Dear friends,

Letters from Leo’s Sunday Reflection Series are essays grounded in the Mass readings — offering a clear-eyed way to follow Jesus amid today’s political realities, not by retreating from public life or baptizing any ideology, but by letting the Gospel shape our conscience, courage, and compassion.

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Today’s Readings

“I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.” — John 6:51

This morning in Madrid, Pope Leo XIV celebrated Mass in the Plaza de Cibeles and then carried the Blessed Sacrament in procession through the city. Corpus Christi in Spain spills into the streets: floral carpets, altars built on sidewalks, monstrances that generations of silversmiths labored to perfect.

Leo told the crowd not to mistake any of it for pageantry.

“This is not an exhibition, a remnant of folklore or a simple display of beauty,” he said in his homily. “It is a profession of faith in the presence of the risen Lord, who is alive and continues to walk among us.”

It called to mind another square. On a rainy March evening in 2020, Pope Francis stood alone in an empty St. Peter’s Square and raised the monstrance over a world locked down by the pandemic — a quiet declaration that Christ’s presence reaches even the darkest hours of human history.

Today is the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, and the Gospel gives us Jesus at his most scandalous.

“My flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink.”

The crowd quarrels. “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”

Jesus answers by making the claim harder to swallow. The Greek verb John assigns him in these verses, trōgōn, means to gnaw or chew — the word a farmer might use for animals at a trough.

By the end of the passage, no metaphor is left standing.

Catholics stake everything on taking him at his word. We believe that at every Mass, wheat and water and the work of human hands become God. Sit with the strangeness of that.

The maker of two trillion galaxies consents to rest in the palm of a young person’s hand at a Saturday vigil.

That belief carries a consequence we would rather not examine. If God is present in bread, the argument over where God can and cannot show up is finished. It ended in the upper room.

A God humble enough to be chewed has stripped away every excuse for failing to notice him in the rest of our lives — the carpool line, the hospital waiting room, the neighbor whose yard signs make you grit your teeth.

The first reading amplifies this reality.