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How the Feast of Corpus Christi developed

The Feast of Corpus Christi began appearing in Church calendars in the thirteenth century. But why then? Who promoted it? How did it become universal?

(Image: Annie Theby/Unsplash.com)

O most noble memorial; to be commemorated in the innermost heart, firmly bound in the soul, diligently kept in the depth of the heart, and recalled by earnest meditation and celebration. – Pope Urban IV, Transiturus (1264)

The Feast of Corpus Christi began appearing in Church calendars in the thirteenth century. But why then? Who promoted it? How did it become universal?

From her very beginning the Church faithfully proclaimed and actualized the teaching of Jesus: “My flesh is food indeed and my blood is drink indeed” (Jn 6:55). But as she emerged from the Dark Ages, new questions arose about the nature of that presence. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, theologians applied the dialectical methods of rediscovered Greek philosophy as well as Patristic exegesis. They strove to defend the reality of the Holy Eucharist as Christ’s Body and Blood. Dissenters were censured.

The issue was settled by the ecumenical Council Lateran IV, which decreed that the entire substance of the bread and wine is transformed into the true Body and Blood of Christ without altering their appearances. The term transubstantiation used to describe—but not explain—this process had been in use since the eleventh century. It is not dependent upon the Aristotelean metaphysics of medieval scholasticism.

Lateran IV also required all Catholics above the age of reason to confess and receive Holy Communion at least once a year. Although the laity communicated rarely and had been denied access to the Precious Blood since the twelfth century, they treated the recently introduced practice of elevating the consecrated Host as the high point of attending Mass. Bells announced the moment to those inside and outside the church.

The purity of the bread and wine to be offered and the safety of the consecrated Species became matters of concern. In those days, the Blessed Sacrament was often reserved in a cupboard (aumbry) or in a locked container (pyx) hung over the altar. Freestanding towers (sacrament houses) started to appear, forerunners of the later altar tabernacles. Sanctuary lamps burned beside the reserved Eucharist in honor of Christ’s Presence.

This flowering of Eucharistic theology and worship was accompanied by vigorous preaching. Typically, the faithful were catechized with miracle stories and exempla that emphasized the living reality of Jesus. Lay piety burgeoned in response. No longer was holiness the special province of clergy and religious. The Eucharist-centered mysticism of medieval holy women became a distinctive feature of spirituality in the Middle Ages. Three-quarters of medieval lay saints were be female and the overwhelming majority of miracles involving the Eucharist happened to women.

Into this world Juliana of Mt. Cornillon was born in 1190 near Liége, a city with a long tradition of scholarship and eucharistic fervor. Orphaned at an early age, Juliana was raised by the Canonesses of St. Augustine and joined their community. It was a double monastery which some sources confusingly call Norbertine. Around 1208, Juliana began to have repeated visions of a bright moon “with a little break in part of its sphere.” She pondered for twenty years until Jesus appeared to her and explained that the dark blemish was a feast missing from the Church calendar: a celebration of the Holy Eucharist.

Juliana kept quiet about her revelation until 1225 when she was elected prioress. Then she shared her idea with her confessor, a priest at St. Martin’s Church where her friend Eva lived as an anchoress. He consulted the bishop, Archdeacon Jacques Pantaleon, and learned Dominicans who passed the suggestion on to the chancellor of the University of Paris. No one objected so the bishop of Liége proclaimed a Feast of Corpus Christi for his diocese in 1246. Unfortunately, he died a few months later at the Cistercian monastery of Fosses.

The new bishop was unsympathetic and cancelled the feast. The prior of Mt. Cornillon, superior over both sections of the monastery, was even more hostile. He accused Juliana of embezzling funds from the leper hospital which she administered and roused the citizens of Liége against her. Removed from office in 1247, she left the city and spent the rest of her life in exile. For a while she joined a community of laywomen (beguines) and then lived in a Cistercian monastery near Namur, but it was burned down in a war. Juliana ended her days as a recluse at Fosses in 1258, the same house where her friendly bishop had died twelve years earlier.

Meanwhile, Hugo of St. Cher, a notable Dominican who was Cardinal-Legate of Germany, visited Liége in 1251. He had the Feast of Corpus Christi celebrated at St. Martin’s Church, promoted it enthusiastically, and instituted it throughout German territories the following year. Hugo’s successor was equally supportive and continued his advocacy.

