On Thursday, the local Church will celebrate the solemn feast of Corpus Christi. The celebration is vital for us as Church but it also defines the gift we – members of the Christian body and citizens of Trinidad and Tobago – offer to the nation.

The gift of the Church to the nation is the gift of our faith. Corpus Christi, or the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ, takes us to the heart of this faith.

The Eucharist, the real presence of Christ among us, “is the sum and summary of our faith”, according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church. The Catechism goes on to quote St Irenaeus, a Father of the Church: “Our way of thinking is attuned to the Eucharist, and the Eucharist in turn confirms our way of thinking” (1327).

A key aspect of the celebration is the annual procession through the streets. It offers the opportunity for the Church to take the words which Jesus spoke to the Apostles in the soft glow of the Holy Thursday night, “This is my body ... This is my blood” (Mark 14: 22-24), and proclaim them “from the housetops” (Matthew 10: 27).

It is a moment to make known the promise made earlier in John’s Gospel: “I am the living bread which has come down from heaven. Anyone who eats this bread, will live forever; and the bread that I shall give is my flesh, for the life of the world” (6:51).

This mystery is an inheritance “destined for all, destined for the whole world”, said Pope Benedict XVI, at last year’s celebration of this feast at the St John Lateran Basilica.

For this reason, he said, the gift of the Eucharist “should be proclaimed and exposed to view: so that each one may encounter ‘Jesus who passes’ as happened on the roads of Galilee, Samaria and Judea; in order that each one, in receiving it, may be healed and renewed by the power of his love”. Our nation, our society, dearly needs the healing and renewal that the risen Lord brings.

Solemnity of the Holy Trinity

We the Eucharistic people, the Christ-bearers, have been called to take Jesus into the streets and alleyways, into the city areas where some will not venture, into the forgotten villages of our nation and behind our prison walls – not only on Corpus Christi, but continually.

In the midst of situations at home that can cause consternation and breed hopelessness and such incomprehensible tragedy and hardship abroad, as in cyclone-hit Myanmar and earthquake-stricken south-west China, faith in the risen Lord still must guide and sustain us.

The Solemnity of the Holy Trinity that we celebrate this Sunday has an interesting link with Corpus Christi. The Trinity Sunday readings invite us to grapple with the character of a holy God, who is “a God of tenderness and compassion, slow to anger, rich in kindness and faithfulness”; a God who “loved the world so much that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not be lost but may have eternal life”.

Our God desires to make himself present to the world today, through his Son living in us and through us.

“Each of us is truly called, together with Jesus, to be bread broken for the life of the world” (Sacramentum Caritas, n. 88).