THE MOST PRECIOUS BLOOD OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST

We therefore pray Thee, help Thy servants: whom Thou hast redeemed with Thy Precious Blood.

The above short invocation is taken from the Te Deum. This Most Precious Blood was shed in the Circumcision, the Agony, the Crowning with thorns and supremely in the Crucifixion of our Savior Jesus Christ and it is offered daily in the Sacrifice of the Altar. The Missal gives today the Octave of St. John the Baptist, which, however, only appears in the Roman Calendar during the late Middle Ages.  In the liturgical reform of Pope St. Pius X this day was chosen for the feast of the Most Precious Blood, which had already been fixed under Pius IX for the first Sunday in July. Blessed Pius IX instituted this feast in thanksgiving for the deliverance of the Apostolic See from the violent revolutionaries who had expelled the Pope to Gæta. In 1849, with the assistance of the French army, they were vanquished and the pope was able to return to Rome. The meaning of this festival is closely akin to that of the Sacred Heart. The Precious Blood is the price of universal redemption, which love would not have to be anything less than itself. There is a very close connection between the Heart and the Blood not only because, according to St. John the Beloved Disciple, after the death of Jesus, blood and water flowed from His wounded Heart, but because the first chalice in which that divine Blood was consecrated and vivified was precisely the Heart of the Incarnate Word. The apostle of this special devotion was the Blessed Gaspare del Bufalo, founder of the Congregation of the Most Precious Blood. The Mass is of quite recent composition. In the ancient Roman rite the Mass of Passion Sunday was especially intended to recall to the remembrance of the faithful the infinite value of the Blood of Jesus Christ.

 

Dom Gueranger-  Reflection

 John the Baptist [whose nativity's octave is commemorated today] has pointed out the Lamb, Peter has firmly established his throne, Paul has prepared the bride; their joint work, admirable in its unity, at once suggests the reason for their feasts occurring almost simultaneously in the cycle. The alliance being now secured, all three fall into shade; whilst the bride herself, raised up by them to such lofty heights, appears alone before us, holding in her hands the sacred cup of the nuptial-feast.

This gives the key of to-day’s solemnity, revealing how its appearance in the heavens of the holy liturgy at this particular season is replete with mystery. The Church, it is true, has already made known to the sons of the new covenant, in a much more solemn manner, the price of the Blood that redeemed them, its nutritive strength and the adoring homage which is its due. On Good Friday earth and heaven beheld all sin drowned in the saving stream, whose eternal flood-gates at last gave way beneath the combined effort of man’s violence and the love of the divine Heart. The festival of Corpus Christi witnessed our prostrate worship before the altars whereon is perpetuated the Sacrifice of Calvary, and where the outpouring of the precious Blood afford drink to the humblest little ones, as well as to the mightiest potentates of the earth, lowly bowed in adoration before it. How is it, then, that holy Church, is now inviting all Christians to hail, in a particular manner, the stream of life ever gushing from the sacred fount? what else can this mean, but that the preceding solemnities have by no means exhausted the mystery? The peace which this Blood has made to reign in the high places as well as in the low; the impetus of its wave bearing back the sons of Adam from the yawning gulf, purified, renewed and dazzling white in the radiance of their heavenly apparel; the sacred Table outspread before them on the waters’ brink, and the chalice brimful of inebriation–all this preparation and display would be objectless, all these splendours would be incomprehensible, if man were not brought to see herein the wooings of a love that could never endure its advances to be outdone by the pretensions of any other. Therefore, the Blood of Jesus is set before our eyes at this moment as the Blood of the Testament; the pledge of the alliance proposed to us by God; the dower stipulated by eternal Wisdom for this divine union to which he is inviting all men, and its consummation in our soul which is being urged forward with such vehemence by the Holy Gho

The Precursor of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, Saint John the Baptist, leapt for joy in the womb of his mother, Saint Elizabeth, as he heard the sound of the voice of Our Lady, carrying within her virginal and immaculate womb the One whose path he would prepare. Saint John the Baptist prepared the way by his preaching for the coming of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to assume His Public Ministry. May he, by his prayers from eternity, help us to prepare for the worthy reception of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ’s Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity each day at the offering of the Immemorial Mass of Tradition wherein everything points seamlessly to the fact we are present at the very Sacrifice of the Cross at which the Most Precious Blood was shed for our redemption and for our nourishment unto eternity.

