Feast of Corpus Christi: Revisiting the Upper Room with the Help of Leonardo Da Vinci

For as often as you shall eat this bread and drink the chalice,

you shall proclaim the death of the Lord, until he come.

External Solemnity of Corpus Christi

6 June 2010

Epistle: 1 Cor. 11:23-29

Gospel: Jn. 6:56-59

Were ours a Catholic society, we would have celebrated the Feast of Corpus Christi last Thursday with all the solemnity and splendor that we now accord this beautiful feast. I mention this fact that we may all be reminded of the connection we should draw between the Feast of Corpus Christi and Maundy Thursday. For both days would have us return to the Upper Room to commemorate the institution of the Holy Eucharist. And yet, the approach we take today is somewhat different from that of Maundy Thursday. On Maundy Thursday, we went to the Upper Room to accompany Christ and His Disciples through the Passion and Death of Our Lord. For that reason, the joy expressed on Maundy Thursday is mixed with somberness and sorrow. The Gloria is sung, but afterwards the organ falls silent, the bells are replaced by clappers, and the altar is stripped of its festive adornments and usual appointments. The sobriety and somberness of the Passion fill our hearts, leaving little room for joy. Today, however, having passed through the sorrows of Our Lord’s Passion, as well as the joys of His Resurrection, we now revisit the Upper Room. Our purpose is twofold: First, to ponder devoutly the Holy Eucharist, that wondrous gift of Himself that Christ imparted and entrusted to His Bride, the Church; second, to give free rein to our joy and gratitude for this gift of the Holy Eucharist, going so far as to give public veneration to Our Lord contained in the Blessed Sacrament.

Let us, then, return to the Upper Room. And today, I propose to do so by way of a special place in Milan, Italy that received the attentions of an exceedingly brilliant man, one of the greatest painters of all time. The place to which I refer is the Dominican Convent of Our Lady of Grace. And the genius who left his mark there was none other than Leonardo Da Vinci.

Between the years 1495 and 1497, during a particularly fruitful period of construction, Leonardo managed to transform the north wall of the refectory of this convent from an ordinary wall into an extension of space through which the Dominican friars could gaze into the Upper Room and contemplate the scene of the Last Supper as they enjoyed their meals in the twilight of the day. Notwithstanding the fanciful attempts of certain contemporary persons to discover in Da Vinci’s painting of the Last Supper some cryptic message of scandalous import, the symbolism contained in this magnificent work of art serves only to give expression to the Catholic theology of the Mass. And so, with our mind’s eye, let us place ourselves in this famous refectory. And, in imitation of those Dominican monks who could enjoy it in all of its original splendor, let us likewise gaze upon Da Vinci’s exquisite Last Supper adorning the north wall.

As we take in the 15 × 29-foot mural as a whole, we would do well to ask ourselves the following question: What is the precise moment that Leonardo has captured with his brush? Is it the moment of consecration? No, it is not. It is the moment immediately following our Lord’s disturbing prophecy regarding his imminent betrayal. “Amen, Amen, I say to you; one of you shall betray me.” Leonardo has depicted the disciples’ reactions to Our Lord’s frightening prophecy, subtly capturing their distinct personalities. As for Judas Iscariot, he appears stunned: his secret scheming has not escaped the notice of the all-knowing Word of God.

Now, at first glance, it should seem very odd to us that Da Vinci has chosen this dramatic moment of Our Lord’s revelation of His own betrayal and not the far more important moment of the consecration, when Christ instituted the sacraments of both the Holy Eucharist and of Order. Leonardo’s choice, however, simply follows the lead of the Catholic liturgy itself. For on Maundy Thursday, an addition is made to that part of the Canon known as the Communicantes so as to make special reference to that Thursday. And that addition is this: Communi-cantes, et diem sacratissimum celebrantes, quo Dominus noster Jesus Christus pro nobis est traditus, etc. Which means: “In communion with, and with them celebrating the most sacred day on which Our Lord Jesus Christ was betrayed for us”. That a Catholic liturgy would do this makes sense, for it is Judas Iscariot’s betrayal of Our Lord that triggers that inexorable series of historical events that brings Christ from the Upper Room to Golgotha, thus linking (at least historically) the Last Supper to the Cross.