Archdeacon Jacques Pantaleon, who had attended the very first celebration of Corpus Christi, went on to become bishop of Verdun, patriarch of Jerusalem, and finally pope, taking the name Urban IV. In 1264, he issued Transiturus, the first papal proclamation of a new universal feast but died before the document had time to leave the curia. Urban did, however, send a personal letter to Juliana’s old friend Eva of St. Martin who had never ceased promoting Corpus Christi. She died the following year.

Although the next thirteen popes ignored Transiturus, the celebrations of Corpus Christi continued to spread across Europe through the initiatives of individual parishes (including St. Martin’s in Liége), German dioceses, Cistercian monasteries, the Dominican Order, and the city of Venice. The feast day was proclaimed once again in the papal letter Si dominum incorporated into a new collection of canon law called the Clementines. But Clement V, the Avignonese pope who had suppressed the Order of Knights Templar, died in 1314 before the official approval of the collection was complete. His successor, John XXII, revised and published the Clementines in 1317. After so many disappointments and delays, the Feast of Corpus Christi was finally installed in the universal calendar of the Church. The blotch on the moon’s bright face had been wiped away at last, more than a century after Juliana first saw it. In honor of their efforts to promote Corpus Christi, the first major Church festival suggested by a woman, Blessed Juliana of Mt. Cornillon and St. Eva of St. Martin have now have their own places in the rolls of sainthood.

Papal proclamation would have counted for little without the fervent response of the faithful, eager to adore Our Lord’s eucharistic presence. The festive Mass and the solemn procession that followed were well suited to express medieval culture’s drive to make the supernatural seem concrete. Each local procession linked the town to the cosmos. Bearing public witness to the sacramental reality of Christ’s Body and Blood rebuked heretics, from the anti-material Cathars to the Lollards and Hussites who denied transubstantiation. Feast day rituals and sermons were designed to strengthen faith and dispel doubt, with the added benefit of indulgences. Confraternities and guilds of the Blessed Sacrament added extra color to the festivities while benefitting their members in body and soul.

The feast of Corpus Christi unleashed creativity as well as devotion across Christendom. Thomas Aquinas wrote magnificent hymns for the occasion that turn doctrine into poetry: the sequence Lauda Sion, Pange lingua (source of Tantum ergo), Sacra solemniis juncta sint gaudia (source of Panis angelicus), Verba supernum prodiens (source of O salutaris hostia), and Adoro te devote. Besides formal liturgies, the Hours of the Sacrament were added to laypeople’s personal prayer books.

Corpus Christi inspired new religious art for church decoration and illuminated books. The monstrance, already used to display relics, gradually evolved into its familiar form to showcase the Blessed Sacrament for processions, adoration, and benediction. The feast was also honored with public tableaux and dramas. In medieval England, cycles of mystery plays staged around the time of the feast drew huge crowds to York, Chester, Coventry, and other towns. European cities also had similar performances as well as miracle plays centered on stories about the Eucharist itself.

Celebrating the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ unites the sublime to the simple even as the Incarnation joins Divinity to humanity. The Corpus Christi procession symbolizes our journey to Our Savior’s everlasting banquet where we will see him as he is.

(Editor’s note: This essay was originally posted at CWR on June 5, 2021.)

Extra Reading

Holy Fast, Holy Feast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women by Caroline Walker Bynum (California UP. Berkley, 1987)
A Sense of the Sacred: Roman Catholic Worship in the Middle Ages by James Monti (Ignatius. San Francisco, 2012)
Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture by Miri Rubin (Cambridge UP. CambridgeI, 1991)


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About Sandra Miesel 30 Articles
Sandra Miesel is an American medievalist and writer. She is the author of hundreds of articles on history and art, among other subjects, and has written several books, including The Da Vinci Hoax: Exposing the Errors in The Da Vinci Code, which she co-authored with Carl E. Olson, and is co-editor with Paul E. Kerry of Light Beyond All Shadow: Religious Experience in Tolkien's Work (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011).

12 Comments

  1. Feminisms creeping into your writing? Did you say: “Three-quarters of medieval lay saints were be female and the overwhelming majority of miracles involving the Eucharist happened to women” because it is a point of pride, as a woman? You are talking about a universal devotion, not some obscure cog in women’s studies. Contra your implication, the Eucharist has always been the center of the Church’s devotion since her beginning. “Eucharist centrism” is not a feature of the Middle Ages.

    • I think part of the reason the author mentions women here is because it’s commonly (and mistakenly) thought by far too many people, even Catholics, that women were ignored in the Middle Ages. I think you’re overreacting in saying this is “feminist”. It’s simply a historical note about, well, the facts.

