Corpus Christi?
La Stampa reports on last week’s Angelus address given by Pope Francis where he continued to incessantly impute some supra-doctrine about the poor.
Pope Francis has poignantly said that Christians have no right to refuse help to those who need it, saying that to partake in the commemoration of Christ’s death is to see him in the poor and suffering and to welcome them and offer them help.
First of all the Pope is not poignant. Secondly, the Eucharist is not a commemoration of Christ’s death. It is Christ himself. At Mass it is being present at His own sacrifice. Third, and most importantly, the Blessed Sacrament is not about seeing Christ in the poor and suffering, welcoming them, or offering them help. That is something else entirely.
Speaking during his weekly Angelus address in St. Peter’s Square Sunday, the pope reflected on the meaning of the Catholic feast day celebrated this week, that of The Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ.
Known commonly by its Latin name of Corpus Christi, the feast commemorates Christ’s actions at the Last Supper, when he is said to have instituted the Eucharist by first holding a piece of bread and saying: “Take this, this is my body.”
Francis applied wide ranging social consequences to that action on Friday, saying those who participate in the Eucharist enter into a communion that requires them to give care for all.
“When we take and eat this bread, we become associated with the life of Jesus, we enter into communion with Him,” said the pontiff. “We commit ourselves to realize the communion between us, to transform our life into a gift, overall to the most poor.”
“Today’s feast evokes this integral message and pushes us to welcome the intimate invitation to conversion and to service, to love and to forgive,” the pope continued. “It stimulates us to become, with our lives, imitators of that which we celebrate in the liturgy.”
“The Christ who feeds us in the consecrated species of bread and wine is the same that we meet in daily occurrences,” said Francis. “It is the poor person who pulls our hand, it is the suffering person that implores our help, it is the brother that asks our availability and waits for our welcome.”
This kind of 1970’s propaganda is quite the blast from the past. Why is it that liberals always go back to their tired old playbook? Who decided that we would now be re-treated to the effeminate, suffocating nightmare that was hippie Catholicism?
When we receive Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament we do not commit ourselves to transform our life into a gift overall to the most poor. Jesus in the Eucharist is not the people we meet in daily occurrences. He is not the one who pulls our hand, implores our help or waits for our welcome. He is Jesus.
Jesus tells us when we help the least of His brothers, we do it for Him, because he loves them so much. He appreciates our love to them and expects it, but they are not actually Him. If they are in states of grace Jesus lives within them, but nevertheless Jesus is Jesus and people are people, even in states of grace.
Why must the Pope twist and minimize the Blessed Sacrament, who is God Himself, by turning it all into one big worldly poverty program? Can’t he just defend the faith and teach it? Isn’t that worth doing on it’s own?
If you’re like many people you spend most of your time helping others. But is that our faith? Isn’t it so much more?
I realize that it’s quite frustrating when Pope Francis words wind up being miscast as some endorsement of some liberal program. At the same time, I can’t find anything in your quoted material that contradicts anything the Church actually teaches. In a sense, we ARE to see Christ in everyday occurrences and people, we ARE to ensure that we offer what help we may to the poor.
Granted, it’s easy to take these as something less than what they are, to see a mere social program in the Eucharist. But for all that I’ve been aggravated by Pope Francis’ typical approach, he doesn’t appear to have said anything untoward.