and exposition. This led to the practice of displaying the consecrated wafer in a precious monstrance for adoration, and then being given further ceremonial by a procession in and outside the church with a number of pauses for a “benediction“. This custom in turn resulted in the popular devotion of benediction held at any time during the year and, until the liturgical reforms of Vatican II, often celebrated at the end of a Sunday mass, something of an anomaly and rightly abolished. In the aftermath of the “liturgical cleansing” period following the Council, however, this and other devotions have all but disappeared, and this could be a sign or result of the decline of interest in what are considered to be “unimportant externals,“ accretions better dispensed with.