Fr. Cipolla’s Sermon for the Feast of Corpus Christi

Sermon for the Feast of Corpus Christi 2023,

St. Mary Church, Norwalk, CT

By Father Richard G. Cipolla

What is today about? It is about everything real and that matters. It is about
the lushness of the startlingly green grass we see around us. It is about the
reddened white of dogwood, the gentle lavender of lilac, the presumption of
the peony. It is about the windows at Chartres cathedral, the dome of St.
Peter’s, the smile on the faces of the putti who peer at the worshipper in San
Andrea al Quirinale. It is about parades and marching bands and color and
sound. It is about sacrifice, especially those who have given their lives for
others. It is about people, about mothers, fathers, grandfathers and
grandmothers, about teenagers, about little kids—all the uniquely real and
part of the whole creation of God. It is about Christmas, the Birth, it is about
Good Friday, the Death; it is about Easter, the new Life; it is about Spirit; it
is about God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. But ultimately it is about
God, this feast, because it is about everything there is. It is about God
because it is the feast of material reality, the affirmation loud and clear that
God created all things and said: This is good. This is when we say to a
world that thinks that all you see is all you get that God not only sustains all
that there is, but now uses it to convey his power and glory and grace.

This is the feast on which we celebrate our basic belief as Catholics that all reality is sacramental, shot through with the glory of God, that all physical reality is being transformed by the power of God in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit—see I make all things new—and that physical reality itself has the potential to be transformed into God himself.
This is the feast that demands we go beyond, far beyond, this is the feast that
leaves far behind the reduction of worship to entertainment and
sentimentality. My favorite line from the sequence writing by St Thomas
Aquinas for this feast is, as many here know, quantum potes, tantum audes.
Dare to do as much as you can, in giving him praise. This is not merely a
feast, but a feast of extravagance, a feast redolent with the costly perfumed
ointment poured out so lavishly on the feet of Jesus before his death, a feast
that engages the senses, which goes beyond the body to the body of Christ,
the Body of the Lord, Corpus Christi. This is the feast that reminds us of the
physical ground of our spirituality, our grounding in the Word made flesh.
This is the feast that is the antidote to the deadly poison of tedious
spiritualization that takes Christianity out of the real and into the vapidity of
moralism and self-congratulation. This is the feast that celebrates the
triumph of Easter, the only triumph worth celebrating. But it is also the feast
that comes out of the relationship in God himself. Only because God is
loving relationship in the Holy Trinity, can we relate to him, can we love
him, and be loved in return. This is the feast of love, what it is and what it does: nec sumptus consumitur in St Thomas’ words: love does not consume; it gives and in giving it receives.

And with the procession at the end of Mass, we not only bring Christ into
the world, our world of Norwalk, we inject Catholic culture into the world.
This is not some culture of the past that is associated with the middle ages.
This is the culture that is the fruit and the life of a world into which the
infinite God of truth, goodness and beauty became finite, one of us, in the
tabernacle of the womb of Mary. This is the affirmation of a Catholic culture
that does not dwell in a ghetto, that is never drawn in on itself, that is not
afraid of the secular world, but rather is the culture of life. It is the
affirmation of wintergreen and new mown hay and the steam of chicken
soup. It is the affirmation of chant, of Palestrina, of Mozart, of Poulenc and
Messiaen. It is the affirmation of the luminous anonymous icons of the
Eastern churches, of Fra Angelico, of Michelangelo, of Bernini, and Duncan
Stroik. This is the affirmation of the tender velvet of veal scallopini, of the
dancing on the tongue of Brunello di Montalcino, the deepness of a mousse
de chocolat. But this is also the affirmation of the home made bread dipped
into home made wine, the sauerkraut, the borscht, the fried baccalà, the hot
dog with the yellow mustard at the family picnic. This is the affirmation of
the sitting out on the stoop on a warm summer’s night with the sounds of
chatter and laughter, of the first communion dress that somehow grows into
the prom dress and into the wedding dress. This is the affirmation of
wrinkled hands, and of lined faces, the affirmation of the extraordinary
beauty of ordinary life.

And it is all of this that we affirm on the feast of Corpus Christi and that we
celebrate in the procession. It is we who bring Christ to the world; it is we
who accompany him in the beauty of music and of vestments and of incense.
And by our going out into this neighborhood, it is not only we but also those
who do not know Christ, those who have no idea of what is going on: we are
all blessed by the holy Body of Christ as he blesses all on His way.
Quantum potes, tantum audes: dare to do as much as you can. And what we
dare to do today is to worship the living Christ, the beauty of God, and to
bring that beauty into the world.

And yet we celebrate this feast in the shadow of those in the Church, at the
highest levels of authority, who are trying to stamp out what has been done
for centuries on this day and what we are doing here today. They are the
enemies of Tradition, not of traditions, but of that which lies at the very heart of the Catholic faith, the passing down through 20 centuries of what
the apostles believed that is the foundation for the growth of that Tradition in
the power of the Holy Spirit that lies at the very heart of the living Catholic
faith. And that act of handing down and growth through the centuries
happened not at all because of meetings of experts, not at all because of
planning sessions, not at all as exercises in logical inferences: but rather as a
baby develops in its mother’s womb, mostly hidden, mysteriously,
organically, some things that are let go because they do not fit the whole
and springs of newness that become a part of the whole that is living because
they are in synch, they vibrate with the same holy frequency that sings the
song of the living God, the source of all life, all being.

This great parish was at the very forefront of the recovery of the sacred in
the Liturgy by returning to its source in the Tradition of the Church, which is
the Mass we celebrate here today with such beauty and joy. It is because of
the witness of parishes like St. Mary’s that so many of the new priests being
ordained the past several years have themselves discovered the power and
the authenticity of the Traditional Roman Mass. And they are the future of
the priesthood. But they would look silly without the laity who have
discovered the beauty and depth of Catholic worship in the Traditional
Mass. And a real part of that laity is you who come to this church on this day
of the feast of Corpus Christi, the affirmation of the reality of the Holy
Sacrifice of the Mass and the active realization that Beauty has saved the
world and in this very time and place is saving the world here in this parish church.

There is indeed a terrible temptation in these difficult times for parish
churches like this church to turn inward, to just try to survive the current
persecution and then go back to being a lovely island in a sea of grey
masses. Just as long as they leave us alone to do what we want to do. That
is literally a dead end. This parish must never turn its back on its obligation
to evangelize the Church in its own way in a time when those in power in
the Church have forgotten the binding force of Scripture and Tradition and
who have forgotten that at the heart of the worship of the Catholic Church is
not a mutual admiration society between priest and people but rather the
surprise of the Lion of Judah, the one with the sword in his mouth with
blazing eyes, the one who has died the death of God and who plumbed the
depths of hell, who cuts through the secular cant of the world and those
clerics and their followers who invented the spirit of Vatican II to turn their
backs on the Tradition of the Church.

It is the Lord of all that there is that we will carry in procession in this small
world of this neighborhood in Norwalk, CT and He blesses all creation and
continues to recreate and make all things new just as he does in the miracle
of the Mass where a bit of the created order becomes divine.