“The devil must flee from the soul sealed with the very Blood of Christ”

The Most Precious Blood of Jesus: A Feast Added, Withdrawn, and Now Returning

Medieval stained glass window in the St Kilian's church in Heilbronn. Photo by Fr Lawrence Lew OP (source).

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The Month Marked with Blood

Each year, as we turn the corner from the month of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus into July — the height of summer in the northern hemisphere — we fittingly start off with the feast of the Most Precious Blood of Jesus that bathes the rest of the month in its vermilion glow.

Like so many feasts in the calendar, this one owes its origin to an act of thanksgiving for a military victory: its inscription in the general calendar was Pius IX’s act of thanksgiving for the expulsion of a revolutionary army from Rome in 1849.

As the adoration of the Blessed Sacrament long predated the revelation to Juliana of Liège of a “missing feast” that would lead to the institution of Corpus Christi on the first free Thursday after Paschaltide, and as the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus long predated the revelations to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque that would lead to the creation of its liturgical feast, so too, devotion to the Most Precious Blood of the Lord is much older than the nineteenth century. It may have taken a bunch of anticlerical Freemasons and a liberated pope to induce its liturgical realization, but the roots are deep — so deep that we may say, as of every true organic development, “Ah, finally, the stone that was missing has been put into just the right spot.”

We have Patristic homilies devoted to the Blood of the Lamb and extensive writings and mystical testimonies from the Middle Ages. The New Testament itself, especially in the Epistle to the Hebrews, specifically focuses on the Blood of the Redeemer as the price of our salvation, the singular means of our redemption and cleansing, foreshadowed in the animal sacrifices of the Old Testament. Indeed, all it takes is looking up “blood” in a Scriptural corcordance to discover how it saturates the pages of the sacred text.