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Details on weekday services and events can be found here.
Due to lack of availability of sufficient personnel, the Sung Mass of Corpus Christi on 30 May 2024 has been cancelled.
Please note that the Vicar will say a Low Mass of the Feast at 6 p.m.
The Exterior Solemnity (Procession & Benediction) will take place after the Sung Mass on the First Sunday after Trinity (2 June).
Thursday, 30 May, 2024
CORPUS CHRISTI:
THE BODY AND BLOOD OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST
6:15 p.m. Solemn Mass & Procession of the Blessed Sacrament
(Both in-person and online)
Music:
Prelude: On the Chorale “Schmucke dich, O libe Seele,” BWV 654 – J.S. Bach (1685-1750);
Mass: Missa Secunda – Hans Leo Hassler (1599);
Offertory Antiphon: Sacerdotes Domini – William Byrd (1605);
Communion Motet: Panis angelicus – Claudio Casciolini (1697-1760);
Postlude: Improvisation – Fr David Smith
Live-Stream Link | Download Leaflet (coming soon)
O God, who in a wonderful sacrament hast left unto us a memorial of thy passion: Grant us so to reverence the holy mysteries of thy Body and Blood, that we may ever know within ourselves the fruit of thy redemption; who livest and reignest with the Father in the unity of the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.
About Corpus Christi
We have gone, step by step, in the course of the liturgical year, from the consideration of the mysteries of the life of Jesus to the contemplation of the Blessed Trinity, whose feast we celebrated last Sunday. Jesus, our Mediator, our Way, has taken us by the hand and led us to the Trinity; and today it seems as though the three Persons Themselves wish to take us back to Jesus, considered in His Eucharist. “No man cometh to the Father but by me” (John 14:6), Jesus said, and He added, “no man can come to me except the Father… draw him” (ibid. 6:44). This is the journey of the Christian soul: from Jesus to the Father, to the Trinity; from the Trinity, from the Father, to Jesus. Jesus brings us to the Father, the Father draws us to Jesus. The Christian cannot to do without Christ; He is, in the strictest sense of the word, our Pontiff, the great Bridge-builder who has spanned the abyss between God and us. At the end of the liturgical cycle in which we commemorate the mysteries of the Savior, the Church, who like a good Mother knows that our spiritual life cannot subsist without Jesus, leads us to Him, really and truly present in the Most Holy Sacrament of the altar. The solemnity of the Corpus Domini is not just the simple memorial of an historical event which took place almost two thousand years ago at the Last Supper; rather, it recalls to us the ever-present reality of Jesus always living in our midst. We can say, in truth, that He has not “left us orphans,” but has willed to remain permanently with us, in the integrity of His Person in the fulness of His humanity and His divinity. “There is no other nation so great,” the Divine Office enthusiastically sings, “as to have its gods so near as our God is present to us” (Roman Breviary). In the Eucharist, Jesus is really Emmanuel, God with us.
– Adapted from Father Gabriel of S. Mary Magdalene, O.C.D.,
Divine Intimacy: Meditations on the Interior Life for every Day of the Liturgical Year, p. 548.