    • Sandra Mielsel: You have written a wonderful summary of the grand theme which should be more present to our hearts and minds than it is. I have copied down the words of St Thomas glorious hymns – and have enjoyed listening to them chanted by abler voices than mine. Thank-you

  2. An interesting historical account of the institution of the Feast of Corpus Christi. Although I won’t become involved in debate regarding the many saintly women who were part of the history. Rather the actual circumstances of the institution of the Feast. A German priest Peter of Prague 1263 from what was called Bohemia, today the Czech Republic including German speaking Sudetenland, offered Mass at the small village of Bolsena in the mountains N of Rome. According to documented accounts Fr Peter, a pious priest struggled with the Real Eucharistic Presence of Christ. During Mass after the consecration when he broke the consecrated bread blood flowed unto the corporal. Overcome, elated, he wrapped the corporal and brought it to Urban IV at Orvieto. Next year, 1264, Pope Urban IV instituted the feast of Corpus Christi to promote devotion to this greatest of gifts. Urban then commissioned Saint Thomas Aquinas to compose a Mass and an office for the Liturgy of the Hours honoring the holy Eucharist. Aquinas composed the beautiful Eucharistic hymns Panis Angelicus, Pange Lingua, O Salutaris Hostia, and Tantum Ergo. This history is documented, although Sandra Miesel details history that contributed to devotion to the Holy Eucharist. Suffice it to say the miracle at Bolsena was meant to fire devotion to this most precious gift of God’s sanctifying grace.

    • Yes , the story of what happened to that priest was not mentioned. I always learned that was the reason for the Feast of Corpus Christi.

  3. Sandra, you’re a STAR. Your mystical write-up is completely from a clear mind point of view. May God continue to bless you. Amen. Rest assured of my prayers. 🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶❤️🙏👏

  4. To the best of my ability, I try to provide accurate information. (Before someone dings me with a question about Julian’s title, my sources did not agree on whether she’s a saint or beata. Her cult was approved in 1869.)

    I mentioned holy women because they were flowered as never before beginning in the twelfth century, notably chronicled by Bishop Jacques de Vitry at the time. Patterns in sainthood, styles of piety, and favorite popular devotions do change over time. The Eucharist-centered devotion of medieval women really was distinctive, as Caroline Walker Bynum’s book cited above demonstrates.

    Sorry, Fr. Morello, the Miracle of Bolsena has no demonstrable connection to the original proclamation of Corpus Christi and is neither mentioned no alluded to in the papal document. See Miri Rubin’s discussion.

    And thanks to the kind readers who complimented my article. I’m not used to that.

    • The Church would not include reference to miracles real or assumed since they’re under the spectrum of private revelation. However, Sandra, it’s safe to assume that the alleged Bolsena miracle could have inspired the Archbishop of Orvieto and the pontiff to inaugurate the feast.

      • What did Pope Urban IV know and when did he know it? He had already heard of Julianna’s vision in (or shortly after) 1230 when he was still James Pantaleon, Archdeacon of Liege. The feast was celebrated for the first time by canons of St. Martin at Liege in 1247 with the approval of the diocesan synod and two papal delegates
        On ascending the papal throne in 1261, he wrote a favorable reply to a letter promoting the feast from Julianna’s friend, Eva of St. Martin. This predates his learning about the Miracle of Bolsena in 1262. (Yes, the miracle supported Eucharistic devotion but the idea for a feast day originated with Julianna.) Urban IV issued a decree establishing the Feast of Corpus Christi on 8 September 1264 but died shortly after. Nothing further happened until a diocesan synod in Liege in 1287 ordered the festival observed in 1287.

        In case any readers are suspicious of modern academic or non-Catholic sources, the above information comes from K.A. Heinrich Kellner’s “Heortology: A history of the Christian Festivals from their Origin to the present day,” second edition, 1908. It was originally published in Germany in 1900. Kellner was a professor of Catholic theology at the University of Bonn.

        • Aha. A good argument in defense of Julianna’s vision and Urban’s favorable letter from Eva. Well, as a poor country priest with scant historiography credentials I seem to have this obstinacy common to our kind.

  5. Sister Juliana could have been influenced by the Blood Miracles in 1222 of Meersen and of St Truiden in 1223. Pilgrimages were made to both towns, not far from Liege.
    St Truiden in Belgium and Meersen in the Netherlands.

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