As we observe the details of the Last Supper scene a little longer, their significance begins to dawn on us. We begin to realize that, through a variety of means, Leonardo has taken this implicit link which the betrayal of Judas establishes and rendered it explicit in a way that would have been difficult, if not impossible, for the Evangelists themselves to accomplish. Take, for example, the feet of Christ. They are pressed close against one another and are situated just above one of the vertical bands of wood running down the length of the floor. Under normal circumstances, no artist would have had any reason to depict the feet of a seated male figure in this manner. But Leonardo’s purpose is to express the Catholic theology of the Mass. Accordingly, guided by his Catholic faith, Leonardo has so disposed the feet of Christ as to evoke in the mind of the perceptive observer the wood of the Cross to which Our Lord’s feet would soon be fastened, and even suggest the willingness with which the divine Victim was prepared to undergo His Passion and Death, and offer Himself up as the ultimate and perfect Sacrifice for the redemption of the world.

Consider also the disposition of Christ’s hands and arms: they are outstretched, not into the air but towards the elements of the Holy Eucharist. They address those homely species of bread and wine which He, the High Priest of the New Covenant in the order of Melchizedek, will soon consecrate. For Leonardo the Catholic well knew that the Last Supper was also the First Mass.

Finally, by happy coincidence, an extra feature of the refectory helps Leonardo achieve his theological purpose. On the wall opposite the Last Supper one finds a fresco depicting the Crucifixion. And so, if Our Lord were to look up, he would see an image of that Sacrifice, a sacramental representation of which He is about to impart to His Disciples and to His Church.

Even though over 500 years lie between us and Leonardo Da Vinci, we share the same Catholic faith that comes to us from Christ and the Apostles. As Catholics, we should recognize Leonardo Da Vinci’s association of the Last Supper with the Crucifixion and with the Mass as being nothing other than an artistic expression of what the Church has always taught in her magisterial pronouncements, and what she has celebrated in her liturgies. To be sure, this association was at one time more dramatically expressed than it is now. For instance, prior to the reform of Holy Week in the 1950s, the Passions of Matthew, Mark, and Luke began, not with the Agony in the Garden, but with the Last Supper. And when, on Good Friday, the Blessed Sacrament was retrieved from the Altar of Repose, it was not just the deacon and a couple of acolytes who went to retrieve It, but the celebrant himself, together with all the ministers, acolytes, and servers. In this way, Holy Thursday’s procession to the Altar of Repose was recalled, and with it, the Last Supper. And during this Good Friday procession, in order to associate the Holy Eucharist with the Cross that much more powerfully, the choir would sing the Vexilla Regis, the Hymn for Vespers during Passiontide, a veritable panegyric to the noble wood of the Cross.

Even though, in my opinion, the Roman rite we celebrate today, in either of its two forms, fails for the most part to integrate the sacred Triduum as well as it had prior to the 1950s, it nevertheless remains true that the way we worship today continues to reflect what we have always believed; namely, that in the divine Sacrifice carried out during the Mass, the very same Christ who made a bloody sacrifice of Himself once for all upon the Cross is likewise contained and immolated in an unbloody or sacramental manner. And we believe this for two reasons. First, because “Christ our redeemer said that it was truly his own body that He was offering under the form of bread,” and truly his own blood that He was offering under the form of wine: “This is my body; this is my blood”; “My flesh is real food, and my blood is real drink.” For this reason, “there has always been complete conviction in the Church of God that by the force of the words of consecration pronounced over the bread and over the wine, there takes place that wondrous and unique change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord, and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood,” while only the appearance of bread and wine remains. Ever since the Fourth Lateran Council, “the holy Catholic Church has most fittingly and properly called this change transubstantiation.”

