Sermon X The Real Presence. (For The Feast Of Corpus Christi.)

St. Matt. i. 23. "They shall call His name Emmanuel, which, being interpreted, is God with us."

We conclude the seasons of Easter and Pentecost with the Feast of the Blessed Trinity, following in thought our ascended Jesus up to the right hand of His eternal Father. From Christmas to Ascension we commemorate the mission (as it is called) of the Second Person of the Trinity: how the Father sent the Son to become Incarnate, to accomplish our redemption, and found the Church. At Pentecost we celebrate the mission of the Third Person: how the Father and the Son together sent the Holy Ghost, to become incorporate in the Church, and abide with and in it through all time. Then, on Trinity Sunday, the Church, in her turn, bids us remember that, although the Son and the Holy Ghost were sent down to earth, yet they never left heaven; where they had dwelt from eternity, and will dwell to eternity, consubstantial and coequal with the Father.

But the Church is the kingdom of the Incarnation; and the Incarnation is God made visible. Therefore, as a true spouse, living only for her Beloved, she does not leave us contemplating the invisible God, but quickly sets before us the Incarnation again—the end of her yearly song no less than its beginning. For the feast of Corpus Christi is to Christmas as the end to the beginning of a chain of mysteries which centre in the Incarnation. It is, indeed, a sort of second Christmas—the sacramental life of our Lord bearing striking resemblance to His helpless infancy. Again, lest we should forget that our ascended Lord left behind Him the very body He carried into heaven, the Church does not let us stand gazing up after Him with the group on Olivet, but invites us to turn and rejoice with her in the mystery of His perpetual presence here below—a presence not the less real because supersensible, nor the less consoling because veiled.

I shall speak, then, of the Blessed Sacrament, first, as a reality; and, secondly, as a consolation.

First, as a reality. You are aware, my dear brethren, that no article of our faith excites so much the wonder of those who are not Catholics as the doctrine of the Real Presence. They are forced to acknowledge, too, that we actually do believe in it, and take it as a matter of course. Their wonderment is natural enough: for they judge of it only by the senses; and certainly we cannot conceive of any mode in which it would have more apparent unreality. If, however, they believe that the Christ who was born in a stable, lived in obscurity for thirty years, was rejected by the Jews as "the carpenter's son," and, at last, died a felon's death, was God, they must allow that the Godhead in Him had very much apparent unreality, and that its surprising concealment can only be accounted for by design. Again, if they are familiar with the Bible, they know that in several passages a certain adorable secrecy and shyness are ascribed to God as characteristic of Him. As, for instance, in the Psalms we are told that He "makes darkness His hiding-place." [Footnote 61] In Job it is asked, "Peradventure thou wilt comprehend the steps of God, and find out the Almighty perfectly? He is higher than heaven, and what wilt thou do? He is deeper than hell, and how wilt thou know?" [Footnote 62] while Isaias breaks out with the exclamation: "Truly Thou art a hidden God, Thou God of Israel, the Saviour!" [Footnote 63]

As far, then, as the hiddenness of the Real Presence goes, it ought rather to commend our doctrine than otherwise, and create a presumption in its favor.

But the radical difficulty with the stranger to the truth lies in his not understanding the Incarnation and its object. It is nothing to him, I may say. He professes belief in it, indeed, but has utterly "lost its meaning" (as dear Father Faber says). Let him once begin to realize the Incarnation, and he will find he is taking the road to Rome: he will find that there is such a thing as a visible Church, and such a person as the Mother of God. To the Catholic, on the contrary, the Incarnation is everything. It is the fount of the whole system to which he glories in adhering. The Church exists for nothing else. The world exists for nothing else. The world for the Church, the Church for Christ, and Christ for God.

Now, the object of the Incarnation was briefly this: The establishment of a visible kingdom, in which the Creator should receive an adequate worship from the creature, and the creature be raised to the highest possible union with the Creator. We say, then, that the Church is this visible kingdom—to wit, an organic body, of which we are made members by Baptism (an outward and visible rite); and that the twofold end of worship and union is accomplished by the perpetual presence of the Incarnation here on earth, as at once a sacrifice and a sacrament. A sacrifice in which the creature offers to God a divine victim—the only adequate worship He can receive, God being offered to God—and in a created nature. A sacrament, in which the assumed humanity in Christ, hypostatically united with the divinity, is made to blend with our humanity in a union so close as to render us, in turn, "partakers of the divine nature." [Footnote 64] Moreover, we say that the form of food, in which our Lord chose to impart to us His deified and deifying humanity, was (so to speak) the most natural form He could have chosen: since food becomes one substance with its recipient—the difference between ordinary food and this divine food being that the latter, instead of being changed into us, transforms us into itself.

Therefore, to us, who, by the grace of faith, understand the Incarnation and its object, the doctrine of the Real Presence is simply the supplement to the doctrine of the Incarnation. The one is the consequence of the other. We behold in the Church, with the Blessed Sacrament on her altars, the mystical Mary with the Divine Babe on her lap: and when we kneel to her, that she may give Him to us, or bless us with Him, we have no more feeling of unreality than the Shepherds and the Magi had in the cave at Bethlehem.

The feast of Corpus Christi, then, my brethren, is one of a blessed reality: a reality which ought to make us thank God every day of our lives that we are Catholics. For can anything be more dismal, more barren, more pointless, than a Christianity in which the Blessed Sacrament and the Blessed Virgin have no place?

