The Blessed Sacrament

A Sermon for the Feast of Corpus Christi by Cardinal Manning, who died in 1892.

CORPUS CHRISTI is a second feast of the Nativity : a Christmas festival in the summer-tide, when the snows are gone and flowers cover the earth. And whence comes all this joy but from the divine fact which St. John declares, "The Word was made Flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld His Glory?"

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IT MAY BE therefore truly said that where Jesus is present in the Blessed Sacrament, there is present all that God has ordained for the salvation of man. The Blessed Sacrament, then, binds together the whole order of divine facts by which we are redeemed. The Incarnation of the Eternal Son, His exaltation to be the Head of His Church, the constitution and organization of His Mystical Body, the coming and inhabitation of the Holy Ghost united by an indissoluble and eternal union to that Body, the institution of Seven Sacraments—all these are works of omnipotence, and, as I have said, Divine facts permanent in the world, and imperishable because sustained by the same power from which they flow. They constitute an order, because they are related to each other, some proceeding from others, the lower depending on the higher in the disposition of God's wisdom and power. Being an order, they constitute a perfect whole, as unity in itself. They are sustained by resting upon their center, the presence of the Incarnate Word, and they are incorporated and enshrined in the Church, which is one visible, undivided and universal, the Tabernacle of God among men.

Wheresoever, then, this divine order is, there is the whole dispensation of grace through Jesus Christ, with all His Sacraments, jurisdiction, and authority.

There is also His whole and perfect revelation "the truth as it is in Jesus," without addition, diminution, or change of a jot, or of a tittle. For what is truth, or the dogma of faith, but the outline, or delineation of these divine facts, first each one severally, next all collectively, in the order and unity by which God has combined them together? What are the doctrines of faith but the delineation of the presence of Jesus, and all that flows from it, first on the intelligence of the whole mystical Body with the pencil of light by which the Holy Ghost traced the mysteries of the Kingdom of God upon the minds of the Apostles? The divine facts are the substance, doctrine is but the reflection, or the conformity of the human reason to the Divine by the intervention of these facts of almighty power. It is not the reason which creates dogma, any more than the eye which creates the image upon the surface of the water. It is the creation of God which reflects itself upon both the water and the eye. We see what God has created, and by a power which God alone can bestow. So with the dogma of faith. What is the doctrine of the presence of Jesus in the Holy Eucharist, of the mystical Body, of the Church reigning in heaven, or purifying beyond the grave, or suffering upon earth, and consequently of the Communion of Saints, their intercession and invocation, of the Seven Sacraments, including the jurisdiction over souls, the power of absolution, and the like—what are all these but the outlines and reflections of an order of divine facts, springing from the Incarnation, permanent and imperishable, in which are verified the words of the Evangelist, "We beheld His glory, the glory of the Only-Begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth?" (St. John i. 14.)

This it is which accounts for the immutability of the dogma of faith in the midst of an intellectual world of flux and change, where nothing holds its own for half a generation, or half the lifetime of a man.

Take for example the changeless identity of the faith which St. Augustine, St. Paulinus, and St. Wilfrid preached in England: the supremacy of the Vicar of Jesus Christ, the Seven Sacraments, the Sacrifice of the Altar, the communion and intercession of the saints, the expiation of Purgatory, the honor due to the Mother of God. St. Bede, in the century after, recites all these as the faith of the Anglo-Saxon people. Pass over nine hundred years; these same doctrines lived on in the hearts and mouths of the Catholics of England—for them they contended and were martyred. Pass over three hundred years again; they are the doctrines which the successors of St. Augustine, St. Paulinus, and St. Wilfred preach at this day to the remnant of their children. Whence comes this marvelous and supernatural immutability of dogma? From the perpetual and supernatural immutability of the order of divine facts which these doctrines only delineate and express. The shadow cannot vary when the substance which shapes it is changeless, and the light which casts it never wavers. The Divine facts are immutable, and their outline is cast upon the intelligence of the Church by "the Father of lights, in Whom is no variablesness nor shadow of vicissitude." (St. James i. 17.)

