A Feast Invented to Answer a Question the Church Year Never Asked

Corpus Christi is fixed by this rule sixty days after Easter, the Thursday after Trinity Sunday, a date chosen because every other feast bound up with the Last Supper falls during Holy Week, when the church's attention is fixed on the Passion rather than on the Eucharist as an object of celebration in its own right. The feast's origin is unusually well documented for a medieval institution, a diocesan observance at Liege in the twelve forties promoted by the nun and mystic Juliana of Liege after reported visions urging a feast dedicated purely to the Eucharist, formalized for the whole Western church by Pope Urban the Fourth in twelve sixty four.

Urban commissioned Thomas Aquinas to compose the liturgical texts for the new feast, and several of the resulting hymns remain among the most widely used Eucharistic hymns in the Catholic tradition today. The feast is marked by outdoor processions carrying the consecrated host in a monstrance, a public display of devotion to the Real Presence that became one of the most visible expressions of Catholic Eucharistic theology in the centuries after Trent. That theology is exactly the fault line along which the feast's observance divides, kept by the Catholic Church and by some high church Anglican parishes, while Reformation traditions that reject the doctrine of the Real Presence in the same terms keep no equivalent date at all.