We must realize that there can be no peace in the souls of men or in their nations or the world unless each man everywhere comes to recognize that the price of human redemption was wrought for us by the God-Man as He shed His blood to redeem us. There is no secular salvation in any ideology or program or policy. There is salvation only in the Blood of the Divine Redeemer. We must resist the entreaties of the naturalists who tell us repeatedly that they have a plan for world peace or for national security that either ignores or is indifferent to this simple fact: the Most Precious Blood of Jesus Christ the source of our peace and sanctification.

Father Faber The Precious Blood:

It is plain that some millions of sins in a day are hindered by the Precious Blood; and this is not merely a hindering of so many individual sins, but it is an immense check upon the momentum of sin. It is also a weakening of habits of sin, and a diminution of the consequences of sin. If then, the action of the Precious Blood were withdrawn from the world, sins would not only increase incalculably in number, but the tyranny of sin would be fearfully augmented, and it would spread among a greater number of people. It would wax so bold that no one would be secure from the sins of others. It would be a constant warfare, or an intolerable vigilance, to preserve property and rights. Falsehood would become so universal as to dissolve society; and the homes of domestic life would be turned into wards either of a prison or a madhouse. We cannot be in the company of an atrocious criminal without some feeling of uneasiness and fear. We should not like to be left alone with him, even if his chains were not unfastened. But without the Precious Blood, such men would abound in the world. They might even become the majority. We know of ourselves, from glimpses God has once or twice given us in life, what incredible possibilities of wickedness we have in our souls. Civilization increases these possibilities. Education multiplies and magnifies our powers of sinning. Refinement adds a fresh malignity. Men would thus become more diabolically and unmixedly bad, until at last earth would be a hell on this side of the grave. There would also doubtless be new kinds of sins and worse kinds. Education would provide the novelty, and refinement would carry it into the region of the unnatural. All highly-refined and luxurious developments of heathenism have fearfully illustrated this truth. A wicked barbarian is like a beast. His savage passions are violent but intermitting, and his necessities of sin do not appear to grow. Their circle is limited. But a highly-educated sinner, without the restraints of religion, is like a demon. His sins are less confined to himself. They involve others in their misery. They require others to be offered as it were in sacrifice to them. Moreover, education, considered simply as an intellectual cultivation, propagates sin, and makes it more universal.

The increase of sin, without the prospects which the faith lays open to us, must lead to an increase of despair, and to an increase of it upon a gigantic scale. With despair must come rage, madness, violence, tumult, and bloodshed. Yet from what quarter could we expect relief in this tremendous suffering? We should be imprisoned in our own planet. The blue sky above us would be but a dungeon-roof. The greensward beneath our feet would truly be the slab of our future tomb. Without the Precious Blood there is no intercourse between heaven and earth. Prayer would be useless. Our hapless lot would be irremediable. It has always seemed to me that it will be one of the terrible things in hell, that there are no motives for patience there. We cannot make the best of it. Why should we endure it? Endurance is an effort for a time; but this woe is eternal. Perhaps vicissitudes of agony might be a kind of field for patience. But there are no such vicissitudes. Why should we endure, then? Simply because we must; and yet in eternal things this is not a sort of necessity which supplies a reasonable ground for patience. So in this imaginary world of rampant sin there would be no motives for patience. For death would be our only seeming relief; and that is only seeming, for death is any thin but an eternal sleep. Our impatience would become frenzy; and if our constitutions were strong enough to prevent the frenzy from issuing in downright madness, it would grow into hatred of God, which is perhaps already less uncommon than we suppose.

