Click here, and you will see a very extraordinary clip. First, we see a pedestrian area in a shopping street in Preston, Lancashire. It could be anywhere in the country. Suddenly, there appears a Franciscan friar. He puts on a white priestly stole. Then he rummages in the bag he is carrying and takes out a charged monstrance, which he lifts up on high. One person comes out of the crowd and kneels. Another friar reads out a long series of Old Testament prophecies about Jesus, and new Testament references to him; interspersed in this list is the refrain “Come and kneel before him now”. Little by little, more and more do; by the time this extraordinary event has finished, there is a sizable kneeling crowd, which in the end burst into amazed and excited applause. Then, it is over. The friar replaces the monstrance in his bag, and walks away. Yesterday, the Oxford Oratory’s Corpus Christi procession took the Lord in his Holy Sacrament through the shopping streets of Oxford. The same kind of extraordinary direct link between shoppers and the core of the Catholic religion took place (I couldn’t be there; but it always has in the past). By the time the procession was over, it had been (if previous form is any guide) swelled by a number of lapsed Catholics and others, drawn into the celebration of Benediction which always concludes it. It is a very extraordinary thing that one of the despised “popular devotions” which those who went on and on, 30 years ago, about the so-called spirit of Vatican II really thought could safely be junked (along with devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, so unecumenical) as part of their supposed “renewal” of the Church was adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. Today, the renewal of the Church, this time the genuine article, means bringing it back. On Sunday (when we kept Corpus Christi), the Pope told a crowd of 30,000 at the Angelus that the Eucharist “constitutes the Church’s most precious treasure”. It is “like the beating heart that gives life to the whole mystical body of the Church, a social organism based on the spiritual but real tie to Christ”: