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Today is the Feast of Corpus Christi. And the man the Church trusted to give the feast its words was the most formidable intellect she has ever produced — which is the entire point.
The devotion did not begin with Thomas. It began in the visions of a Belgian nun, St. Juliana of Liège, and was first kept locally in Liège in 1246. But it was Aquinas — then living at the papal court at Orvieto, the most brilliant theologian in Christendom serving at the pope’s side — who helped move it from a local observance to a feast for the entire Church. And when Pope Urban IV established it universally in 1264, in the bull Transiturus de Hoc Mundo — the first feast a pope ever mandated for the whole Latin Rite — the pope needed a Mass and an Office worthy of it: hymns, readings, prayers for the entire Church to pray forever. For that, he turned to one man. Thomas Aquinas.
Sit with who that was. Aquinas is, by wide consensus, the greatest philosopher-theologian in the history of Christianity — a mind so rigorous that secular universities still teach him, so vast that his unfinished Summa remains the most ambitious intellectual project the West ever attempted. If raw intellect could reason its way out of the Eucharist, no one was better equipped to do it.
And here is what that mind produced for Corpus Christi: the Pange Lingua. The Lauda Sion. The Adoro Te Devote. The Tantum Ergo your parish still sings at Benediction; the Panis Angelicus sung at weddings by people who have no idea a 13th-century Dominican wrote it. Seven hundred and sixty years later, the whole Church still prays the words he chose.
Now read what he actually wrote, because this is the part that should stop you.
In the Adoro Te Devote, Aquinas says of the Host: “Sight, touch, and taste in thee are each deceived; the ear alone most safely is believed. I believe all the Son of God has spoken; than Truth’s own word there is no truer token.”
Read that again, and remember who is saying it. The most powerful reasoner the Church ever had is telling you that at the altar your senses fail — your eyes, your hands, your tongue all report “bread” — and that the only faculty that reaches the truth there is faith in the word of Christ. The man who trusted human reason more than almost anyone who ever lived knelt before the Eucharist and wrote that reason’s own instruments are deceived here, and that the word of Christ is the one thing that is not.
This is the answer to the question every skeptic thinks is devastating: “You really believe it’s literally His body?”
Yes. And the smartest man in the history of the Church examined that exact claim with more rigor than any modern critic has ever brought to it — and concluded that when Christ took bread and said Hoc est corpus meum, “This is my body,” a thing becomes what its Creator declares it to be. The “it’s just a symbol” theory is not a more sophisticated position than Aquinas reached. It is a 16th-century retreat from what every Christian, East and West, had believed for fifteen hundred years — and it was answered, in advance, by a man who could out-think its inventors in his sleep.
There is a tradition told of him at Naples. Praying before a crucifix after writing on the Eucharist, Thomas heard a voice: “You have written well of me, Thomas. What reward will you have?” And the greatest mind the Church ever produced — who could have asked for anything — answered: “None other than Yourself, Lord.”
That is Corpus Christi.
The most brilliant man who ever served the Church bent the whole of that brilliance to one task: to adore, and to teach the rest of us to adore, a Presence his own genius told him was really, truly, substantially there under the appearance of bread. He did not want a reward for it. He wanted the One he had defended.
Today the Church carries that same Host through the streets, in the monstrance, with the hymns Thomas wrote. Not a symbol. Not an idea. A Person — the Body of Christ, really present — exactly as the smartest man in her history said, on his knees, with his reason laid down at the foot of the altar.
Adoro te devote. I devoutly adore you.