Corpus Christi Countdown

Corpus Christi, celebrated on the Thursday sixty days after Easter, is the Catholic feast honouring the Eucharist — famed worldwide for solemn processions and spectacular carpets of flowers, petals and coloured sawdust laid along their routes.

History

Corpus Christi is one of the few great feasts of the Christian calendar whose beginnings can be traced to a single person. From around 1208, Juliana of Liège, a canoness in the Low Countries, reported visions urging that the Church set aside a day devoted wholly to the Eucharist. Her long advocacy bore fruit in 1246, when Bishop Robert of Torote established the feast for the diocese of Liège. Less than two decades later, Pope Urban IV — who had earlier served as archdeacon in Liège — extended it to the whole Latin Church with the bull Transiturus de hoc mundo of 1264. Thomas Aquinas is traditionally credited with composing the feast's liturgy, including hymns such as Pange Lingua and Lauda Sion that are still sung today. After a slow start, the feast spread rapidly once Pope Clement V confirmed it at the Council of Vienne in 1311–12 and Pope John XXII promoted its observance. Its defining custom soon emerged: a procession in which the consecrated host is carried through the streets in a gleaming monstrance beneath an embroidered canopy, accompanied by clergy, confraternities and townsfolk. In medieval England the day became the occasion for the great cycles of mystery plays staged by craft guilds in cities such as York and Coventry. Over the centuries communities began adorning the procession route itself, and Corpus Christi grew into one of the world's most visually stunning feasts. Italian towns such as Genzano perfected the infiorata, intricate pictures composed entirely of flower petals; Spanish towns from Ponteareas in Galicia to La Orotava in the Canary Islands lay carpets of petals, greenery and coloured volcanic sand; and in Germany, where the day is called Fronleichnam, boats carry the sacrament across Bavarian lakes in floating processions. Missionaries and settlers carried the feast to Latin America, where Brazilian towns like Ouro Preto and Castelo still spread kilometres of coloured-sawdust carpets before the procession passes.

Meaning

For Catholics, Corpus Christi — Latin for "the Body of Christ" — celebrates the belief that Jesus is truly present in the consecrated bread and wine of the Eucharist. While Holy Thursday recalls the institution of the sacrament amid the solemnity of Holy Week, Corpus Christi returns to that gift in a spirit of pure thanksgiving and joy, without the shadow of the Passion. Carrying the host through ordinary streets expresses the conviction that faith belongs in the midst of daily life, blessing homes, fields and neighbourhoods. The feast has also become a remarkable celebration of community artistry. Entire towns work through the night laying carpets of petals, dyed sawdust and sand that exist only for the few hours before the procession walks over them — a shared act of devotion, craftsmanship and hospitality that draws neighbours and visitors together in early summer.