Even in the great Greek schism, which has rent itself from obedience to the Vicar of Christ, and after its schism labored to justify it by errors which border upon heresy, even there all the conditions of truth and grace remain. In a moment, as once already in the Council of Florence, if it would but renounce its national pride, its schism and the contentious if not heretical errors it had elaborated, it might be restored as a whole to Catholic unity. It has valid Orders, and the presence of Jesus, and the whole order of Divine facts and truths, less only by its schism and its errors. But it is recoverable, and one day may rise again as from the dead. Not so those bodies which have lost the perpetual presence of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, and have mutilated the order of divine facts and the organization of the Mystical Body: for them corporate reunion is impossible. They are in dissolution and must be recreated by the same Divine power. Their members may be saved one by one, as men picked off from a raft, or from a reef, but the ship is gone. Its whole structure is dissolved. There remains no body or frame to be recovered from the wreck.

For where the Blessed Sacrament is not, all dies. As when the sun departs all things sicken and decay, and when life is gone the body returns to its dust; so with any province or member of the Church. There was a time when the truth and grace which went out from Canterbury and York spread throughout the whole of England, and bound it together in a perfect unity of faith and communion, of Christian intelligence and Christian charity. There was but one jurisdiction reigning over all the people of England, guiding them by a divine voice of changeless faith, and sanctifying them by the Seven Sacraments of grace. But then the grand old churches were the majestic tabernacles of the Word made Flesh. Jesus dwelt there in the Divine Mystery of the Holy Eucharist. His presence radiated on every side, quickening, sustaining, upholding the perpetual unity of His Mystical Body. Then came a change, slight indeed, to sense, but, in the sight of God, fraught with inexhaustible consequences of supernatural loss. Does any one know the name of the man who removed the Blessed Sacrament from the Cathedral of Canterbury, or from York Minster? Is it written in history? or is it blotted out from the knowledge of men and known only to God and His holy angels? Who did it, and when it was done, I cannot say. Was it in the morning, or in the evening? Can we hope that some holy priest, in sorrow, yielding to the violence of the storm then falling upon the Church, out of love to His Divine Master removed His Eucharistical Presence to save it from profanation? or was it some sacrilegious hand that dragged Him from throne, as of old He was dragged from Gethsemane to Calvary? We cannot know. It was a terrible deed; and that name, if it be recorded, has a terrible brand upon it. But a change which held both on earth; and in heaven had been accomplished. Canterbury and York went on the day after as the day before. But the Light of Life had gone out of them. Men were busy as not knowing or not believing what was done, and what would follow from the deed. There was no Holy Sacrifice offered morning by morning. The Scriptures were  read  there,  but there  was  no  Divine Teacher to interpret them. The Magnificat was| chanted still, but it rolled along the empty roofs, for Jesus was no longer on the altar. So it is to this day. There is no light, no tabernacle, no altar, nor can be till Jesus shall return  thither. They stands like the open sepulcher, and we may believe that angels are there, ever saying, "He is not here. Come and see the place where the Lore was laid." (St. Matt, xxviii. 6.)

But this is not all. The change, so imperceptible to sense, in the supernatural order, is potent and irresistable. The center of the order of grace had been taken away, and the whole had lost its unity and its coherence. Separation from the visible Body of Christ is separation from the presence and assistance of the Holy Ghost Who inhabits it. There is no influx of His divine and infallible light into the intelligence of a body which breaks from the unity of the Church. There is no divine voice speaking through it as His organ of immutable truth. Straightway all began to dissolve and go to pieces. The sinews relaxed and lost their tenacity, the joints and bands of what had been the Mystical Body parted asunder. For three hundred years it has been returning into its dust. In the day when the Blessed Sacrament was carried out of the churches of England, the whole population was contained with the unity of the one Body. Now hardly one-half remains to the Church which taught the fatal lesson of separation. From generation to generation, by a succession of crumbling secessions, divisions, and subdivisions, the flock it could not retain when the Blessed Sacrament is no longer upon the altar, has wandered from it and dispersed.