The second reason we believe is that, in the Last Supper or First Mass, the pattern found in the Book of Exodus is repeated, though in a far superior way. Before God delivered the Israelites from the Egyptians, He provided them with a way both to anticipate their delivery through the celebration of the first Passover meal and for subsequent generations to commemorate and re-present that same delivery. Similarly, at the Last Supper, “after celebrating the old Passover which the whole people of the children of Israel offered in memory of their departure from Egypt”, Christ, the true Lamb of God (of which the Paschal Lamb of the Old Covenant was but an imperfect figure), “instituted a new Passover, namely the offering of Himself”. This same offering Christ commanded His Church likewise to “do in remembrance” of Him “through her priests under the visible signs of bread and wine, in memory of His own Exodus from this world to the Father, when He redeemed us by the shedding of His blood, rescued us from the power of darkness, and transferred us to His kingdom (see Col. 1:3).” For this reason, we Catholics rightly maintain the true faith of the Apostles when we assert, together with St. Paul, that at every Mass, when the Body and Blood of the Lord is made present and becomes our spiritual food, we “proclaim the death of the Lord, until he come.” This same true faith was expressed in the third century by St. Cyprian of Carthage, who declares that the “Passion of Our Lord is the Sacrifice that we offer.” In the fourth century, St. Cyril of Jerusalem handed on this same deposit of faith in his Catechetical Lectures. Commenting on the benefits of the Mass as a propitiation for the sins of both the living and the dead, he writes that “we … offer prayers to Him for those who have fallen asleep, though they be sinners. We do not plait a crown, but offer up Christ who has been sacrificed for our sins; and we thereby propitiate the benevolent God for them as well as for ourselves.” In the early fifth century, St. Augustine bore witness to this same faith in his work Against Faustus the Manichean, where he writes: “In the Psalms these words are sung: ‘A sacrifice of praise will glorify Me, and the path is there, where I will show him My salvation’. Before the coming of Christ, the Flesh and Blood of this sacrifice is promised by victims offered as likenesses thereto; in the Passion of Christ it is rendered in very truth; after Christ’s Ascension it is celebrated by sacramental memorial.” Towards the end of the 6th century, St. Gregory the Great taught the same faith when in his Dialogues he wrote: “This sacrifice alone has the power of saving the soul from eternal death, for it presents to us mystically the death of the only-begotten Son. Though he is now risen from the dead and dies no more, and death has no power over him, yet living in Himself immortal and incorruptible He is again immolated for us in the mystery of the holy Sacrifice.” And in the 13th century, we cannot fail to mention those immortal words of St. Thomas Aquinas: O sacrum convivium, in quo Christus sumitur; recolitur memoriam passionis eius; mens impletur gratia; et futurae gloriae nobis pignus datur. “O sacred banquet, in which Christ is consumed, the memory of his passion recalled, the mind filled with grace, and a pledge of future glory is given to us.” This is the faith that has been handed down through the centuries, reaffirmed at the Council of Trent, and bequeathed to us. This is the Mystery of Faith that we joyfully affirm today.

On this day, then, having revisited the Upper Room and pondered the significance of what took place there, let us thank Our Lord that, unlike the unbelieving Judas, we do believe. Let us also pray that, unlike Judas, we may never betray Our Lord by receiving Holy Communion unworthily, or by rejecting our faith and falling into the sin of apostasy. Let us also pray that those who lack the gift of the true faith may receive it and persevere in it unto eternal life. And after receiving Our Lord today in Holy Communion, let us express our joy and gratitude towards Him by giving public expression to our faith in and devotion towards our Eucharistic Lord.

O Sacrament most Holy, O Sacrament Divine,

all praise and all thanksgiving be every moment thine!

The Holy Eucharist: The Mystery of Faith

"My flesh is real food; my blood is real drink."

Feast of Corpus Christi
3 June 2010
Epistle: 1 Cor. 11:23-29
Gospel: Jn. 6:56-57

Today’s Feast of Corpus Christi is properly celebrated on Thursday, for today we commemorate the institution of the Holy Eucharist. In this respect, today’s feast is comparable to Maundy Thursday of Holy Week. In many other respects, however, these two liturgical celebrations, even though they focus our attention upon the same event, greatly differ from one another. Holy Thursday celebrates that most holy day as it took place in the life of Our Lord: the day on which He celebrated His Last Supper with His disciples; the day on which Judas Iscariot, one of the Twelve, betrayed Him to the Jews who sought to kill Him, and in so doing, unwittingly triggered those historical events that brought about our redemption. The Feast of Corpus Christi, on the other hand, celebrates the Mystery of Blessed Sacrament as the Lord’s gift of Himself to His Bride, the Church — His Body, the Corpus Mysticum.

