The Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ (known also as the feast of Corpus Christi) gives us the opportunity to contemplate the most beautiful sacrament Our Lord has given us : the gift of His Real Presence in the Most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist. In the Eucharist Our Lord makes Himself present on the altar. He makes Himself present in order to perpetuate the sacrifice of the Cross and to offer Himself to us as spiritual food. The same sacrifice of the cross is made present in the Eucharist. The Eucharist does not multiply Christ's sacrifice but makes the one and the same sacrifice on the cross present once more. Our late Holy Father Jonh Paul II wrote: "Because the sacrifice of Christ and the Eucharist are the same, Christ's reconciliation is applied to men and women of today. 'We always offer the same Lamb, not one today and another tomorrow, but always the same one' ( St. John Chrysostom). Therefore, the Mass does not add to or multiply Christ's sacrifice. The Mass… makes this sacrifice always present in time" (Ecclesia de Eucharistia, no. 12, by John Paul II).
Our Lord in the Eucharist as priest and victim, also becomes food for us. Just as the paschal lamb of Exodus was slaughtered and then eaten, so Christ the "Lamb of God" becomes victim for our sins and then becomes our food so that He may enthrone Himself in our hearts. That the Eucharist contains the real presence of Our Lord has been the constant teaching of the church. St. Cyril of Jerusalem (315-386 A.D.) wrote: "Do not see in the bread and wine merely natural elements because the Lord has expressly said that they are His body and blood: faith assures you of this, though your senses suggest otherwise." Pope Paul VI wrote that theologians "must firmly maintain that in the objective reality, independently of our mind, the bread and wine have ceased to exist after the consecration , so that the adorable body and blood of the Lord Jesus from that moment on are really before us under the sacramental species of bread and wine" (Solemn Profession of Faith, 1968). St. Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century would write: " What the senses fail to fathom, faith must serve to compensate."
With whole hearts we must adore and receive Our Lord in the Eucharist "which is the source and summit of the whole of Christian life" (Redemptionis Sacramentum, no.2, by the Congregation for the Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments).