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 Feast of the MOST PRECIOUS BLOOD OF  OUR LORD AND SAVIOR JESUS CHRIST

 Double/ First Class/ Red Vestments

EPISTLE:   Hebrews 9: 11-15

Lesson from the Epistle of Blessed Paul the Apostle to the Hebrews. Brethren, Christ being come, a high priest of the good things to come, by a greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, that is, not of this creation, neither by the blood of goats or of calves, but by His own blood, entered once into the Holies, having obtained eternal redemption. For if the blood of goats and of oxen, and the ashes of an heifer being sprinkled sanctify such as are defiled, to the cleansing of the flesh, how much more shall the blood of Christ, Who, through the Holy Ghost, offered Himself without spot to God, cleanse our conscience from dead works, to serve the living God? And therefore He is the mediator of the New Testament: that by means of His death, for the redemption of those transgressions which were under the former testament; they that are called may receive the promise of eternal inheritance; in Christ Jesus our Lord.

GOSPEL:    John 19: 30-35

At that time, Jesus, when He had taken the vinegar, said: “It is consummated.” And bowing His head He gave up the ghost. Then the Jews (because it was the parasceve), that the bodies might not remain upon the cross on the sabbath-day (for that was a great sabbath-day), besought Pilate that their legs might be broken, and that they might be taken away. The soldiers, therefore, came: and they broke the legs of the first and of the other that was crucified with him. But after they were come to Jesus, when they saw that He was already dead, they did not break His legs. But one of the soldiers with a spear opened His side, and immediately there came out blood and water. And he that saw it hath given testimony, and his testimony is true.

Praise be to Christ

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The Feast of the Most Precious Blood  -   A Sermon by St. John Chrysostom

Wouldst thou learn the power of the Blood of Christ?  Then let us look at the figure thereof, by calling to mind the ancient type written in the ancient Scriptures.  In Egypt, at midnight, God threatened the Egyptians with the tenth plague, by which their first-born should perish, because they kept in captivity his first-born people.  But, lest the beloved Jews should share their danger, because they were all in the same place, he found, in his wisdom, a remedy.  Behold then a wonderful figure, that thou mayest learn his power in truth.  The anger of the divine indignation was expected, and the Angel of Death circled over every home.  What, therefore, did Moses do?  Kill, saith he, a yearling lamb, and sprinkle the doors with its blood.  What sayest thou, O Moses?  Is the blood of a sheep likely to deliver a reasoning man?  Yea, in good sooth, saith he; not by what that blood is in itself, but because by it, there is displayed a figure of the Blood of the Lord.

For as the statues of monarchs, mindless and speechless images though they be, have sometimes been an helpful refuge to men endowed with soul and reason, not because they are made of bronze, but because the likeness they bear is a King’s.  And just so did this unconscious blood deliver the lives of men, not because it was blood, but because it foreshadowed the shedding of the Blood of Jesus.  On that night in Egypt, when the destroying Angel saw the blood upon the lintel and on the two side-posts, he passed over the door, and dared not to enter in unto the house.  Even so now much more will the destroyer of souls flee away when he seeth, not the lintel and the two side-posts sprinkled with the blood of a lamb, but the mouth of the faithful Christian, the living dwelling of the Holy Ghost, shining with the Blood of the True Messiah.  For if the Angel stopped before the type, how much more shall the enemy tremble if he should perceive the reality itself?  Wouldest thou hear more of the power of that Blood?  I am willing.  Consider from what source it welleth, from what fountain it springeth.  Its fountain is the Cross itself, its source is the Side of the Lord.  The soldier opened his Side, and laid open the wall of that holy temple; and I have found that most noble treasure, and I rejoice to discover the glittering riches.