Now while the Catholic faith contains many sublime mysteries, the mystery of the Blessed Sacrament enjoys the singular dignity of being called the Mystery of Faith, the Mysterium fidei. Why is that? Should we not, someone may reasonably ask, reserve that title to the Holy Trinity, a mystery that is wholly Other, entirely divine, entirely removed from our not so mysterious humanity? No, we should not. For far more sublime, far more mysterious, are those mysteries that entail some sort of communion between the divine and the human, between Creator and creature, between the eternal and the temporal, between the ever unchanging and the always changing. Such is the mystery of the Holy Eucharist. It makes use of lowly, corruptible matter: bread and wine. It involves a twofold change — a wondrous supernatural change, to be sure, but a change nonetheless: First, the change of the substance of the bread into the flesh of the Incarnate Word, and that of the wine into His Precious Blood, even while the species of these same lowly elements of God’s creation remain the same — veiling, as it were, from sight, the extraordinary reality hidden within. And this change doesn’t happen only once, but at every Mass celebrated in time — from the Last Supper to the present.

The other change occurs in those who worthily receive this divine food at the sacred banquet. Unlike ordinary food, which is assimilated by the one consuming, this divine Food of the living God assimilates those who worthily consume Him — the members of His Body — into Himself. In this way, the members of His Body are not only united to one another through this Sacrament of unity, but they are also united to Christ crucified, the better to love Him and one another with that same divine, sacrificial charity with which Christ loved us even unto death, death upon a cross.
How, then, does the mystery of the Holy Eucharist surpass even the mystery of the Incarnation? For Christ is true God and true man, generated from all eternity in His divinity, yet born in the fullness of time in His humanity; all-powerful and impassible in His divinity, yet was subject to weakness, fatigue, and death in His humanity. As a mystery of faith, the mystery of the Holy Eucharist surpasses even that of the Incarnation insofar as it expands and perfects our faith. For when Christ walked the earth, an act of faith was needed to believe He was the Son of the living God, but that He was truly a man was evident to all. In the Holy Eucharist, however, such is the Real Presence of Christ that our act of faith extends even to His humanity, for this too is hidden under the species of bread and wine. Understood thus, the mystery of the Holy Eucharist surpasses in its profundity the principal mysteries of our Catholic faith; namely, the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation.

Yet another reason to call the Holy Eucharist the Mystery of Faith is that it lies at the very heart of any and all authentic Christian liturgy. For a properly celebrated liturgy subordinates all of its elements and parts to the Holy Eucharist, such that these elements and parts derive their ultimate meaning and significance only in their relation to the Blessed Sacrament. For example, if one were to ask why Sacred Scripture is read during the Mass of the Catechumens, incomplete would be the response that failed to show the relationship between the Word of God and the Holy Eucharist; how the one may cause one’s heart to burn and long for the Lord, but only the latter enables one truly to recognize and know the Lord. Only the Holy Eucharist, together with the operation of the Holy Ghost, fosters that mutual indwelling between God and man; between Christ and His Bride — that unity which, on the one hand, has its original paradigm in the mutual indwelling of the divine Persons of the Blessed Trinity (what theologians call circumincession), and which, on the other hand, is reflected analogously in the unity enjoyed between spouses in the sacramental bonds of holy matrimony.

Speaking of matrimony and all things nuptial, if one were to ask why women wear veils in the house of God, the most profound and complete answer would likewise have its foundation in the Holy Eucharist. After all, veils constitute a subtle yet important element of the sacred liturgy. Briefly, then, it is in the nuptial character of the Holy Eucharist — its capacity to assimilate and unite the members of the Church, the Bride of Christ, to Christ her Head — that one will discover the deepest meaning of the veil. Put another way, the traditional custom of wearing veils visibly manifests the nuptial unity that the Holy Eucharist invisibly fosters.

