Sunday Bulletin for Christ the King, Ann Arbor

May our worship of this Sacrament of Your Body and Blood

help us to experience the salvation You won for us….

May the grace and peace of the Risen Lord Jesus be with you. The statement above is part of the opening prayer for the Solemnity of Corpus Christi, the Feast of the Body and Blood of the Lord Jesus. Like most of the formal prayers of the Church, it serves a two-fold function: as prayer and as catechesis for those who are praying. In this case, it is a reminder to us of the great gift to us of this most wondrous of Sacraments. It is also a reminder that our response to this gift should be worship, worship of His Presence there. The final sentiment, in this portion of the opening prayer, is a reminder that salvation is what this is all about-a wonderful reminder of the End we long for and the Means God uses to bring it about. We, as the Body of Christ, receive the very Body of Christ, which continues to transform us as we cooperate with His grace, feasting on this banquet of love until that glorious day when we finally see Him face to face. The Lord Jesus invites us to enter ever more deeply into this mystery, meditating on His Eucharistic Presence, receiving Him with joy and delight, and continuing to surrender our hearts to Him, even as He fills us with His grace.

One of the results of this process is that we become ever more the Body of Christ that He has called us to be. This is a life-long process of continuing growth and spiritual maturity, laying down our lives in surrender to Him, being filled more and more with His Holy Spirit, and entering ever more deeply into the heart of His Church. It is a process He calls us to actively cooperate with and each one of us, as well as the Parish as a whole, is intimately involved in this. One of the ways we cooperate with His grace to be more and more the Body of Christ is by continuing to seek His will for our lives, individually and as a Parish, especially on those decisions that significantly affect our lives together. It is a teaching of the Church that all of the Christian faithful share in the power of the Spirit, and that the Spirit guides the faithful as they seek to know and do God's will. This is the heart of the meaning of the term "sensus fidei," "the sense of the Faith," which is referred to in #12 of Lumen Gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, one of the documents of the Second Vatican Council. There the Council Fathers teach: "The whole body of the faithful who have an anointing that comes from the Holy One cannot err in matters of belief. This characteristic is shown in the supernatural appreciation of the faith (sensus fidei) of the whole people…." This faithful people, guided by this sense, the document goes on to say: "unfailingly adheres to this faith, penetrates it more deeply with right judgment, and applies it more fully to daily life." Because all the faithful share in this and have a right and a duty to apply "it more fully to daily life" it is only appropriate that the faithful be consulted when decisions concerning that practical application of the faith are being made, especially decisions that will significantly affect their lives or their parish. This is why we have a consultation on issues like should we take over this or that school, etc. Notice, the consultations are properly concerned with the practical application of our faith and not the content of the faith itself. It is right to consult about how to apply the teachings of the Church on Catholic education to our life as a Parish. But we are not consulting about the content of that teaching, anymore than we would have a consultation about whether or not we should have Sunday Mass, or uphold the Church's teaching on family planning, etc. We are the receivers of the Faith, handed down to us by the Magisterium of the Church, but then we have a certain freedom in its practical application to our lives together-we join together to seek God's will on how to live out, in the practical experiences of our daily lives, individually and communally, the Faith He has given us. Let us, each of us, take seriously our responsibility as members of His faithful people, to seek to know His will and to carry it out, that He may be glorified! I commend you to the care of the Mother of God and the protection of St. Michael.

Fr. Ed