For kneeling in front of something you cannot see through. Seven verses by the Church's most careful thinker, on believing what the eyes deny — in the English of the poet who understood him best.
Adoro te devote
It says what is in front of you and then says that your senses are wrong about it. Seeing, touching, tasting are in thee deceived; how says trusty hearing? that shall be believed. That is the whole argument of the hymn: the eyes see bread, the ear heard what God's Son said, and the ear wins.
Then it asks, in the fourth verse, for exactly the thing it does not have — to be like Thomas the apostle, who saw the wounds — and settles for the next best thing, which is to say the words anyway. Lord and God as he. The last verse asks to see face to face someday. Until then, this.
Thomas Aquinas, in or around 1264, when Urban IV established the feast of Corpus Christi and asked him for its hymns. This one is not in the office he wrote for the feast, and its attribution to him rests on manuscripts of the next century rather than on the documented commission — but it has been his in every hymnal for seven hundred years, and the scholars who have examined it most closely have kept it his.
The English is Gerard Manley Hopkins's. He made it in the 1870s, a Jesuit priest who published almost nothing in his lifetime and whose poems appeared in 1918, twenty-nine years after his death. It is not a literal translation; it is a poet putting the hymn into English verse, and it is the version people can say without a book.
It is sung at Benediction and adoration across the world in Latin, and the Hopkins version is in most English hymnals. Its plainchant melody is one of the oldest in continuous use. Pope John Paul II asked for it at his deathbed.
On this site it sits next to the Holy Face, another devotion to something that has to be looked at on purpose, and it is the bridge to the saints who wrote their own prayers — this one, the Suscipe, and Augustine's.