Heartfelt creativity: Corpus Christi celebrates colorful children's altar campaign!

Heartfelt creativity: Corpus Christi celebrates colorful children's altar campaign!

Today, June 16, 2025, the festival of Corpus Christi is traditionally celebrated in Eichstätt. This festival, which commemorates the last supper of Jesus with his disciples, is all about the Eucharist and communal devotion. As bistum-eichstaett.de reports, the pastoral officer Anna Wagner from Gunzenhausen has taken special measures to actively involve the children even in times of declining flower donations and participation.

In recent years there has been a significant decline in the number of children and flower donations. This year in particular, many of the young participants were away due to the Whitsun holidays. But Wagner did not allow himself to be discouraged and developed creative alternatives to involve the children in the action through craft activities. Under the motto “My heart for Jesus,” the children prepared for the celebration by designing pretty wooden hearts. Over a thousand of these hearts are waiting to be presented at the “Children’s Altar” in the Falkengarten.

A celebration for the community

Corpus Christi, which has been celebrated by Catholics for centuries, has a central meaning in the community and is also an important part of religious life for children. The holiday is celebrated exactly nine weeks after Maundy Thursday and highlights the importance of the Eucharist, where bread and wine as the body and blood of Jesus are part of the celebration. The children play an active role in the community while enriching the creative and active atmosphere with their contributions, as kindergottesdienst-katholisch.de explains.

As part of this special celebration, Wagner also plans to regularly support a kindergarten with her visits. “We want to introduce the children to Corpus Christi as a festival of friendship with Jesus,” she explains. With this in mind, lessons about the festival have already been offered in schools, even in those that do not offer denominational religious instruction. This represents part of the model project “Religious Education with Extended Cooperation” (RUmeK) in Bavaria.

A look at tradition

The term “Corpus Christi” comes from Middle High German and means “The Feast of the Body of Christ”. During the procession that accompanies the festival, the host, which represents the body of Christ for the faithful, is carried in a monstrance. Participants pray and sing as they stop at decorated tables to thank God. Traditionally, it is also customary for children to scatter flowers, a beautiful gesture that underlines the importance of the festival, as katholisch.de notes.

This year, the “children's altar” in the Falkengarten, a popular beer garden in Gunzenhausen, will be lovingly decorated with heart garlands. After the celebration, the hearts are displayed in the “take a look at room” of the local parish church and decorate this special place. Last year, the children made 900 mailboxes for messages to God, another example of how children can be creatively involved in church celebrations.

Overall, it can be seen that even with decreasing participation, a lot of creativity and commitment flows into the design of Corpus Christi, so that the tradition lives and can still be experienced by the youngest people.