Corporis Christi

Feast of Corporis Christi

Feast of Corporis Christi, (Lat. festum corporis Christi, i.e. festival of the Body of Christ, Fr. fête-Dieu or fête du sacrement, Ger. Frohnleichnamsfest), a festival of the Roman Catholic Church in honour of the Real Presence of Christ in the sacrament of the altar, observed on the first Thursday after Trinity Sunday.

By a bull of 1264 Urban IV made the festival, hitherto practically confined to the diocese of Liége, obligatory on the whole Church,1 and a new office for the festival was written by Thomas Aquinas himself.

The procession of the Host on Corpus Christi day became, as it were, a public demonstration of Catholic orthodoxy against Protestantism and later against religious Liberalism. In most countries where religious opinion is sharply divided the procession of Corpus Christi is therefore now forbidden, even when Catholicism is the dominant religion. In England occasional breaches of the law in this respect have been for some time tolerated, as in the case of the Corpus Christi procession annually held by the Italian community in London. An attempt to hold a public procession of the Host in connexion with the Eucharistic Congress at Westminster in 1908, however, was the signal for the outburst of a considerable amount of opposition, and was eventually abandoned owing to the personal intervention of the prime minister.

Source: Encyclopedia Britannica (1911)