I cannot fail to mention, moreover, that those women who have reclaimed and restored this ancient part of our Catholic heritage do us all a tremendous favor by gently reminding us that their capacity to bear children is a sacred capacity. What does it mean for something to be sacred? Sacred things are not only good but also dangerous. They cannot be desired, used, and enjoyed in any which way; on the contrary, they must be desired, used, and enjoyed in very specific ways. Fire, for example, is a good thing. But if used in the wrong way, it can burn, destroy, and even kill. The Blessed Virgin Mary bore Our Lord for nine months, which is why both St. Luke and St. John associate her with the Ark of the Old Covenant. She is the Ark of the New Covenant, who carried the Word of God within her womb, the Word of God — not inscribed in tablets of stone, but united to a human nature, the flesh of which she provided. Now, the Ark of the Old Covenant was a sacred object, a dangerous object. No one was allowed to touch it except for the members of the priestly tribe of Levi. Anyone else who touched it was struck dead, as happened to Uzzah, that unfortunate dunderhead who, as we read in the Second Book of Kings [6:6-7], “put out his hand to the ark of God and took hold of it, for the oxen stumbled.” If, then, the Ark of the Old Covenant was so sacred — so dangerous — as to kill those who touched it, how much more sacred must be the Blessed Virgin Mary! Similarly, precisely because their capacity to bear new life is a sacred function, and because the mores of modern society but dimly reflect and affirm the sacred character of that capacity, women who make it a point to wear the veil in liturgical settings help remind us all of this largely forgotten truth about themselves. For the same Divine Word who was born of the Virgin Mary is now reserved in a tabernacle — the liturgical equivalent of the Ark of the Old Covenant, and thus the liturgical equivalent of the Ark of the New Covenant, the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary. And because the tabernacle (to say nothing of chalices and ciboria) is a sacred object, it too is veiled. As with the Ark of the Covenant, access into it is restricted: notwithstanding the aberrant practices of contemporary times, only certain consecrated individuals can and should open the tabernacle and touch the Holy Eucharist with their hands; namely, those who have committed themselves to the virtue of chastity expressed through celibacy. Similarly, no man is allowed to “touch” a woman except when both he and the woman have committed themselves to the virtue of chastity expressed through total and exclusive fidelity to one another in the bonds of holy matrimony.
Now, the mysteries of the Catholic faith all contain this paradox: they are simple enough for the simplest child to understand and believe, yet profound enough to remain for the greatest of minds the continual object of study and contemplation. As someone once observed, the mysteries of the faith are like puddles of water at once shallow enough for a mouse to scamper across them, yet deep enough for an elephant to swim in them. The Mystery of Faith is certainly no exception. As Pope St. Pius X well knew, every child who enjoys the use of his reason can understand what the Holy Eucharist is sufficiently to receive the Blessed Sacrament in Holy Communion. At the same time, a genius like St. Thomas never tired of gazing into its depths and expounding on what he found contained therein. And when he did expound, he did so in two ways. The first way we may call the scholastic approach, and is exemplified in works like the Summa Theologiæ. Not everyone, however, can benefit from this approach, since it presupposes some training in philosophy. The other way that St. Thomas expounded the mysteries of the Catholic faith we may call the poetic approach, the best example of which we find in the Sequence of today’s Mass, the Lauda Sion. Unlike the Summa Theologiæ, everyone can ponder the truths expressed in the Lauda Sion.

One of those truths concerns the unworthy reception of Holy Communion, a truth also expressed in today’s epistle. How easy it is for Catholics living in a decadent age to become the victims of its superficiality, such that they glibly go through the outward motions of their faith while failing to discern the Real Presence in the Holy Eucharist, and failing to see any connection between the state of their souls and a worthy reception of Holy Communion! As St. Paul declares, such Catholics “shall be guilty of the Body and of the Blood of the Lord.” In the Lauda Sion, St. Thomas renders this same Biblical truth into verse: Sumunt boni, sumunt mali: sorte tamen inaequali, vitae, vel interitus. Mors est malis, vita bonis: Vide paris sumptionis Quam sit dispar exitus. “Both the wicked and the good eat of this celestial Food: but with ends how opposite! Death to the wicked, life to the good: See how from an equal reception a very different result is produced.”

Indeed, just as only the living eat food, so too only the spiritually alive should eat spiritual food. Unlike Baptism and Penance, the Holy Eucharist is not intended for the dead. And so, as we give thanks to God for the great gift He has given us in the most Blessed Sacrament, let us resolve never to dishonor or betray Our Lord by receiving the Living Bread from heaven, the Bread of Angels, so long as we find ourselves to be dead in sin. And may our faith in the Mystery of Faith remain firm and steadfast during our sojourn in the wilderness of this life, that we may one day be united to Christ and Him to us, with the company of the saints in Sion, the heavenly city.