Good morning, this is Cardinal Francis George, and I invite you to join me for the next few minutes to reflect with Father Robert Baron on the Word of God, which is the Word on Fire.

Father Baron will challenge us to open our hearts to the Word on Fire, which is God's Word of Love for each of us.

If our hearts are open, the Lord can change and transform us, who we might speak with love about the one who is love.

The Archdiocese of Chicago through the generosity of Sacred Heart Parishing Winnetka now presents the Word on Fire.

Peace be with you. Friends, today the feast we celebrate in the Church is the great feast of Corpus Christi, the Body of Christ.

It's an image that has so many overtones and undertone the so powerful and provocative throughout the history of the Church.

To me, the greatest thing about the image of Corpus Christi or the Body of Christ is that it is the best description of the Church.

I know I spoke about this, I think several months ago on this show, but it's such an important point. I want to just touch on it briefly.

The Church is not an organization. The Church is an organism.

An organization is the United States government or the Cub Scouts or General Motors. Those are voluntary associations, things that we have come up with, we decide to join, we construct them, we create them.

The Church is not an organization like that. The Church is an organism. It's a living thing. Christ is its head and its life.

Christ is the life force that holds together a body. There is the great image, the Corpus Christi, the Body of Christ.

We, members of the Church, are cells or organs in this body.

I am the vine, you are the branches. Now that's not organizational language. That's not flow chart language. That's organism language. Christ is the living vine, we are the branches grafted onto him.

In John's Gospel, over and over again, he says, live in me. Notice please not just follow me, not just listen to me, the way you'd follow or listen to any religious leader or guru, but Jesus says, live in me. I'm your life.

The Church is his body. Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, there's no life in you.

Again, we're relating to him, not just as a leader and an inspiring teacher, we're relating to him as the one in whom we live.

Middle of the last century, 1950, Popeye's 12 comes out with encyclical, Mr. Chi Corporus, the mystical body of Christ.

This was the culmination of a long period of theological reflection. Many of the leading theologians of the 19th and 20th centuries put a great stress on this theme of the mystical body.

What they loved about it was this, the connection it made between church, liturgy and society. All three of those things are linked.

Theologians in our country, such as Virgil Michael and Godfrey Deakman, up at St. John's in Collegeville, in fact Godfrey Deakman is still alive, he's about 94, still going strong.

But a great stress they placed was on this connection between church, liturgy and society.

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