June 18, 2006

The thirteenth century produced some of the most remarkable people. Jacques Pantaléon, the son of a cobbler in Troyes, became a priest and scholar and papal diplomat, reforming the Church in Germany and the Teutonic knights. In France in 1253 he was made Bishop of Verdun, where in World War I history's most slaughterous battle would be fought. Two years later he became Patriarch of Jerusalem and worked hard in a time of conflict similar to what is going on there now. Jacques' influence and travels are breathtaking, considering the difficulties of communication and transportation.

His election as Pope Urban IV followed the reign of the vacillating and timorous Alexander IV. Urban strengthened discipline. A remarkably efficient banking system advanced the commercial life of Europe and he fought hard to subdue the Hohenstaufen dynasty occupying Sicily. The hanging of their scion Conradin on the scaffold in Naples in 1268 was an important political advance. In an attempt to establish some sort of order, the Pope offered the throne of Naples to the son of the English king Henry III but the confusion of the times did not see this carried through.

As pope, Urban never was able to enter Rome itself because of remnant forces opposed to him, led by Manfred, the illegitimate son of Emperor Frederick II. He took refuge in Orvieto. There he was shown the altar cloth said to be marked with the blood of Christ from the miraculous event in nearby Bolsena, where a German priest, on his pilgrimage way to Rome, had offered Mass in the church of St. Christina while struggling with doubts about the Real Presence of Christ. Blood flowed from the host and marked the corporal (the altar cloth under the chalice and paten). Urban remembered that when he had been Archdeacon of Liège, an Augustinian nun, St. Juliana, had prevailed upon the bishop, Robert de Thorete, to celebrate a special feast in honor of the Blessed Sacrament, after years of liturgical abuse and moral corruption.

Urban decreed a universal feast of Corpus Christi, drawing on the local feast of Liège. Though he does not refer to the miracle of Bolsena in the official decree, for it is a private revelation, the miracle is portrayed in Raphael's painting in the Vatican. The greatest of European monarchs, St. Louis, helped spread the devotion in this golden age of saints, and the Pope commissioned the incomparable theologian Thomas Aquinas to write hymns for it. That is how we got Pange Lingua with its verses Tantum Ergo which we sing at Benediction. Urban and Louis and Thomas, of incomparable sophistication, would go cross-eyed and groan at the low estate of the hymns sung in some parishes in our century. Nonetheless, the same Christ is with us, as so we bow low before him on the Feast of Corpus Christi with all the saints and angels.

Fr. George W. Rutler