But, secondly, it is a feast of peculiar consolation. It is this which most endears the Blessed Sacrament to us. For as long as we are in exile from our true fatherland—the "patria" of the O Salutaris—we shall always be wanting consolation, and prize it as a foretaste of our rest. This consolation, then, this foretaste, is abundantly vouchsafed to us in the Blessed Sacrament. And, first, as regards our Lord Himself. It is impossible to love Him without sorrowing for all He once suffered; without grieving at the thought of the world's sins, and our own share of them, which drenched His soul with anguish, and steeped His heart in woe. And what pains us most is the melancholy fact that His love was thrown away on the majority of mankind, and is so at this hour. It is, therefore, indeed a consolation that now He dwells on earth without the condition of suffering—impassible for evermore; that, at last, He "comes unto His own, and His own do receive Him"; that He is enthroned King of His elect in the kingdom He so dearly purchased; that He can now take unmixed "delight" in "being with the children of men"; that if His Sacramental Presence is still to the heretic "a stumbling-block," and to the sceptic "foolishness," yet to millions upon millions, who believe and love, it is "the power of God and the wisdom of God"; and, further, that whatever degeneracy may come upon Christ's kingdom, however widely the "love of many may wax cold," yet, even in the worst times, "those whom the Father hath given Him" will unfailingly confess Him their "Emmanuel."

Again, the Blessed Sacrament is full of consolation as regards ourselves. In the first place, because it is our Emmanuel—God tabernacled with men; and because the veiled Presence here is an earnest of the unveiled hereafter. Also, because it is an abiding "propitiation for our sins," and the perpetual oblation of infinite merit to obtain us all good things. Again, it is the food in the strength of which we travel, like Elias, through the wilderness of this world "unto the mount of God": [Footnote 65] the medicine of our spiritual diseases, the balm of our sorrows, and, sweetest thought of all, perhaps, our viaticum in death.

If God could thus address His people of old, how much more meaning have His words for us: "Fear not, for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name: thou art mine. When thou shalt pass through the waters, I will be with thee, and the rivers shall not cover thee; … for I am the Lord thy God, the Holy One of Israel, thy Saviour." [Footnote 66]

But especially ought we to take comfort in the Blessed Sacrament in times of trial for the Church, such as that which is on us now. You remember how the ship of Peter was tossed one day on the lake of Galilee, and the disciples got terrified and awoke their Master, who was asleep on a pillow. [Footnote 67]

And He rebuked them for their want of faith; because, let wind and sea rage as they might, could that vessel have perished with the Lord of the elements on board, though He was "asleep on a pillow"? Now, that ship is a striking figure of the Church, with the Blessed Sacrament reposing on her altars. She has ridden out many a heavy gale as yet, and no matter how many more are in store for her, weather them she must while she carries the Almighty Saviour. Instead of losing heart, then, our aspiration should be that of the sacred poet:

"Amid the howling wintry sea, We are in port if we have Thee."

And even if there should come a time, as many think, when "the daily sacrifice shall be taken away," when it shall be death to say Mass or to hear it, and the Church has to "fly into the wilderness"—if the final persecution thus exceed even those of the Cæsars, yet Mass will be said and Communion will be given; and still, at the words of the priest, "even as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth unto the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man" to His altar; and still, "wheresoever the Body shall be, there will the eagles be gathered together." [Footnote 68]

In conclusion, my dear brethren, let me remind you how apt we are—we who are so favored with the faith—to neglect the Blessed Sacrament, to be irreverent in its presence, to show it ingratitude by receiving it too seldom, and to betray our forgetfulness of its presence by never coming to visit it. I would dwell a little on this last point. When we meet with misfortune or trouble of any kind, we often brood over it at home, and get impatient and fretful, and make mischief in consequence to others as well as to ourselves, instead of coming to tell the Sacred Heart all about it, and draw on an ever-ready help. So, again, we are constantly complaining how cold the world is, what a want there is of sympathy, how selfish and thankless people are. And what are we but cold and unsympathizing, selfish and thankless, toward our best Friend? He is here "love's prisoner"—our prisoner; and how few of us take any notice of Him as such! Were an earthly dear one in prison for our sake, we should move heaven and earth to get to him. But here is the Lover of all lovers, the infinite beauty, accessible all day long, and how many come to visit Him of those who are not reasonably prevented? I wonder that more of us are not haunted by those words, "I was in prison, and ye visited Me not." [Footnote 69]

Let us endeavor, then, my brethren, to realize more the treasure we possess in our Emmanuel, our Gesù Sacramentato (Sacramented Jesus), our Dios Sagramentado (Sacramented God), as the happy Italian and Spanish languages can word it. If we could only accustom ourselves to think a little more of the Blessed Sacrament, it would soon have a perceptible influence on our lives, on our domestic relations, on our intercourse with society, on our dealings with the world of business. And this influence would be anything but oppressive, as some of you may think. It would exercise a wholesome restraint, indeed, for which we should often be deeply thankful afterwards, but would give us a true cheerfulness and an abiding sense of calm. Oh! that all our words and actions might harmonize in one ceaseless chorus of praise—

"Blessed and praised every moment Be the most holy and most divine Sacrament!"