And what has happened visibly in its external divisions of communion, was wrought invisibly in the internal aberrations of its doctrines; the order of divine facts being broken through, and the substance shattered, the shadow betrayed its ruin. What reflection does the Anglican Church leave upon the intelligence of the people? If dogma be the intellectual conception of divine realities, what dogma is to be found where the divine realities of the Sacramental Body and Mystical Body of Jesus, His Presence, His Sacrifice, His Seven Sacraments, His infallible and perpetual Voice, are denied?

But into this I will not enter. I have no will, on such a subject as this, to speak controversially. One word is all I will say. The Reformers of the Church of England took for the basis of their religion, not the perpetual and infallible teaching of the Spirit of Jesus in His Church, but the Bible. A written Book was erected in the place of the Living Teacher, so as to exclude His supreme living voice. Anglican Christianity was to be based upon the Bible. But it is precisely this basis that Anglicans have been ruining under their own feet—so sure is it the Incarnate Word in the Tabernacle and the Written Word in the Scriptures cannot be put asunder. They come and go together.

Let it be, then, our chief work to propagate the knowledge and love of the Blessed Sacrament, not only for the sanctification of the faithful but for the conversion of those who have been robbed of the Presence of Jesus. The people, that is the poor, of England, were innocent of the great offense. They did not remove Jesus from the altar. They were disinherited of their true birthright in His Presence. They did not pull down His throne. They rose in arms, and especially in Northern and Western England, for the faith of the Blessed Sacrament. I believe there is no surer instrument of their return to the unity of grace and truth than the manifestation of the love of Jesus in the Holy Eucharist. It is a way of controversy altogether uncontroversial. It has no sharp accents, or contentious tones, or wrangling arguments. It bears witness by its own light, and preaches by its divine silence.

Moreover it is a witness for truth which contains all truth. It preaches the Incarnation, the unity, perpetuity, imperishableness, and divine immutability of the Church and of the Faith; communion with Jesus, communion with the living and the dead, with the whole Church on earth, with the saints in heaven.

And besides this, it draws with its own sweetness, and holds by its own attraction. It convinces the intellect by its own light, and persuades the will by its own power of love; thereby winning the soul in all its faculties, the whole man to the obedience of faith. He who believes in the Presence of Jesus in the Tabernacle cannot long doubt that His Mystical Body is one, visible, indivisible, and infallible; that its voice is the voice of Jesus, divine and changeless in every age; and believing this, he cannot linger long upon the threshold of the only Church of God among men. Thus the unity of the true Fold and of the Truth as it is in Jesus, would spread once more in England evenly and irresistibly as a circle on the waters.

But if we would make other men to know and love Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, we must first be disciples of the Blessed Sacrament ourselves. We must know and love Jesus, then, with an especial fidelity. Make it the support of our supernatural life in Sacramental Communion as often as we may, in spiritual Communion as often as we can—in daily visits to the Presence of Jesus, kneeling in prayer, or sitting in silence at His feet, as often and as long as the works and hindrances of life will permit. Such was the source of the power and sanctity of St. Mary Magdalene of Pazzi. When she was a child, before she was admitted to Holy Communion, she used to follow her mother to the steps of the altar, and creep close to her side as she received the Bread of Life, because, as she said, she was thereby nearer to the Presence of Jesus. And through her life of supernatural sanctity in the cloister, she used to venerate her sisters as they returned from Communion, calling them the living Tabernacles of Jesus. This habit of faith would make us to be disciples of the Blessed Sacrament, and would make it to be the support of our life. And then our relation to Him would be the measure and the motive of our actions. We should begin every day with Him, in the morning, and go out from His Presence to our daily work; and in the evening return to His side again before we lie down to rest. And so His words would be fulfilled in us, "A little time and ye shall not see Me; and again a little time and ye shall see Me, because I go to the Father." (St. John xiv. 16.) He is gone to the Father, and yet He is here, and we see Him and behold His glory; but in a little while we shall see Him as He is. Here He is veiled, but the veil grows finer year by year; a sense of nearness, a consciousness of relation to Him, grows so lively and so sensible, it turns all the balance of the heart away from the world and from self to Him, our only Lord, "Whom not having seen you love in Whom also now, though you see Him not, you believe, and believing shall rejoice with joy unspeakable," (I St. Peter i. 8,), waiting for the time when the veil shall melt away and you shall see Him face to face.