Happy Thanksgiving!

The Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter wishes a happy Thanksgiving to you and your families! Today is a perfect opportunity to pause amid our everyday routine and consider all that we truly have to be thankful for. We begin a new liturgical year this coming Sunday, the First Sunday of Advent, and we enter once again into the Church’s year-long commemoration of the life, death and Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father’s great Gift to the world. The liturgy’s continual cycle of praise is permeated with ever-renewed utterances of thanksgiving, expressed so often through the words of the Psalms that constitute such a large part of the prayers of the Mass and form the backbone of the Divine Office.

Interestingly, one of the Votive Mass options for the day of the week that Thanksgiving always occupies (Thursday) is the Mass of the Most Blessed Sacrament, the summit and center of the Church’s life. The Mass is taken from that of Corpus Christi (which is always the Thursday after Trinity Sunday), and is filled with the praise of this wonderful Sacrament, wherein Christ gives Himself as our heavenly Bread. On a holiday which is marked so distinctly by an earthly feast, it seems apt to recall first and foremost – and to give thanks for – the infinitely superior spiritual feast which He bestows on our souls not once a year, but every single day. +

The eyes of all hope in Thee, O Lord, and Thou givest them meat in due season. Thou openest Thy hand, and fillest every living creature with blessing.

– Psalm 144:15-16, the Gradual for Corpus Christi and the Votive Mass of the Blessed Sacrament