Thursday June 7th
CORPUS CHRISTI will be celebrated in style at Arundel Cathedral today with an evening Mass and procession, with the traditional glorious Carpet of Flowers on the Cathedral floor, Bishop presiding, lots of candles, Knights of Malta in robes, all the trimmings...yes, that's right. This evening, Thursday.
So we can have the feast on its proper day, then? Well, I hope so - and please, Bishops, next year and the year after that, and all the years to come, can we PLEASE HAVE OUR FEAST DAYS BACK so that we can enjoy and honour them, as people will be enjoying today at Arundel?
3 comments:
When I was a little boy I used to wonder why it was called a feast day. My mother was unusually obervant so we'd always go to Mass. But then it would be fish fingers and beans for dinner, as normal. Somehow we allowed the feasts to degenerate into chores to degenerate into people not even attending, which wasn't a situation the bishops could just ignore.
Malcolm McLean
Hi Joanna,
In Ireland too, as you probably know, the Bishops moved some major Feastdays to Sundays a few years back. I was pleasantly surprised, therefore, when I went to Mass at St. Mary's Pro-Cathedral in Dublin today. We had a Votive Mass of the Blessed Sacrament - a clever way to lessen the damage! Then in the evening we had the Diocesan Corpus Christi Procession (a recent innovation - this is only the third year) in the grounds of Clonliffe College (the former diocesan seminary). I would estimate that there were about 2,000 people there which was very heartening. This year we are also marking the 75th anniversary of the International Eucharistic Congress in Dublin in 1932. It must have been a truly amazing event, with crowds rivaling those seen for the Papal Visit in 1979.
Quite right - the Bishops couldn't ignore it - but surely there was another way rather than implying it didn't matter after all! A bit of a kick in the teeth to those of us who did bother to go and worked hard, in our schools and families, to make the day special.
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