6/25/2009
Mount Angel revives Corpus Christi tradition
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MOUNT ANGEL — Catholics in this Bavarian-flavored Willamette Valley town have revived a late spring tradition that rings through the memories of many old timers here.
After 15 years, St. Mary Parish took up the centuries-old tradition of a Eucharistic procession from the church and into the streets.
The June 14 Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ, or Corpus Christi, was a time when Mount Angel’s parish leaders wanted to give the tradition of their parents to their children, says Tony Morris, a pastoral associate at St. Mary’s.
Parishioners hope the annual festival of faith, which continued for about a century until the 1990s, will give doctrine a boost at a time when faith seems to be weakening.
Polls in recent years show that many Catholics are doubtful about the real presence.
In the old days, homeowners along the route of Mount Angel’s Corpus Christi processions set up miniature altars on their porches. The priests would pause at each one, blessing it and the home’s inhabitants.
Corpus Christi, or Corpus et Sanguis Christi, the Body and Blood of Christ, is a feast day that celebrates Jesus’ gift of the Eucharist to the Church.
From the time she was a little girl to when the tradition ended, a decade or so ago, Henrietta Saalfeld remembered the colorful processions. “It was very impressive” she told the Sentinel in 2000. “I never missed one, from the time I carried the flower baskets to the day they quit.”
As a first communicant in the 1930s, Saalfeld was among the little girls in their white dresses and veils with baskets full of rose petals. It was their job to walk ahead of the priests, scattering petals along the way.
On June 14, new little girls flung flower petals.
The Corpus Christi procession came to Mount Angel with the German Catholics who settled here in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
The feastday was born in Belgium and came to Germany in the early 1300s. St. Juliana (1193-1258) is credited with helping it become a part of the church calendar. She was an orphan who was educated by Augustinian nuns in Belgium.
She read St. Augustine and other theologians as a child, and early on became enamored of the mysteries of the faith — especially the Blessed Sacrament.
She had a vision of the Church as a full moon with one dark spot, symbolizing the missing feastday that would celebrate the Holy Eucharist.
Processions become popular parts of the celebration in the early 1300s.
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