And so was it done concerning that Lamb: the Jews killed a sheep, and I have learned the value of the sacrament.  From the Side flowed forth Blood and Water.  I would not, O my hearer, that thou shouldest pass by the depths of such a mystery as this without pausing; for I have yet a mystic and mysterious discourse to deliver.  I have said that the Water and Blood shewed forth symbolically baptism and the sacraments.  For from these, holy Church was founded by the laver of regeneration, and the renovation of the Holy Ghost.  Through baptism, I say, and through the sacraments, which seem to have issued from his Side.  It was therefore out of the Side of Christ that the Church was created, just as it was out of the side of Adam that Eve was raised up to be his bride.  This is the reason why Paul saith, no doubt in allusion to his Side: We are members of his Body, and of his bones.  For even as God made the woman Eve out of the rib which he had taken out of the side of Adam, so hath Christ made the Church out of the Blood and Water which he made to flow for us out of his own Side. – On the occasion of the nineteenth centenary of the accomplishment of the redemption of mankind, as a fitting celebration of this ineffable blessing, Pope Pius XI decreed an extraordinary Jubilee.  During that year the Supreme Pontiff, wishing that the fruits of the Precious Blood of Christ, the Lamb without spot, might redound more abundantly upon mankind and that the minds of the faithful be impressed with more vivid recollections of this same Blood as the price of their redemption, elevated the Feast of the Most Precious Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ to the rank of a double of the first class, to be celebrated as such every year by the universal Church.

Devotions to the Most Precious Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ

Litany of the Most Precious Blood of Jesus

Lord, have mercy on us. Christ, have mercy on us.
Lord, have mercy on us. Christ, hear us. Christ, graciously hear us. God the Father of Heaven, Have mercy on us.
God the Son, Redeemer of the world, Have mercy on us.
God the Holy Ghost, Have mercy on us.
Holy Trinity, One God, Have mercy on us.
Blood of Christ, only-begotten Son of the Eternal Father, Save us.
Blood of Christ, Incarnate Word of God, Save us.Blood of Christ, of the New and Eternal Testament,Save us.Blood of Christ, falling upon the earth in the Agony,Save us.Blood of Christ, shed profusely in the Scourging, Save us.Blood of Christ, flowing forth in the Crowning with Thorns, Save us.Blood of Christ, poured out on the Cross, Save us.Blood of Christ, Price of our salvation, Save us.Blood of Christ, without which there is no forgiveness,Save us.Blood of Christ, Eucharistic drink and refreshment of souls, Save us.Blood of Christ, river of mercy, Save us.Blood of Christ, Victor over demons, Save us.Blood of Christ, Courage of martyrs, Save us.Blood of Christ, Strength of confessors, Save us.Blood of Christ, bringing forth virgins, Save us.Blood of Christ, Help of those in peril, Save us.Blood of Christ, Relief of the burdened, Save us.Blood of Christ, Solace in sorrow, Save us.Blood of Christ, Hope of the penitent, Save us.Blood of Christ, Consolation of the dying, Save us.Blood of Christ, Peace and Tenderness of hearts, Save us.Blood of Christ, Pledge of Eternal Life, Save us.Blood of Christ, freeing souls from Purgatory, Save us.Blood of Christ, most worthy of all glory and honor,Save us.

Lamb of God, Who takest away the sins of the world,Spare us, OLord.
Lamb of God, Who takest away the sins of the world,Graciously hear us, O Lord.
Lamb of God, Who takest away the sins of the world,Have mercy on us.

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Chaplet of the Most Precious Blood

Seven “effusions of the Blood of Christ”, implicitly or explicitly mentioned in the Gospels, are recalled in a series of biblical meditations and devotional prayers: the Blood of the Circumcision, the Blood of the Garden of Gethsemane, the Blood of the Flagellation, the Blood of the Crowning of Thorns, the Blood of the Ascent to Calvary, the Blood flowing from Christ’s side pierced by the lance. Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy

This Chaplet is divided into seven groups, containing thirty-three “Our Fathers” in honor of the thirty-three years during which the Precious Blood flowed in the veins of Jesus, before it was poured out on the Cross for our salvation. After each group, the “Glory be to the Father” is recite in thanksgiving to the Holy Trinity for this great gift of the Precious Blood. While reciting these prayers, you are asked to meditate on each of the seven bloodsheddings of Jesus.

