Feast of Corpus Christi Celebrated

• 

Details

Published on Sunday, 14 June 2009 20:18

  
The town parish marked the Feast of Corpus Christi Sunday with a Eucharistic Procession that wound around La Piazza after the 10 a.m. Mass.

The feast has a long and colorful history. Pope Urban IV ordered its celebration in a papal bull issued in 1264. According to legend, a priest known as Peter of Prague was struggling with his doubts about believing in the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. As he prepared to consecrate the host, blood began dripping from it onto a cloth on the alter called a corporal. The priest went to the nearby hill town of Orvieto (below left), where the pope was in residence at the time, bringing the cloth. Pope Urban declared the Feast day a year later. The cloth is still kept in a special altar at the cathedral in Orvieto. At left, the cathedral at Orvieto and below it, the altar where the corporal is kept.

The tradition of a procession is said to have started in Orvieto when, some time after the Feast day was established, local residents began carrying the corporal around the town square before returning it to the cathedral.

 

 

 Below, more pictures from the Ave Maria Eucharistic procession June 14. (Ave Maria pictures by Peter Spellman and Kevin Stinnet)