Archbishop's web site Denver Catholic Register Parishes Catholic Pastoral Center
Jun 5, 2002
On feast of Corpus Christi, pope encourages vocations to priesthood
Pope John Paul II: `God's people need the Eucharist'
By John Norton
ROME (CNS) — On a Church feast dedicated to the Eucharist, Pope John Paul II urged Rome's young men to respond generously and without reserve if they felt a call to the priesthood.
The 82-year-old pope let a cardinal celebrate the May 30 liturgy, the feast of the Body and Blood of Christ, which in Rome ends with a eucharistic procession through the city streets.
"(God's) people need the Eucharist," the pope said in his homily during Mass, celebrated on the front steps of Rome's Basilica of St. John Lateran.
"In fact, it is the Eucharist that makes the Church missionary. But is this possible without priests, who renew the eucharistic mystery?" he said.
Cardinal Camillo Ruini, the pope's vicar in Rome, celebrated the Mass. The pope sat to the side, mostly with his eyes closed, wearing an embroidered red and gold stole over his white papal attire.
"The days, the years, the centuries pass, but not the most holy act (of the Eucharist) in which Jesus condensed his whole Gospel of love," the pope said in a quavering but understandable voice.
He asked for prayers for a diocesan congress that was to begin in a few days and was to focus on the theme of religious vocations.
After the Mass, the pope was helped onto the back of a white flatbed truck at the head of a traditional twilight procession to the Basilica of St. Mary Major, about nine-tenths of a mile along a tree-lined Roman street. He knelt, then later sat, in front of the monstrance under a gold-tasseled white canopy.
Cardinals, bishops, priests, religious and thousands of lay faithful walked the route, carrying prayer books, flowers and candles in the waning daylight.
Until 1994, when he underwent a hip operation, the pope walked in the procession, carrying the monstrance with the Eucharist. He reinstated the Corpus Christi procession in 1979 after a 109-year hiatus in the tradition.
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