Prayer:

V. O God, come to my assistance. R. Lord, make haste to help me. V. Glory be to the Father, etc. R. As it was in the beginning, etc.

1st Mystery – Jesus shed His Blood in the Circumcision

Let us ask for chastity of soul and body. Our Father five times. Glory be to the Father, etc. We pray, You, Lord, help your people whom You have redeemed with Your Precious Blood.

2nd Mystery – Jesus shed His Blood while praying in the Garden of Olives.

Let us ask for the spirit of prayer. Our Father five times. Glory be to the Father, etc. We pray You, Lord, help your people whom You have redeemed with Your Precious Blood.

3rd Mystery – Jesus shed His Blood in the scourging

Let us ask for the grace of mortification. Our Father five times. Glory be to the Father, etc. We pray you, Lord, help Your people whom You have redeemed with Your Precious Blood

4th Mystery – Jesus shed His Blood in the crowning with thorns

Let us ask for contempt of worldly honors. Our Father five times. Glory be to the Father, etc. We pray you, Lord, help Your people whom You redeemed with Your Precious Blood.

5th Mystery – Jesus shed His Blood while carrying the Cross

Let us ask for patience. Our Father five times. Glory be to the Father, etc. We pray You, Lord, help Your people whom You redeemed with Your Precious Blood.

6th Mystery – Jesus shed His Blood in the Crucifixion

Let us ask for contrition for our sins. Our Father five time. Glory be to the Father, etc. We pray You, Lord, help your people whom You redeemed with Your Precious Blood.

7th Mystery – Jesus shed His Blood and water when His side was pierced.

Let us ask for the grace of perseverance. Our Father three times. Glory be to the Father, etc. We pray You, Lord, help Your people whom You redeemed with Your Precious Blood.

Eternal Father, I offer Thee the Precious Blood of Jesus Christ in atonement for my sins, in supplication for the holy souls in Purgatory and for the needs of Holy Church. Amen

Hail, saving Victim, offered on the gibbet of the cross for me and for the whole human race. Hail, precious blood, flowing from the wounds of our crucified Lord Jesus Christ and washing away the sins of the whole world. Remember, O Lord, Thy creature that Thou hast redeemed by Thy precious blood.

Indulgence of 60 days, once a day, at the elevation during Mass.  Leo XIII, June 30, 1893

O SACRAMENT most holy! O Sacrament divine! All praise and all thanksgiving be every moment Thine!

Indulgence of 100 days, once during each Mass, when said at the elevation of both species. Pius VII, Dec. 7, 1819

Most Precious Blood of Jesus Christ, shed, in order to obtain mercy for all men, behold us prostrate before Thee; flow upon us abundantly. Behold our heads, our hands, our wills, our understandings, our memories, our thoughts, our affections, our work, our senses, interior and exterior; wash all because all is soiled; purify all because all is corrupt; cure all because all is diseased. Change us by Thy adorable virtue that we may unite ourselves to Thee, O infinite Purity! Purify us, adorn us, save us, and crown us. Amen.

O Precious Blood of Jesus, wash and purify all sinners!

O Precious Blood of Jesus, may Thy powerful voice drive away from us and from our dwellings the scourges merited by our sins!

O Precious Blood of Jesus, through Thee, may the Glory of God be repaired!

O Eternal Father, I most ardently beg, through the Precious Blood of Thy Divine Son, the cessation of the evils which afflict the Church, the destruction of heresies, and the rapid propagation of the faith in infidel countries. Amen

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Mother Catherine Aurelia, Foundress of the Institute of the Precious Blood, wrote about the Heart of the Most Precious Blood:

“. . . Wear this with confidence; it will continually say to you, ‘Do not fear; the Blood of Jesus is protecting you.’ Yes; in Holy Communion the Precious Blood penetrates your soul, gives you strength to overcome the difficulties on your way to Calvary, and assures you of victory.”

Sources:  http://www.dailycatholic.org/issue/14Jul/preblood.htm