Reflection on the Feast of Corpus Christi

You probably noticed: This morning’s readings are not those from the lectionary; I chose them instead to help us focus on three distinct themes of the mystery of Corpus Christi at this particular time in Loretto, our nation, and our world.

The passage from Isaiah speaks of God’s faithfulness to refugees of old and refugees today in many nations, fleeing ruthlessness, poverty, homelessness, climate disasters. The passage from 1 Corinthians brings our attention to the Eucharistic feast which we commemorate this morning — sharing in the one bread, we become one in Christ. And Matthew’s Gospel reminds us that being one in Christ, each time we lift up one another, we lift up Christ.

Here at Loretto Motherhouse we are commemorating the 200^th anniversary of our early sisters’ arrival on this land.  I see lots of connections between the story of their arrival and today’s feast of Corpus Christi. 

The Loretto women were among the early Kentucky settlers. They and the Indigenous Peoples they displaced, had a common story — they were almost all refugees, which means for one reason or another they needed to leave where they were living because times were hard. The Native Peoples had to flee or be killed by the arriving settlers. The settlers had to move because they needed more fertile land for their growing families. All of these refugee peoples took everything they had from their homes and walked to Kentucky — or walked away from Kentucky — to find a place where they could make a safe and healthy living. Even when they settled, they sometimes had to move more than once to find the right place for their families. Our early sisters were one very small part of the refugee story.

They were daughters of Maryland settlers, young women who came together on the Kentucky frontier in the area some call “The Kentucky Holy Land.” They committed themselves to teach pioneer children and to live simple religious lives. They called each other Sister.

At the beginning, in 1812, the sisters bought land in what then was southern Washington County, near St Charles church — they paid for that land with cash gained from selling a man named Tom. They named their log cabin compound Little Loretto; their neighbors called them the Sisters of Loretto. Later they bought more land nearby, where they meant to expand their school.  

In 1824 a group of priests began to build on the sisters’ land, and the bishop agreed to let them go ahead. The bishop said to the sisters, “I want you to trade your land for another place. You must take your school equipment and your students, take all your farming and household things, take yourselves and your elderly and your novices and go to a place called St. Stephen’s Farm” — the place that Father Stephen Badin abandoned six years ago.

So the sisters borrowed a lot of wagons and packed up everything. The last thing they packed was the Blessed Sacrament. They made a pretty place on one of the wagons and had the students walk alongside the wagon as an honor guard. It was 8 miles to St. Stephen’s Farm; it took most of one day to move everything they had over the rough road. Some neighbors walked with them. It was late November 1824 — cold and cloudy like November days are in Kentucky. 

At St. Stephen’s Farm the sisters hurriedly settled into the few neglected buildings Badin had left behind. It was a cold winter as they worked together making a new school and a new living space. They called the place Loretto Motherhouse, because it would be the homeplace for all the sisters of Loretto. Loretto Motherhouse is in the same place today, 200 years later, and sisters still live here.

The sisters called themselves The Friends of Mary Beneath the Cross of Jesus; their special devotion was to Mary as she sorrowed because her son suffered.  While the sisters were packing everything, getting ready to leave their home, they remembered the time when Mary and Joseph fled sorrowfully to Egypt to save their baby Jesus from King Herod. Like Mary and Joseph, the sisters were refugees too, and they were carrying the body of Jesus too. Maybe the sisters also thought of the peoples of the world who were refugees in 1824 — in South America where Simon Bolivar was fighting the Spanish, in St. Petersburg, Russia, where floods killed 10,000. Maybe they thought of the Cherokee Indians who even then were trudging a Trail of Tears across Kentucky.

Now in 2024, we are preparing to commemorate the sisters’ journey and to do so we will have a caravan of cars and farm wagons later this month. We want to remember the sorrow of Mary and Joseph fleeing into Egypt with the baby Jesus. And we want to carry in our hearts all the refugees of today, around the world, driven from their homes by war, poverty, climate change, seeking a better, safer home in some new place.

We will carry the Blessed Sacrament like the early Sisters carried it from Little Loretto to St. Stephen’s Farm. We’ve invited confirmation classes in the “Kentucky Holy Land” to participate and walk or ride as an honor guard for the Blessed Sacrament, just like the Sisters’ students did 200 years ago. When our caravan reaches Loretto Motherhouse, we will celebrate Benediction on the steps of the old Academy Building. We will pray that the blessings of the Eucharist will help us understand that we, and all who seek a safe and healthy home, all are the Body of Christ.