CORPUS DOMINI

The readings of today’s solemnity can be summarized in one term: alliance. In Ex 24,3-8 we remember the alliance stipulated by God after the liberation from Egypt. Through a founding rite (the sacrifice of communion) God and his people are inextricably linked. The ritual of sprinkling with blood instead attests that this bond is vital (blood represents life). Finally, the fact that the people are sprinkled with half the blood means that God not only accepts the life of his people but also offers them his own. The letter to the Hebrews (9.11-15) instead presents us with the mediator of the new alliance, Jesus, the high priest. He is both victim and priest. He is a worthy victim, we add, because he is without sin; perfect priest because in the Spirit he offered himself totally. Effective sacrifice because he has purified and made us. With the Gospel text of Mark (Mk 14,12-16.22-26), which takes us back to the Last Supper, the way in which Jesus inaugurated the new and eternal alliance is reiterated: the oblation of himself. As a pictorial commentary on this solemnity, we choose a fresco by Raphael, the Disputa del Sacramento, which we find in the Vatican’s Stanza della Segnatura.  Born in Urbino, Raphael learned the rudiments from his father, Giuseppe Santi, a painter from the circle of Melozzo da’ Forlì. Initially he looks to Pietro il Perugino and Piero della Francesca. From the first he learns the classical language, from the second the rationality of space. Later, he inherited the feeling of nature from Leonardo, while from Michelangelo he inherited the moral feeling. Everything will find in him a perfect synthesis that will never again be achieved. As is known, he was an unsurpassed master of drawing, but he was equally so when it came to colour. There are some paintings, for example La Velata (1516), which are marvels of chromaticism. But Raphael was also an excellent luminist. Just cross the Stanza di Eliodoro, also in the Vatican, where you can see three sources of light that illuminate Peter’s liberation: the one surrounding the liberating angel, that of the soldiers’ torches and finally the moonlight. With the Disputa (1508-1509) the long story of frescoes in the apartment of Julius II began. The first room was originally the pope’s private library and the frescoes allude to the subject of the volumes preserved in the shelves along the walls; in this case Theology, symbolized by a double exedra of characters in two registers, one human and one divine; the human one represents the Church militant and the divine one the Church triumphant. At the center of the composition we find the monstrance with the Eucharist. Let’s just notice one detail. The base of the monstrance is rhomboidal in shape like the halo of the Eternal Father. This is to mean that at the basis of the Sacrament there is the sacred and perfect Mystery. The stem of the chalice can instead be combined with the Fountain of Youth (whose waters, according to a medieval legend, flow from Eden). Everything, heaven and earth, converges towards the Eucharist for which only adoring silence is suitable.

Commentary by b. Sandro Carotta, osb
Abbazia di Praglia (Italy)

Translation by f. Mark Hargreaves,
Prinknash Abbey