As part of the National Eucharistic Revival, parishioners walked Sunday in the Corpus Christi Eucharistic Procession in downtown Alexandria.
“Each year we celebrate the body and blood of Christ on this Corpus Christi Sunday,” said Diocese of Alexandria Bishop Robert Marshall, who led the procession from St. Francis Xavier Cathedral to St. James Memorial Catholic Church. “We are uniting two communities of faith common in the one body of Christ.”
Corpus Christi is Latin for “Body of Christ.” The Eucharist commemorates the biblical Last Supper, in which bread and wine, representing the body and blood of Jesus Christ, are consumed.
Leonard Ford Jr., a parishioner of St. James Church, was born and raised Catholic. He wanted to be part of the ceremony to show his devotion to Catholics worldwide.
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After the pandemic, the nation’s bishops have seen that many Catholics have become separated from Mass and the church, Marshall said. They want to proclaim that they believe Christ meant what he said when he took bread and said, “This is my body” and when he took a cup of wine and said, “This is my blood.”
The bishops are calling for a National Eucharistic Revival for the next three years.
“He meant for that to be our sustenance,” said Marshall. “He said, ‘Do this in remembrance of me.’ So we continue to live that mystery out. We are fed continually by the Eucharist and a Corpus Christi Procession.”
The procession helps live that out, Marshall said.
He carried a monstrance, a sacred vessel carrying the consecrated Eucharistic host, beneath a canopy that serves as a sacred space and protection.
“This is an opportunity for the Catholic community to give visible witness to our faith in the Eucharist and our desire to share that faith with the world that surrounds us,” Marshall said in a statement on the diocese’s website.
The goal of the revival, Marshall states, is to rekindle “in the hearts of the faithful the fire of God’s love, which is most perfectly nourished and nurtured in the Sacrament of the Eucharist, in an encounter with the real presence of Jesus Christ.”
For more about the Eucharistic Revival, visit diocesealex.org
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