Sunday, June 7, 2026
Last Sunday, the Church celebrated the Trinity as a revealed mystery through God’s relationship with humanity. The Trinity, one God in three Persons, not three Gods, is a mystery. This Sunday we celebrate another mystery: Corpus Christi. Jesus Christ gives Himself to the Church in the Eucharist: truly present, sacrificially offered, and uniting believers into one Body. Catholic teaching names the Eucharist the “source and summit” of the Christian life, the efficacious sign and cause of the Church’s unity, and the place where Christ is present and acting.
The COVID-19 pandemic painfully revealed that humans need companionship and mutual presence; we thrive on shared life and communion, not isolation. When ordinary gathering was interrupted, the loss was not only social but also spiritual, because the Church does not understand the Mass as a private devotion or a weekly habit but as the public worship of Christ and His Body, the Church, in which the faithful are fed by the Bread from heaven. It is therefore no surprise that many Catholics felt a sharpened Eucharistic hunger when they were limited to following Mass online and could not receive Holy Communion. The experience made visible that the Church’s life rests not on a building but on the living communion of the People of God gathered by the Spirit. God does not treat material food as worthless; rather, He gives it as a gift, but not as our final sustenance. It is in the Eucharist that the Word made flesh sustains life. Our spiritual hunger can only be fed by God’s life-giving presence, and the Eucharist is not merely a moment of spiritual remembrance but an actual participation in Christ that forms a real union. Jesus identifies himself as “living bread that came down from heaven”—John 6:51. He speaks plainly of eating His flesh and drinking His blood, and the listeners dispute it because the language sounds impossible, even grotesque. The Church invites us to recognize the mystery of a God who does not merely watch from afar as we wander our own wildernesses but who enters into union with the very fabric of our physical existence, becoming the sustenance we require for the journey. Yet its fruitfulness in us is not automatic; the sacrament bears fruit more fully when the heart freely welcomes it. God offers life, but God does not force the heart to receive.
Saint Paul in today’s New Testament makes clear that our reception of the Eucharist should show itself in how we treat others, even the difficult ones: “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? … we, though many, are one body.” —1 Corinthians 10:16-17. Communion reaches beyond our relationship with God to embrace the whole community. When we receive the Body and Blood of Christ, we’re called to let go of attitudes that splinter His Body: resentment, division, and the private “murmuring” that holds onto hurt instead of choosing forgiveness. Our call for today and going forward is not simply to believe the mystery of the Eucharist but to live a life of surrender as the one body of the Church.
Go in Peace to Love and Serve the Lord.